Abstract
As book sales start to rise
Pew’s website notes: “Some 28% of adults aged 50 and older have not read a book in the past year, compared with 20% of adults under 50.”
The data is borne out by a 2016 study from the National Endowment for the Arts, which found that 42% of Americans aged between 18 and 24 had read a book in the preceding year. Millennials, it seems, have returned to print in the same way they have returned to vinyl or slow cooking – call it the lure, the appeal, of the artisanal.
Why is this important? We are facing a crisis in critical thinking, not only in the USA but throughout the West. Reading – or the lack of it – has become a convenient scapegoat because critical thinking is one of the skills books promote.
I want to propose a counter-argument, however, which is that books and reading are also important because they remove us, for the time that we engage with them, from the white-hot centre of the maelstrom; from all the clutter of the culture, all the detritus and noise. They allow us to recharge, to reconnect, to come together with another mind, another intelligence, in the most fundamental sense.
Think about what books require of us: a kind of silence, a stillness, a suspension (in some measure) of our judgment, or at least the ability to wait and see. My favourite books are those that reveal themselves slowly, that confound my expectations, that require me to think on my feet.
The same is true of writers. Those I admire most are the ones who allow me to see them thinking, whether about personal or political concerns. Lucia Berlin, James Baldwin, Claudia Rankine, Viet Thanh Nguyen: the power of their work has to do with voice – with intention or with point-of-view – but at the same time with intellectual and narrative openness, the sense that the interaction on the page is essentially one of discovery for both reader and writer alike. I prefer not to know where I am going. I prefer to suspend my disbelief. This reminds me, as we all need to be reminded, of everything I don’t know, of the stories that I tell myself, my assumptions and my preconceptions, all my unexamined beliefs.
Unfortunately, the same is not true of how we consume news, which involves reading of a different sort. According to another Pew report, nearly half the respondents aged from 18 to 49 got their news online, as opposed to fewer than 10% from print newspapers. I don’t want to sound like a Luddite; I, too, read news almost entirely on the internet. We live online, even those of us who do not want to. But do we really read news online?
CREDIT: Ryan Etter/Ikon
In 2016, a study by Columbia University and the French National Institute found that 59% of the links we shared on social media were to stories we had not read. This has everything to do with the speed of the internet, which requires us to speak out before we’ve had the chance to process or to think. It’s less a problem of reading than of reacting, emotion rather than reasoned response. This is why we’re so susceptible to bots and fake news; to manipulation, data mining and algorithms, because they support what we believe we know. Over the summer, Facebook announced it had uncovered what The New York Times called “dozens of inauthentic accounts and pages that are believed to be engaging in political activity around divisive social issues ahead of November’s midterm elections”. Such efforts work, or have worked, because unlike real reading, the internet – and particularly social media – never asks us to question ourselves.
Take the 2016 presidential campaign as an example. In the lead-up to Donald Trump’s election, 40% of his voters relied on Fox for their news. Only 3% of Hillary Clinton voters did. The data suggests that we do not look to news outlets for information so much as affirmation, which we then take as truth. This is especially the case on social media, where fact and rumour and innuendo blur into a miasmic cacophony of voices, all flattened by the medium to equivalent authority.
If we can’t be bothered to read a link before we comment, what can our opinions mean? I think of Maggie Haberman, The New York Times’ White House correspondent who recently scaled back her presence on Twitter because “everything is shrunk down to the same size, making it harder to discern what is a big deal and what is not. Tone often overshadows the actual news. All outrages appear equal”.
I have my issues with Haberman. When it comes to social media, however, she is absolutely right. Facebook and Twitter have turned the internet (or large corners of it) into a shouting match, where it is not the loudest voice but the combined volume of all the voices, the tweets or posts one after the other, every second, that make us numb. I used to imagine the World Wide Web as a kind of commons, virtual and actual at once. Now, I have come to consider it, in the prescient words of Nathanael West, as “a dream dump. A Sargasso of the imagination!... Many boats sink and never reach the Sargasso, but no dream ever entirely disappears”.
I suppose the same might be said of a library, such as the one Jorge Luis Borges invented, in which every book that had ever been written and every book that had never been written were all equally preserved. What Borges was exploring in the Library of Babel, however, was the question of possibility, which sits at the centre of every piece of serious written work. Too often, the digital discourse encourages the opposite: a narrowing of perspective, not unlike the ranting at a speakers’ corner, where one can mouth off without fear of contradiction – unless contradiction is what is sought. This is not information, this is not inquiry – this is fear masquerading as authority. As to why it matters, James Baldwin offers a brilliant analysis in The Fire Next Time, writing: “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”
I am a free speech absolutist. I believe information is the cornerstone of liberty. At the same time, if all we are doing is venting, what’s the point? If we are not engaged in listening and learning, how does communication work? This is why I read, it is why I have always read, it is why I continue to read now.
And yet, I can’t help but worry this is something we are in the process of forgetting, to our abiding detriment. If this is not the end of reading, then it is a shift in the way we pay attention, and to what, by which the very nature of our public discourse is corrupted in irrevocable and dangerous ways.