The Future of Reading
MSNBC Interactive, admittedly not one of the best arguments for a free press, bloviates about the future of reading this morning. But what do I know? After all, here's a powerhouse that combines the technical savvy of Microsoft with the enduring reach and relevance of a major television network.
More seriously, Rogers's piece is lazy at best and dishonest at worst. (It references a report from December 2005--he might just have had a tight deadline and a slack brain.) I'm expected to believe that a Stanford grad and putatively successful novelist thinks this? He might want to consider that we live in the utopia Wells imagined--with his background, one would hope that he could.
Perhaps, then, reading is just unnatural--the equivalent of the dog that walks on its hind legs. (Stay tuned for a post on why Johnson invented the blogosphere.) As William Gass points out in his pugnacious "Pulitzer: The People's Prize,"
Because we have a large, affluent, mildly educated middle class that has fundamentally the same tastes as the popular culture it grew up with, yet with pretensions to something more, something higher, something better suited to its half-open eyes and spongy mind, there is a large industry of artists, academics, critics, and publicists eager to serve it--lean cuisine, if that's the thing--and the Pulitzer is ready with its rewards. (Gass, in Finding a Form, Random House 1996, p. 13. Buy Gass's book.)
That is, widespread reading and literary culture may be a temporary and acutely historical aberration, the equivalent of a half-hearted jogging regimen whose jig may soon be up. Nonetheless, in an Information Age, wouldn't you rather be one of the haves? Reading allows for complex symbolic representation and manipulation--exactly the sort of skill set, the last time I checked, that is needed now and will be even more important tomorrow. Ask Neal Stephenson.
2 Comments:
What Rogers overlooks is that the majority of humans have never been much for book learnin'. Who cares if only five percent of college students can read a complex book and extrapolate from it? My wager is that five percent of today's college graduates outnumbers the total number of college graduates in, say, the year 1900, when only a tiny fraction of the smaller pre-war population saw the need for advanced learning. Yet the 1900 at group still came up with some pretty nifty writing, art, thought, and scientific discovery. The point is not whether all humans need to be taught reading. It's that all humans deserve the opportunity to explore human thought. And the best way to communicate thought is still through writing.
Make no mistake, a fast reader can cover more ground than a passive watcher or listener, and with each re-reading can see deeper into raw text than, say, a person watching an edited video again and again. It's the details in serious writing that make it superior to Men's Health articles, or the screenplay of a Van Dam flick. Finally, how long would it have taken me to whip up a quick video or podcast to express this opinion (not counting the fact that I would probably want to jot down a few notes to gather my thoughts)?
Literacy is not going away. It just becomes more diluted among the masses with the "democratisation" of education. For those who don't feel the need to string together thoughts more complex than a super bowl halftime commercial, or an msn.com article, they will have a place in the world. For those who have the need to look more closely, they will have a place in the future.
I was absolutely horrified when I read Michael Rogers column. I suppose I shouldn't be, but I remain horrified none the less. In fact, I’m actually a bit pissed off. Enough to scribble out this little rant. I checked the header more than once just to make sure that I hadn't accidentally wandered onto The Onion.
I suppose as long as gainfully employed writers like Rogers continue to find that reading is as significant as well...picking one's nose, things may continue to move rapidly towards people no needing or wanting to read.
The opinion that being forced to learn to read is a "misery" is interesting. I might counter that there have been many a child (myself included) that wondered more than once why I was *forced* to learn mathematics. Well HELLO because one is supposed to-that’s why! It’s like saying “ya know, wearing pants is really banal, let’s everybody just chuck it and go round pantless.” Well firstly, you’d quickly accumulate cuts and bruises when bumping into things that your previous pant wearing self would prevent, unattractive chafing would no doubt follow, and frankly men subjected to a cold breeze would be constantly concerned about their place in the pecking order (pardon the pun) due to shrinkage. No doubt, you’ll think that these last few sentences are ridiculous. Well, choosing to live in a world that doesn't see the rationale in wearing pants makes about as much sense as not accepting the fundamental importance of reading.
Reading shapes one’s mind. I’d be so bold as to say it is responsible for the molding of one’s personality. Reading gives one a broader outlook into the very world. I’ve walked the streets of Cairo, seen life one-hundred years before my time, and a million years in the future through the pages of books. Isak Dinesen once described herself as “a mental traveler”. Mr. Rogers would no doubt consider her passion to be profligate and naïve. No doubt, her answer to him would be that his choice was his own-though in my overactive imagination (formed from years of reading) she’d give him a big poke in the nose for good measure. As for the rest of us, we can take solace in the fact that people like Rogers will gutter out on with no intervention from ourselves. They will be forgotten in the annals of time. The scales will naturally balance themselves out. That “Practical Futurist” might take hope that nobody in the MSN upper-offices reads his twaddle. For if he is correct, before long there will no more audience for himself and no further employment. And well, wouldn’t that be a shame.
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