Vox: “…Americans still consume plenty of text. Social media platforms teem with words — even video-based apps like TikTok are replete with captions and comments. And on average, we spend more than two hours scrolling through such platforms each day. But not all reading is created equal. The mind can skim over the surface of a sentence and swiftly decode its literal meaning. But deep reading — sustained engagement with a longform text — is a distinct endeavor. As neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf explains, when you give your complete attention to a stimulating book or longform article, you activate a wide array of the brain’s linguistic and cognitive capacities. In this contemplative state, the reader rapidly draws connections between the text and their background knowledge, generating original thoughts in the process. And this vital form of reading is in sharp decline. In 2021, American adults read fewer books on average than in any year on record, according to Gallup. Among young Americans, the dwindling of deep reading is especially stark. In 1984, some 35 percent of 13-year-olds said they read for fun “almost every day,” according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). By 2012, that figure was 27 percent. By 2023, it had fallen to 14 percent. Similar declines have transpired among the nation’s 9-year-olds and late adolescents. Meanwhile, daily screen time among all age groups is surging to record highs…Even among the rising generations’ academic elite, reading books is an increasingly niche hobby. According to a recent report from The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch, many students at America’s most selective colleges now lack the capacity (or at least, the wherewithal) to read a book cover-to-cover. In the view of some analysts, these trends don’t just threaten to curtail bookworms’ literary lives or stunt young Americans’ intellectual development. Rather, digital media’s displacement of books is propelling our species back to an ancient mode of cognition and communication: After a brief dalliance with literacy, humanity is returning to its oral roots. According to such varied commentators as media theorist Andrey Mir, Bloomberg reporter Joe Weisenthal, historian Adam Garfinkle, and culture writer Katherine Dee, the digital age’s modes of thought and discourse increasingly resemble those of pre-literate oral cultures. In making this claim, these writers draw heavily on the work of Walter Ong, a philosopher who developed a deeply influential — but somewhat controversial — theory of how the oral and literate minds diverge…
This is your brain on books – In Ong’s account, the advent of writing radically restructured thought. Language was liberated from the limitations of human memory. Through text, people could express ideas with an eye to precision rather than repeatability, while building upon the accumulated knowledge of all who came before. Literacy did not just enable abstract thought but inherently inspired it, according to Ong and his acolytes. The very act of reading trains the mind in the arts of abstraction: Text conjures a voice that speaks inside the reader’s head rather than through her ears, prompting her to detach from sensory experience and turn attention inward. In so doing, literacy facilitated modes of thought that were more independent, rational, individualistic, and universalistic than those of oral societies…”
See also Counter Craft – The Forever Dying and the Always Dead; or, Literary Fiction and the Novel. A long post on the state of “literary fiction,” book sales, and the culture at large.
