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Our culture is moving or has already moved away from a reading culture. Instead of spending free time reading, people watch Netflix, Youtube, TikTok etc. I think that has huge consequences on human behavior. Where as once people would read the newspaper and be able to think about what is happening in the world, people today scroll through their feed where in one instant they are reading an article about war crimes in South America committed by the U.S. and in the next instant what Kylie Jenner wore to the MET gala.
“The new thing is bad, people should do more of the old thing”. If people couldn’t watch Netflix they certainly wouldn’t be using that time to think about important issues.
The world has not moved away from a reading culture, it never had one.
I disagree. And sure, the new thing comes along and isn't really all that new or bad until it actually is. Sometimes a new thing really is bad. Sounds like a fallacy to think that since every past advance was a good thing that every future advance must also be a good thing. You don't think digital media has caused a huge and rapid shift in the way humans entertain themselves and communicate?
I'm not sure if it's for better or for worse but this is vastly different than anything humans have dealt with for all of history.
I have to admit, I read books a lot less than I used to, but many of the books I read weren't really much more substantial than a TV show in the end. For every high quality book that makes you think i've read, i've read a dozen or more fluff fantasy or sci-fi stories.
Whereas my web browsing habits have probably changed for the better. I spend far less tine reading random nonsense now and most of my time spent on the web is spent either reading things at least I find productive or talking to people.
Consider that at the start of the 20th century, there was no other mass media besides print. Western literacy rates were poking into the 90% range (with some demographic variation) by sometime around the dawn of America.
There's always been more to culture than print (as with any media), of course, and reading culture has never meant universal critical engagement with deeply thoughtful texts. But the place of print between the enlightenment and the rise of broadcast & networked media was huge -- it soaked up the space occupied by all media now.
Maybe the new things aren't worse than the old thing, maybe they are. But any picture that doesn't reckon with the fact that things are in fact different now isn't going to be a very accurate one.
Some parts of the world certainly did. Read Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death". He talks about how Midwestern farmboys would read while they ploughed fields, with one hand holding reins and the other holding an open book.
They were for the most part not reading fine literature, they were reading low quality trash fiction adventure stories while their wives read trash fiction romance novels. It was the Netflix/Youtube of it's day. Of course some people read "good" things or consume "high culture" but most people consume whatever the mass market media of their day is (hence why it's called "mass market").
> Some parts of the world certainly did.
i believe that's all they had. if they had other choices...
i do agree with OP. it just seems like whatever the era provided to you to occupy your mind.
> it never had one.
How can you say that? Literacy was once a very strong proxy to wealth, and still retains a connection today. Books have been fundamental to many aspects of human history.
If Russia never had a culture of reading, then how does the Communist Manifesto drive an entire society, millions of people, to overthrow its familial leaders before the era of television?
> If Russia never had a culture of reading, then how does the Communist Manifesto drive an entire society, millions of people, to overthrow its familial leaders before the era of television?
It didn't. The central (though far from only) divergence of Leninism from classical Marxism to allow it to work in early 20th Century Russia, which wasn't the kind of advanced (even by mid-late 19th Century standards) liberal industrial capitalist regime to which the Communist Manifesto was directed, was the adoption of vanguardism, in which broad class consciousness and awareness of class theory by the proletariat was abandoned as a requirement for Communist revolution in favor of authoritarian leadership of the masses by a narrow intellectual elite.
A major justification for Leninism was the belief by Russian Communists of the time that what you describe could not happen in Russia.
(I don't assert that the reason for that is or is not anything to do with culture of reading, but the Communist Revolution certainly does not support your thesis in the way you suggest.)
In most democracies (or allusions thereof) political parties each release a manifesto before elections. Most people don't read them.
> If Russia never had a culture of reading, then how does the Communist Manifesto drive an entire society, millions of people, to overthrow its familial leaders before the era of television?
Firstly, the leaders whom the Bolsheviks overthrew in October 1917 were not familiar to most Russians. The Provisional Government instituted after the February Revolution was a messy affair.
Committed Bolsheviks were a minority at the time of the Russian Revolution. However, there were just enough of them in the railroads, ports, army and other key infrastructure that they could carry out a coup against the Provisional Government.
As with many radical movements, most of the ordinary Bolshevik sympathizers had never actually read the foundational texts of Communism (Marx' writings are often a challenge even for intellectuals). They only knew some simple agitprop distillations thereof.
That the Communist regime spent the whole 1920s and early 1930s carrying out literacy campaigns and establishing written standards for most of Russia's languages also underscores how little of a culture of reading existed in the country pre-1917 outside the elite cities like Moscow and Saint-Petersburg.
> how does the Communist Manifesto drive an entire society, millions of people, to overthrow its familial leaders before the era of television?
It didn't and couldn't. That was the conceit and power behind Lenin's "vanguard" concept. Only a small minority needed to be ideologically driven; everybody else could and did join sides based on more practical, individualized motivations. See, generally, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguardism
That said, I'm not trying to opine on whether, when, and how popular book reading was or still is.
