Last night I enjoyed a conversation around the kitchen table with friends from out-of-town. At one point in the conversation a parent told a story about a neighborhood child joining their family for an evening meal. As mastication commenced the mother noticed all her children had a book they were reading while the neighborhood child looked about awkwardly. The mother told her eldest not to ignore their friend, maybe offer the friend a book. Her eldest puts the book down and asked the friend, “Do you like reading?” The friend replied, “Not much.”
This story reminded me of something I read recently regarding “aliteracy” — being able to read and write, but choosing not to — and the decline of reading whole books — in other words, reading a book cover to cover versus reading world literature condensed to 140 characters or less (see Twitterature for an example). In a recent article published in The Chronicle, Carlin Romano writes:
Destructive cultural trends lurk behind the decline of readerly ambition and student stamina. One is the expanding cultural bias in all writerly media toward clipped, hit-friendly brevity—no longer the soul of wit, but metric-driven pith in lieu of wit.
Link: Will the Book Survive Generation Text?
This isn’t a new trend. I recall Socrates faced similar “cultural trends” in his age. When a culture has the immense wealth of knowledge and wisdom but choses to vapid soundbites and emotionalism, the “destructive… trends” are established like a rut society finds difficult to escape. Almost twenty years ago, The New York Times published an educational article with the following lead paragraph:
Illiteracy is primarily a problem of the third world. But it is the United States that appears to be leading the way in aliteracy — the rejection of books by children and young adults who know how to read but choose not to.
Link: The Lost Book Generation
This past weekend I attended a local poetry reading. An Irish poet lamented that a second-hand bookstore closed and now he has to go to Barnes & Noble to purchase books. He commented that Barnes & Noble is a place where people seem more interested in coffee drinks than books.
Best I can tell, The New York Times story may be the first mainstream publication to cover aliteracy (if you find others, please share them in the comments section or email me). George Orwell published an essay in the 1940s on a similar theme (Books v. Cigarettes) and in the 1930s Aldous Huxley presented a society without books in Brave New World. Toward the end of Brave New World, World Controller Mustapha Mond tells John the Savage:
Our world is not the same as Othello’s world… The world’s stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get… But that’s the price we have to pay for stability. You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art.
I can’t help but wonder what we as a culture trade for happiness?
Coffeehouse Junkie 