These are times when optimism is about as easy to sustain as the suspension of disbelief during a superhero movie. Especially in the face of all the media fury, of which I consume way too much. So I won’t add to it here. Rather, I’d like to address one small slice of the public debate, at least among those who are literate enough to ask: Are we moving into a post-literate society?
Maybe, though it might depend on
how you define literate.
Just as there’s a natural distribution
of bad hairdos, nice teeth and athletic grace across the population, there’s a
percentage of people who like to read, absorb information and artistic
expression, and formulate their own opinions from the swelter of competing
views. Let’s assume that the qualities
described above are encouraged, for some, by achieving at least some education. This
means the percentage of the thoughtful and inquisitive is larger than ever: In 1940, only about five percent of the
country had graduated from college. Now
it’s over a third.
You’ll hear it said, “People don’t read anymore.” That’s not exactly true. While overall book sales and reported reading habits have slid a bit, they’re certainly not gone. After a long bloodletting of independent bookstores, their numbers have actually increased, if you discount some fatalities of the pandemic. Barnes & Noble is still in operation, and doing pretty well, even if their big box competitors have mostly disappeared.
Movies didn’t kill books. Television didn’t kill movies (even
streaming). CDs didn’t kill records. For that matter, the novel didn’t kill
poetry, jazz has survived rock ‘n’ roll, synthesizers didn’t wipe out drums and
guitars and song writers are still writing beautiful melodies and captivating lyrics.
There are temporary swells of artistic
fashion, but the end result is additive, not wholesale extinction.
Journalism is another institution
that is supposedly dying on the vine, and print media is particularly under
huge duress. Though for every daily
newspaper that goes under there are hundreds, if not thousands, of fresh news
outlets appearing online. You may
rightly assert that many, or most, are poorly managed and edited, and filled
with uncurated dreck. That still leaves
so much worthy and enriching information, and commentary, that you’ll never be
able to absorb it all.
You can make a case that the once
and possibly future cretin in the White House has caused an upsurge in media
consumption, however polarized individual outlets have become. Trust in the media favored by Democrats has
actually improved in recent times. I
submit this is because people are paying more attention, that they’re reading more. I also believe that
responsible journalism, in an era of propaganda and phony news, is trying
harder to keep their facts straight and their commentary thoughtfully
nuanced.
A good friend of mine has a theory
of the human mind: “People have a tendency
to extrapolate current circumstances indefinitely into the future.” Even the scantest understanding of the past
ought to unburden you of this fallacy.
We are, no doubt, going through some monumental changes, occurring at an
unprecedented pace. This is much of the
problem, since rapid change makes it feel like everything is going to hell in a
hand basket. The originators of Chaos
Theory, a scientific paradigm that explains the behavior of complex systems,
say that nature moves from order to disorder, and back again, in irregular, but
relentless, cycles. They call the state
between these cycles “phase transition”, when things become the most
chaotic.
If you believe civilization is
worth preserving, you have to believe that wisdom and critical thinking are
essential ingredients in that preservation.
Thought in isolation from information is valuable, but closed-ended. You can only go so far on your own. I maintain that the richest source of
revelation and enrichment are books.
Whatever form they take, physical or electronic, books will save us from
annihilation, from the foolishness – economic, military, environmental, cultural
– that is also an irredeemable aspect of the human experience.
Don’t despair. Publishers are publishing, readers are
reading. Thus, thinkers keep thinking.
I agree with you 100%. Just as, after a long period of cassettes and CDS and then digital, vinyl came back (I know at least two people who run real record shops), so books will return. I think people like to experiment with the latest digital stuff... but then they like a return to the tactile. A vinyl record with a cover you can look at and liner notes you can read. A book you can hold in your hand, and smell the paper...
ReplyDeleteIn addition to the old records, I'm keeping all my cassettes and CDs, and clinging to the devices that play them. If I had the energy I'd convert it all to Mp3 and store in the cloud, but there are other things to do. Like walk the dog, write essays and fix the stuck drawer.
DeleteChris, a wise post. I think my angst comes from the fact that a mid-list author in the 90s could make a living at it. A mid-list author today (the same author) can't. Even if sales are exactly the same, or in my case, greater, due to backlist sales. Inflation has gone way up since the 90s, but our income per book has not. So I think what I grieve is the lack of value seen in the work authors produce.
ReplyDelete☛ lack of value ☚
DeleteHmm…
Mid-lister is not a great status anymore for sure. Also falling foreign rights sales and audio books. But better to have loved once than to never love at all.
DeleteChris, one thing that gives hope is that Generations XYZ and 𝛂 continue to write. Although some firebrands eschew ‘rules’ including mixed person, mixed tense, grammar, and spelling, others take their craft seriously and ask lots of questions.
ReplyDeleteI notice a number of audio short stories on YouTube. One characteristic is a repeating visual background utterly unrelated to the story itself, sometimes nothing more than a car cruising around. Another unusual aspect is that the same story might appear three or four times in nearly the same form, at times not bothering to change names. I suspect the source is to blame, Reddit, where multiple people latch onto a theme– revenge, infidelity, crime, etc.– and more than one person snatches the same story to read. And when I say ‘read’, I mean that few humans are reading and many more text-to-speech voices are now heard.
On the dark side, the reading male population has fallen off along with decline in college-educated men. Last I read, the gap was 10% and increasing.
Women are likely taking over literature, and I look forward to their successes.
ReplyDelete