> If Russia never had a culture of reading, then how does the Communist Manifesto drive an entire society, millions of people, to overthrow its familial leaders before the era of television?
not disagreeing with your premise, but -
assuming this to be accurate (leaving out alot of factors),
nothing says small number of people couldn't read it and then go around verbally agitating everyone else.
that said literacy was fairly high in those times and i agree reading was very common
It didn't. The fact is Russian Empire was very illiterate populationюThe thing is dew to the fact that the big part of highest society was well educated with French and German culture the lowest society was ready to follow everyone who will level up their standard of living. The same practically was in the Germany with nazi and the same was in USA. The low level reading always lead to misunderstanding between the government and people. Understand me in a right way, When it was USSR the population was very educated but there were also such people as we call it intelligentsia who were disappointed with the situation in the country and it grew into the protests and to the GuLAG but this is another story :)I am sure people need to travel to grow their mind, their scope... get aquatinted with other cultures.
How is this different than the past two or three generations and television?
Personally, I grew up reading any sort of book and then switched to nonfiction and magazine articles. My habits haven't changed considerably with the internet. I may be an outlier but I don't enjoy video in general and don't watch it on TV or online.
My experience with recent children is that they read books, watch video on TV and online, play physically and with toys, and also play video games. That's almost exactly what my life was like growing up in the '80s.
Agreed. And the same with the radio generation. Honestly, wouldn't be surprised if most people didn't read in USA and elsewhere through most of human history.
Well, that's a great point. For almost all of human history prior to the 20th century, the vast majority of people never even learned to read.
On the other hand, those who really want to read have a vast supply of amazing content online in both fiction and non-fiction. Those who have time and are willing to pirate books basically have the keys to the kingdom, they can learn whatever the hell they want with just a computer and an Internet connection.
Think of how much of a difference that makes in low and middle income countries. Maybe in the first world people have always been able to buy books for cheap (relative to their income), but the amount of reading opportunities people in low and middle income countries have with the Internet is, in my opinion, a new and beatiful thing.
> people today scroll through their feed where in one instant they are reading an article about war crimes in South America committed by the U.S. and in the next instant what Kylie Jenner wore to the MET gala
Doesn't this completely invalidate your argument? If it's that much easier for folks to read an article about war crimes in South America committed by the US and the next about Kylie Jenner at a gala, how is that different from reading one section of a newspaper and then a different section?
I think the point he’s trying to make is people are reading, but reading blurbs and tweets, rather than long form content like a book or an essay piece. Similar to eating fast food as it’s readily available, accessible, quick instead of choosing a more wholesome meal with good benefits.
In that case, he could have said "a book" rather than "the newspaper".
Most newspapers have never really been much different, same with the nightly news on TV. Everything is presented in such a way to give a very brief surface level look at a lot of stories without really giving a level of deep understanding of anything.
Online that level of deep understand is there if you want it, but most people scrolling through a feed won’t seek it out.
>> I think that has huge consequences on human behavior.
They once said that about reading. The invention of the printing press made books cheap. Suddenly everyone was learning to read. They spent time with their noses in books rather than knitting sweaters, toiling in the fields or praying. Then it was TV. Then the internet. Then social media. There is always a new medium that threatens to "change behavior" to the detriment of society. Somehow we have muddled through.
I would like to mention Paul Graham's essay Acceleration of Addictiveness http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
Slight tangent but somewhat related. The amount of damage mobile phones and the tech industry have done on the human mind has been extremely understated. These hits of dopamine aren’t free. There’s a massive cost. Loss of privacy aside, the next battle has to be addressing the addiction of these platforms/devices and what it means for humans going forward.
This was the underlying implication of my post. Reading a book is in no way similar to the way we consume media/information today.
Do you have any data to back up your first sentence, or is this your personal opinion? People have been claiming this for decades, but I'm not familiar with the sources on this. It looks like other people here would be interested too. Also, are you defining "reading culture" as leisure reading? Or something else?
Ashamed to say I haven't read a non-tech book start to finish in a long time. I simply don't enjoy it. Some of the technical long articles (even scientific ones like quantamagazine) or wikipedia pages I enjoy reading. I even sometimes look up topics out of curiosity and get lost in wikipedia for hours.
I can't stand written novels or other non-tech/spiritual books. Same with audiobook or acted out narrated versions. I just have too many things fighting for my time and attention.
Nope, people have been reading shit for decades before the Internet. Go to your local grocery store and look at the magazines on the racks near checkout.
It depends on what you're watching. I read a lot less than I used to, but that's because I prefer to watch long form discussion in the form of podcast. In my eyes it's often disseminating the same information of the authors book, but in a form of spoken word and conversation that is much more natural for a human to digest.
Here is a source: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/the-dec...
