Decline of Reading
We have a crisis on our hands.
You mean global warming?
The world economy?
No, the decline of reading.
People are just not doing it anymore, especially the young.
Who's responsible?
Actually, it's more like, What is responsible?
The Internet, of course,
and everything that comes with it—Facebook, Twitter.
You can write your own list.
There's been a warning
about the imminent death of literate civilization
for a long time.
In the 20th century, first it was the movies, then radio,
then television that seemed to spell doom for the written world.
None did.
Reading survived;
in fact it not only survived,
it has flourished.
The world is more literate than ever before—
there are more and more readers, and more and more books.
The fact that we often get our reading material online today
is not something we should worry over.
The electronic and digital revolution of the last two decades
has arguably shown the way forward
for reading and for writing.
Take the arrival of e-book readers as an example.
Devices like Kindle make reading more convenient
and are a lot more environmentally friendly
than the traditional paper book.
As technology makes new ways of writing possible,
new ways of reading are possible.
Interconnectivity allows for
the possibility of a reading experience
that was barely imaginable before.
Where traditional books had to make do with
photographs and illustrations,
an e-book can provide readers
with an unlimited number of links:
to texts, pictures, and videos.
In the future, the way people write novels, history,
and philosophy will resemble nothing seen in the past.
On the other hand, there is the danger of trivialization.
One Twitter group is offering its followers
single-sentence-long "digests" of the great novels.
War and Peace in a sentence?
You must be joking.
We should fear the fragmentation of reading.
There is the danger
that the high-speed connectivity of the Internet
will reduce our attention span—
that we will be incapable of reading anything of length
or which requires deep concentration.
In such a fast-changing world,
in which reality seems to be remade each day,
we need the ability to focus and understand
what is happening to us.
This has always been the function of literature
and we should be careful not to let it disappear.
Our society needs to be able to imagine the possibility
of someone utterly in tune with modern technology
but able to make sense of a dynamic, confusing world.