Excerpts from “Twilight of the Books” by Caleb Crain

According to the latest NEA analysis, reading for
pleasure in America is continuing to decline.

Now, author, Caleb Crain, writing in the New Yorker,
looks at this decline in reading (having been replaced
with TV and video) and what this means for society.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2007/12/24/071224crat_atlarge_crain?currentPage=all

Crain argues that Americans are losing the ability to read well:

More alarming are indications that Americans
are losing not just the will to read but even
the ability. According to the Department of
Education, between 1992 and 2003 the average
adult’s skill in reading prose slipped one
point on a five-hundred-point scale, and the
proportion who were proficient—capable of such
tasks as “comparing viewpoints in two editorials”
—declined from fifteen per cent to thirteen.

More people reading less - changing society?

…if, over time, many people choose television over books,
then a nation’s conversation with itself is likely to
change. A reader learns about the world and imagines it
differently from the way a viewer does; according to
some experimental psychologists, a reader and a viewer
even think differently. If the eclipse of reading
continues, the alteration is likely to matter in ways
that aren’t foreseeable…

Secondary orality:

The scholar Walter J. Ong once speculated that television
and similar media are taking us into an era of “secondary
orality,” akin to the primary orality that existed before
the emergence of text.

Does “secondary orality” explain the “dumbing-down of society”?

Whereas literates can rotate concepts in their
minds abstractly, orals embed their thoughts in
stories. According to Ong, the best way to preserve
ideas in the absence of writing is to “think memorable
thoughts,” whose zing insures their transmission.
In an oral culture, cliche and stereotype are valued,
as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned
upon, for putting those accumulations at risk.
There’s no such concept as plagiarism, and redundancy
is an asset that helps an audience follow a complex
argument. Opponents in struggle are more memorable
than calm and abstract investigations, so bards
revel in name-calling and in “enthusiastic description
of physical violence.” Since there’s no way to erase
a mistake invisibly, as one may in writing, speakers
tend not to correct themselves at all. Words have
their present meanings but no older ones, and if
the past seems to tell a story with values different
from current ones, it is either forgotten or silently
adjusted. As the scholars Jack Goody and Ian Watt
observed, it is only in a literate culture that the
past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for,
a process that encourages skepticism and forces
history to diverge from myth. 

 Sounds like television news:

Moving and talking images are much richer in information
about a performer’s appearance, manner, and tone of voice,
and they give us the impression that we know more about
her health and mood, too. The viewer may not catch all
the details of a candidate’s health-care plan, but he has
a much more definite sense of her as a personality, and
his response to her is therefore likely to be more full
of emotion. There is nothing like this connection in print.
A feeling for a writer never touches the fact of the writer
herself, unless reader and writer happen to meet. In fact,
from Shakespeare to Pynchon, the personalities of many
writers have been mysterious.

Emotional responsiveness to streaming media harks back to
the world ofprimary orality, and, as in Plato’s day, the
solidarity amounts almost to a mutual possession.
“Electronic technology fosters and encourages unification
and involvement,” in McLuhan’s words. The viewer feels at
home with his show, or else he changes the channel. The
closeness makes it hard to negotiate differences of opinion.
It can be amusing to read a magazine whose principles
you despise, but it is almost unbearable to watch such
a television show. And so, in a culture of secondary
orality, we may be less likely to spend time with ideas
we disagree with.

Self-doubt, therefore, becomes less likely. In fact, doubt
of any kind is rarer. It is easy to notice inconsistencies
in two written accounts placed side by side. With text,
it is even easy to keep track of differing levels of
authority behind different pieces of information. The
trust that a reader grants to the New York Times, for
example, may vary sentence by sentence. A comparison of
two video reports, on the other hand, is cumbersome.
Forced to choose between conflicting stories on television,
the viewer falls back on hunches, or on what he believed
before he started watching. Like the peasants studied by
Luria, he thinks in terms of situations and story lines
rather than abstractions.

And he may have even more trouble than Luria’s peasants
in seeing himself as others do. After all, there is no
one looking back at the television viewer. He is alone,
though he, and his brain, may be too distracted to notice
it. The reader is also alone, but the N.E.A. reports that
readers are more likely than non-readers to play sports,
exercise, visit art museums, attend theatre, paint, go
to music events, take photographs, and volunteer.
Proficient readers are also more likely to vote. Perhaps
readers venture so readily outside because what they
experience in solitude gives them confidence. Perhaps
reading is a prototype of independence. No matter how
much one worships an author, Proust wrote, “all he can
do is give us desires.” Reading somehow gives us the
boldness to act on them. Such a habit might be quite
dangerous for a democracy to lose.

Notebook: “Twilight of the Books” - from Caleb Crain’s blog 

Are Americans reading less? - from Caleb Crain’s blog

Are Americans spending less on reading? - from Caleb Crain’s blog

Is literacy declining? - from Caleb Crain’s blog

Does television impair intellect? - from Caleb Crain’s blog

Does internet use compromise reading time? - from Caleb Crain’s blog

Is reading online worse than reading print? - from Caleb Crain’s blog

Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
by Maryanne Wolf (2007)

Twilight of the Books and Why Undecided Voters Can’t Make Up Their Minds (Maybe)

More excerpts from “Readers Roundtable” The New Yorker: “Twilight of the Books”

Milwaukee Journal  Book signs point gloomily to the demise of literacy