Reading has been on the decline since the advent of television, and now it’s only getting worse. On “Interesting Times,” the Times of London columnist James Marriott explains why we’d rather watch videos than read books.
- So, if literacy is declining in this radical way, why is it happening now? I think it’s happening now because of smartphones and short video. I think it’s also part of a longer-term story. When you get into this, the declines in reading that are measured and that people begin to talk about, are in the 1950s and ’60s, ’70s with the arrival of television. Television just swallows up human free time. There’s a remarkable statistic quoted by Robert Putnam in his book “Bowling Alone,” about how I think it’s between the ‘60s and the ‘90s, the average American gained hours of free time and they spent virtually all of it watching television. When you measure how people are using their free time after the arrival of television, reading just drops off a cliff. And the screen just swallows things up. Reading is hard work. It’s not — it’s a cognitively taxing activity. It requires a bit of brain effort. And watching a screen is passive. It’s easy to do. It comes much more naturally to us. Absorbing images through our eyes, it’s something we’ve evolved to do. Absorbing language through our eyes via text is a weird and difficult thing to do. And if given the option, we tend to op t for the screen, not the text. I think the decline of deep reading is really accelerated by the arrival of the smartphone in the early 2000s. That’s a major revolution. And so much has been said about that. And I guess the point we’re at now is almost a revolution within a revolution. It’s become possible to watch video everywhere. And I think that has really, for a lot people, meant that long-form text, or I increasingly think, if you’re young, any text, any real reading, is just beginning to drain out your life.
https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000011195427/reading-is-hard-watching-is-not.html
