Explaining the downfall of reading
Is reading still popular, or is it now just a dead end? Explaining the reasons behind the sudden decline of interest.
We, as a society, are constantly moving forward to achieve ever-new goals. At this point in which we’re finding ourselves, relating to both history and our personal lives, it’s tough to resist the temptation to discover and create new trends and hobbies, which are practically part of the world’s cultural history.
Our lives are very flickering and uncertain, and we like to change things in the outer world, the external things—if you will, very often. Whether it’s a place where we use to sit at lunch or which school are we going to attend. Nothing really lasts long in our current cultural settings, and so many things seem just foolish to us.
The time in which we currently are, as a society, can be described with a sociological term secondary orality, meaning post-literate culture as our current cultural status. With the introduction of electronic media and Internet, we got used to searching for information on Google, instead of finding it in a book. The world had advanced to another stage of technology, but that could be fatal to all of us.
With trends made in the last few decades, in which we progressed much faster than in the whole history of human being, it’s really hard to catch on what is popular and what is not. Although, we can clearly see that reading isn’t the new sensation of social media, which everyone (doesn’t) want to do to feel enough cultured.
If we wanted to know what are people nowadays doing instead of reading, the answer couldn’t be simpler. Let’s look at the survey of the U.S. Department of Labor, published under the name American Time Use Survey, conducted from 2003 to the present time. The graph below shows us the average hours per day spent on reading by the typical American.
As you can see at first glance, reading isn’t really on the right track to become popular, just the opposite. The popularity peak of reading occurred (according to this research) around the years 2003 and 2004 when people read 0.38 hrs/day, which can be translated into 22.8 minutes. But still, that’s less than half an hour per day doing something so important and valuable. From that time, the stats had been falling off drastically, now stopping at a value of 0.26 hrs/day (15.6 minutes)—for which various newspapers reported as “the reasons for the decline in book reading being unclear,” and more.
There could be various aspects and reasons why this sudden decline started happening, including Americans finding other ways to entertain themselves or COVID-related restrictions (but people can download e-books or audiobooks without leaving their homes, so that’s probably a dead end).
On the other hand, if we look at the graph of average hours spend watching TV, which I attached below, the numbers couldn’t be more predictable. The numbers range from 2.58 to newer 2.86 hours of watching TV every day, remaining around similar values, while being significantly higher than the numbers of time spend on reading. Based on these data, we can assume that television is a much larger interest for Americans than reading.
But maybe all of these changes and surprising values are (at least in a small way) related to the composition of the American population, which could have changed rapidly in the last few years, resulting in more of a direct and immediate response—or it could have been changing for the longer time interval, resulting in shifts of cultural development in long-term tense.
Now imagine you have a tree. The tribe, being the main part of the tree, portrays our main problem—the changes in the composition of US inhabitants. And this tree is split up into smaller branches, which would portray the smaller reasons why is this problem happening. Just as the tree can’t properly function without the branches (and vice versa), our problem wouldn’t be complete without these factors.
In the role of branches, you can imagine various situations: there are more women than men, or more people are employed rather than unemployed (people without work would probably have more time for reading than a person with a full-time job). There could also be more people of different races, ethnicity or age. In our world, nothing is happening without a reason, you just have to understand it fully.
If we already know that most people are not really into reading, and we discussed the causes of that matter, we can now shift our interest over to people who actually like to read. There are many questions regarding this specific group of people, like who are they? And what do they actually read?
The skill of reading has essentially become one of the symbols of literacy; and also one of the main skills needed to survive in this world. We need to understand texts to perform simple actions included in daily life, like reading directions on a map or a menu in a restaurant. And even we tried as much as possible, our reading programs aren’t 100% successful and there are still people who are struggling in a long-term position, because of this ongoing issue.
Another problem in the world of books is the price of literature. With the recent trend of inflation all over the world, many things—including books—became partially or completely unavailable to some people. And by that, I mean that someone just had to buy fewer books, so they could keep on paying rent. But someone easily didn’t have enough money to buy any—which sounds, to be honest, totally terrifying to me. I just can’t understand the idea of someone not having access to literature, to education in the 21st century.
