Daily reading down 40% as books die in the smartphone era
Let me start with a confession.
Spencer Russell, founder of Toddlers Can Read, joins ‘Fox & Friends Weekend’ to explain why Gen Z parents are reading less to their children, which may be contributing to a decline in childhood literacy.
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Let me start with a confession.
I’ve always been an avid reader. There was a period when I was constantly thumbing through novels by Updike, Irving, Roth, Malamud, Atwood, as well as the occasional non-fiction novel, including all of Bob Woodward’s books.
As the author of six books, I love the feel of a hardcover. Getting your hands on the first copy is always a rush, a great sense of accomplishment.
But this was all before smartphones, or rather the kind of phones and apps that bombard us with Instagram and TikTok’s hot shots, endless images, and AI summaries.
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And now I’m not studying anywhere near that far. Too busy glued to the screen.
My attention span has shortened. Let’s say it’s harder to finish a two-hour movie. Shorter episodes are easier to watch.
Has my brain changed? Have I become lazy? (This is a rhetorical question.)
I started thinking about this topic after reading James Marriott’s Free Press article “The Dawn of Postliterate Society.”
The digital age has caused casual reading to fall off a cliff, and as a result we may be entering a post-literate society. (Juliana Yamada/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
Researching history, he writes that in the mid-18th century “a large number of ordinary people began to read.”
What was once the pursuit of the elite has filtered down to the middle and lower classes, thanks to increased education and the explosion of cheap books. According to Marriott, this was “the greatest transfer of knowledge into the hands of ordinary men and women in history.” This introduced the masses to radical new ideas and included essayists such as Samuel Johnson and Edward Gibbon.
Media analyst Neil Postman is quoted as saying in 1985: “To engage with the written word means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classification, inference, and judgment.”
And now, Marriott openly says “books are dying.”
You felt this coming, didn’t you?
In America, “daily reading for pleasure has fallen by more than 40 percent in the last 20 years.” Ah.
The publishing business is in dire straits: “Books that would once sell in the tens or even hundreds of thousands are now lucky to sell in the mid-four figures.”
College students “have grown up almost exclusively in a world of short-form video, computer games, and addictive algorithms (and, increasingly, artificial intelligence).”
The publishing industry is in decline as the demand for printed literature continues its rapid rise post-technology. (Sergei Supinsky/AFP via Getty Images)
This is their world. They don’t remember what it was like before. They were very young then.
By chance, I found a box full of long, handwritten letters that I shared with close friends when I was 15, 16, 17; even five pagers from a friend’s girlfriend who moved to Los Angeles. There was no texting back then and long distance calls were expensive. Unlike today, “What happened,” “OMG,” “ASAP,” and “BRB.”
A survey of English Literature students at two Midwestern universities last year found that most of them could not understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’ “Bleak House.”
So who can we hold responsible for this sad situation?
READING WAR: CHILDREN IN THE CAR
One study suggests that students, especially Generation Z, will spend 25 years of their lives glued to their phones. (iStock)
First of all, it does not apply to everyone. We have free will. We can take time to read. And “Bleak House” is no breeze.
A study cited by the Times of London says that students (especially Generation Z) will spend 25 years of their lives glued to smartphones. A period of quarter of a century. Wowza.
Glenn Stephenson, co-founder of Fluid Focus, said “we need to confront an uncomfortable truth: We unknowingly gave powerful, addictive technologies to children in their most formative years – without fully understanding the risks of doing so.”
That’s it. This is our fault.
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Maybe it can be edited. Perhaps more knowledgeable students will see the need for course correction. Maybe we’ll have so much wearable technology that it won’t seem so distracting.
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Or perhaps, unfortunately, publishing will go the way of the horse-and-buggy business, which is largely aimed at the horse-owning elite.
I started a few books, then put them aside to read later, and a month or two later I picked them up for a few pages. Now where did I leave them…?
