The National Education Association released a study this month suggesting that the number of Americans who read fiction, poetry or drama has declined to in recent years, especially among younger Americans. A lot of news stories on the study, however, insist on spinning this to mean a general decline in all reading, leading to hilarious nonsense like this from the Christian Science Monitor,
As with any good detective novels, the usual suspects are here — but surprises are, too. As websites and talk radio proliferate, reading is no longer the only way, or even the primary one, of getting information.
Yeah, if only the Internet was dominated by text rather than being exclusively a video/audio media, then maybe more people would be reading.
LOL.
I have a hypothesis, by the way, on the literature finding. Personally, I read far fewer novels than I did a decade ago. Why? Because story telling can be replicated in large part by video/audio media whereas text is (and will likely remain) still superior to video/audio for nonfiction. Plus I can tell when a movie or TV show is crap pretty quickly, whereas you might have to read several hundred pages before learning the novel you’re reading is crap.
(Not to mention the fact that the last 3 or 4 novels I’ve read were all on my PDA, and the only one that wasn’t was a tie-in novel to Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. Somehow I don’t think either of those count in the NEA’s book).
Source:
New on the endangered species list: the bookworm. Christina McCarroll, The Christian Science Monitor, July 12, 2004.