As for the division of literature, scientists divided literature into two basic categories—elite and popular. Elite literature, also called officially sanctioned literature, is focused primarily on academics and education, based upon the imposition of distinction and is regulated by a smaller group of critics and teachers.
The second category is called popular literature, sometimes called the literature of everyday life, which is anything distributed to the general public. Books are acquiring the status of popularity (thus we refer to them as “a bestseller”) when people read them. But in the situation of popularity, a book doesn’t need to be good at all to become popular, while in elite literature it needs to. There are more than one million books published every year, but how do we know what’s good and what’s not? Are we even publishing good books anymore, or is the book market just overloaded from all of these books? Tough questions to answer.
Even though we already know about these two types of literature, there have been big misunderstandings in past studies about literature. Every research was counting on literature as printed materials (e.g. books, magazines, etc.) only, not including any other type of text, which was a huge mistake to make.
The word literature does not only mean books and magazines but essentially, also billboards, labels, menus and many more. Maybe no one thought about it until now, but just as printed materials have the relative strength and influence to define us and our choices, so do any other things we see daily on the street. When you were shopping for, let’s say, bread in the grocery store, did you suddenly recall the ad you saw yesterday (or even last week) for a specific brand of bread? Your answer was probably yes, which indicates that we actually can remember at least some of the advertisements we see everyday.
When we are talking about the most popular literature as science fiction or romance, it’s so unacceptable and restricting. Who doesn’t read the text on a box of cereal, labels on a toothpaste tube or graffiti on a telephone booth? We like to interact with the world around us, so counting something we read in our spare time as the only option for most popular literature is really absurd and meaningless.
And limiting literature to only printed materials is still too restricting because literature is changing every day, just as many things in our world do, so we should perhaps accept the new orders to move forward in evolution. Not wanting to accept something new is just too dangerous to be done. And even though many things have changed over the years, the fact that literature is an unforgettable reminder of our history and culture, and is practically one of the main pillars of society and the world in general, remained the same.
Reading is a really old hobby, which is not as popular today as someone may have thought. There is an uncountable amount of texts published to the general public, so everyone has a chance to find something they like. The market of literature is expanding and enlarging every day—but many people don’t care about this at all and just don’t really read anything.
There have been various changes in the book market, including the growth of e-books and audiobooks and the opposite decline in interest in printed materials. More people are hopefully finding their ways to read, which is a big plus for them. And you can’t say you don’t like to do something until you actually tried it. Remember that life is about trying new things and changing the boundaries of what you’re able to do.
Even the people who refuse to read are actually reading everyday, even if they don’t know about it. On the street—ads, billboards or flyers. In the store—labels on groceries or detailed ingredients on some product. In short, reading refers to any interaction between the reader and the text, and it does not have to be conscious or voluntary at all. Even someone who says they don't read anything at all actually reads every day, and all of these words are equivalent to several books every year.
Thank you so much for reading, I hope you enjoyed today’s article as much as I enjoyed writing it. Please let me know in the comments if you like this kind of longer, deep-dive article, so I know if I should continue with it. Also, write any of your questions or thoughts in the comments, I am more than happy to answer everything I can.
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Once more, thank you for reading and see you soon!
M.
References
Crain, C. (2018). Why We Don’t Read, Revisited. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/why-we-dont-read-revisited
Nagourney, P. (1982). Elite, Popular and Mass Literature: What People Really Read. The Journal of Popular Culture, XVI, 99-107. DOI: 10.1111/j.0022-3840.1982.00099.x
Photos from Unsplash.
Have you read the Pew Research Center survey "Who doesn’t read books in America?"
People who love to read (myself included) have always been the minority. Most people have lazy limited glucose brains and just learn enough to survive and have a comfortable life - which is cool but for them but for some of us reading is like breathing air - a daily necessity to stay alive. yet it is true that kids and adults spend most of their time online nowadays - reading just enough to get the gist of something but rarely deeper than that. Sad but true. As a teacher it's an ongoing battle to get the youth off their phones and focus on more important stuff. C'est la Vie! But I agree about the importance of the free press tier of Democratic countries - without this check and balance system - you only have the state's voice which is a form of 1984 autocracy which sucks as the classic book reveals.