It seems like OP is accurate in their assessment, it's surprising to see how many people read ZERO books in the preceding year.
I've probably read zero books in the preceding year.
But I have the internet and I can access rich content at my fingertips on topics I care to educate myself on in a way that wasn't possible when I was a child. I use this to do things like say to my 32 year old son "I'm having X health issue. I recall reading something about (y health topic). Please see if x and y are related and if there is something I can do about it."
An hour later, I have an email full of supporting links showing me that research shows there is a connection, these are the nutrients related to that problem and here is a list of foods with those nutrients. This has resulted at times in answer like "The answer to your problem is you need to eat a Reese's Cup." I eat a Reese's Cup and my agonizing, incapacitating pain drops dramatically to bearable levels.
The old way isn't necessarily superior. I used to read a lot of books when my mother would take my older sister and I to the library so my sister could spend hours doing research for her high school papers. I would lay on the floor in the children's room and read Dr. Seuss or whatever.
I can now access more high quality information on the internet via my cheap smart phone than probably any library has ever physically contained. And I spend large parts of my time reading on the internet and then I write to collate the information and keep track of the parts that matter to me.
I am always baffled by people acting like spending all day on the internet means pissing your time away shit posting on Facebook or Twitter and not doing anything at all intellectually valuable. I'm doubly baffled when I see such sentiments expressed on Hacker News, where a bunch of smart people hang out to discuss mostly written articles (audio and video tend to do poorly here) and many people here read the comment first because of the calibre of thought the audience provides.
What about reading Dr. Seuss (or similar books), where the goal is not to access rich content or solve a problem? Where there is no goal other than to enjoy a book?
I agree with you there's all sorts of useful and interesting internet content that's not reading crap on facebook. There's even literary discourse on the internet!
But what about books? Reading actual books is different.
Your source also argues that the trend is probably turning around.
Reading doesn't necessarily mean more thinking than it does with other mediums. Lots of text lacks substance and depth and is used as entertainment. Much of the previous generations were reading quick bites from news and magazines.
I don’t have a source on hand, however I read now because of chat culture people actually read and write a lot more. Back then verbal communication was so much more commonplace.
Sure it’s not novels etc, mostly comments are chit chat, but still words.
Podcasts are getting pretty popular as well. I think just in terms of sheer available time to listen versus watching videos, podcasts could gain a sizeable market share.
Right now, there is no real news to read, just grim statistics, anger, and blame.
Best thing you can do for your mental health is limit your intake of it.
Ahahah, the only news I see are covid news... nothing else...like literally Today the number of ill ones jumped to new record... so I really suffer of lack of news. That is why I started to learn motion design, read few new books of infamous authors and even went to culinary courses( online) ... And one more thing.. all that shit that we were talking about that we don’t have enough time ... it’s crap, we just fell into disgrace :)
I think we underestimate how many people understand social media, YouTube, Netflix, etc. are/can be bad for us.
The issue is our ability to resist the addiction, which more people need tools to handle. I appreciate what TikTok does by giving a custom video reminder to take a break and go do something else.
I’d really like to see all major platforms forcing users off after a given amount of time. Of course this directly competes with profit incentives so would likely need to be regulatory.
Excerpts from Neil Postman's book, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985):
“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.
But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.
As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”
—
“What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate. In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility.”
—
“Huxley believed that we are in a race between education and disaster, and he wrote continuously about the necessity of our understanding the politics and epistemology of media. For in the end, he was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.”
—
“This idea – that there is a content called “the news of the day” – was entirely created by the telegraph (and since amplified by newer media), which made it possible to move decontextualized information over vast spaces at incredible speed. The news of the day is a figment of our technological imagination. It is quite, precisely, a media event. We attend to fragments of events from all over the world because we have multiple media whose forms are well suited to fragmented conversation.”
—
“Together, this new ensemble of electronic techniques called into being a new world – a peek-a-boo world, where now this event, now that, pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again. It is a world without much coherence or sense; a world that does not ask us, indeed, does not permit us to do anything; a world that is, like the child's game of peek-a-boo, entirely self-contained. But like peek-a-boo, it is also endlessly entertaining.”
—
“The reader must come armed , in a serious state of intellectual readiness. This is not easy because he comes to the text alone. In reading, one's responses are isolated, one's intellect is thrown back on its own resources. To be confronted by the cold abstractions of printed sentences is to look upon language bare, without the assistance of either beauty or community. Thus, reading is by its nature a serious business. It is also, of course, an essentially rational activity.”
Americans were always voracious readers before television, has nothing to do with women or the Great Depression.
That's interesting. Do you know of any hard stats comparing to other countries?
This probably isn't exactly what you're looking for, but you might find Robert Darnton's essay "First Steps Toward a History of Reading" interesting. [1] It mostly covers the early modern period, if I remember correctly, not contemporary reading practices.
[1] http://robertdarnton.org/sites/default/files/First%20Steps%2...
TikTok will get them through this one.