Here Lies Reading
Who was the murderer? Zoomers with their smartphones in the internet room? Or is something else happening?
Contemporary with my piece “Where Be Our Readers,” where I bemoaned the lack of reading among Americans, there were some similar pieces written by academics with public profiles with a greater focus on youth reading.
First, there was a piece in Slate by Adam Kotsko, a humanities professor at North Central College, which sounded an alarm on the struggles of college students to competently complete short reading assignments. Kotsko wrote with concern that in the last five years his students have been “intimidated” by reading assignments over 10 pages and “seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” More shockingly, Kotsko notes that “even smart and motivated students struggle to do more with written texts than extract decontextualized take-aways.” Kotsko speculates on three potential causes for the degradation in critical reading skills among the youth: smartphones, COVID-19 learning disruptions, and changes in reading pedagogy. Despite being a short piece, it caught the eye of some in the commentariat.
Second, Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University and recent author of Generations, examined cohort-level reading behavior trends among the youth of today and the past. Jean M. Twenge’s piece “Are books dead? Why Gen Z doesn't read” presents data from the Monitoring the Future (MtF) Survey, highlighting a number of concerning changes in youth reading.1 There are two big data-derived insights:
Young people no longer read for pleasure.
The percent of U.S. 12th graders reading six of more books for pleasure saw a choppy but strong and steady decline from 1976 through 2022 (~40% to 13%). In sharp contrast, the percent of U.S. 12th graders reading no books for pleasure saw a dramatic increase from 1976 through 2022 (11.5% to 41%).
Borrowed from Jean Twenge’s Are Books Dead?. Chart shows percent of U.S. 12th graders reading none or six or more books for pleasure in the last year, 1976-2022. Source: Data from Monitoring the Future complied and analyzed by Jean M. Twenge, author of Generations
The reading behavior of the academically inclined and disinclined are converging.
U.S. 12th graders planning to obtain graduate degrees now read approximately one more book than U.S. 12th graders without such ambitions. This difference has halved over the data period. This convergence is not explained by the high achievers doing more homework than in the past. In Twenge view of the date, the convergence is likely explained by screen time usage.
Returning to the reading for pleasure trend among high school seniors (chart 1), we see two major inflections points. The first is circa 1990 where reading for pleasure and not reading at all converges, and the second is where that latter grouping (no reading) begins its ascent around 2012. Professor Twenge argues the 2012 inflection, which is admittedly stark in the data is explained by the widespread adoption of the smartphone.2 However, she is puzzled by the decline in reading between the 1970s-1990s. She also highlights the 2002-2010 brief and small resurgence of reading. She has some interesting comments on this resurgence that challenge my reflexive explanation of this bump as part of the Harry Potter series phenomenon:
Another mystery is the bump in reading between about 2002 and 2010. When I posted a related graph on Twitter/X, many people theorized that the increase in teen reading during those years was due to the publication of the Harry Potter books, which took place from 1997 to 2007. That’s possible. But, as Figure 4 shows, nearly all of the bump in reading was driven by girls. That makes me wonder if the uptick was also partially due to the Twilight books, which were published between 2005 and 2008, with the movies coming out between 2008 and 2010.
Now, I do think the Twilight series is an important factor in the 2002-10 bump, but I think the popularity of many young adult fiction series (Unfortunate Events, Inheritance, Hunger Games, Divergent, etc) at the time was driven by demand initially inspired by Harry Potter. Heck, it’s possible even Dan Brown was responsible for some of this bump. Back then, books seemed to go viral in the way online memes or video reels do now. People actually solicited reading recommendation from one another in a way that I don’t see anymore outside the seemingly walled garden of Goodreads.
I have no way of demonstrating the particular reading culture of this period, it is just something I feel. It is how I understood a lot of the interest in reading around me during this time (I was in my tween/teen years during this period). People, young and old, were chasing excitement and entertainment in books in ways that seem unimaginable today or are confined to narrow sub-cultures. It is hard to understand why this brief resurgence occurred, but it is easy to understand how the stimulation provided by popular novels could be supplanted in a way similar to how film with sound and color replaced black-and-white, silent film. Some advances are so dramatic, it makes regression appear horrofyingly boring.
Whatever was happening with reading between 2002-10 is evidently a blip in the broader trend. The secular decline in reading was already well underway and seemingly inevitable. The pressing remaining question is why, especially for the trend between 1970-90? After ruling out television and video games, Professor Twenge is at a bit of a loss. I don’t have a great explanation either. However, I think there are potential answers hidden in American cultural change. A lot has happened after the halfway mark of the 20th century.3 There is a wealth of personal reports over this period that provide hints behind what could be driving this trend. I immediately thought of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) when considering commentaries on related trends.
Bloom, a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago, attacked the increasing prevalence of moral relativism and nihilism among his students. His book also included critical sentiments about the degradation of high culture, including a derisive analysis of Rock & Roll music. By critics, Closing was characterized as a reactionary polemic, while proponents saw it as a deft Nietzschean dissection of modern American liberalism. Today, Bloom’s polemic is sometimes uncharitably characterized as an old man complaining about “kids these days.” Nonetheless, many of its observations are resonant today, and its incisive scrutiny of higher ed is still animating a great deal of thinking.4 However, I think Closing serves as a useful and thoughtful first-hand account of an ongoing cultural shift among Americans, one that may have begun with parents of Bloom’s students or earlier. I don’t think we can yet give a full accounting of that cultural shift or define it precisely, but we have numerous markers of it: the sexual revolution, the Civil Rights movement, the countercultural movement, rock & roll music, the New Left, WaterGate, stagflation, etc.5 And I think these shifts are related to reading behavior, especially because they are often so closely tied to our system of higher education and elite or intellectual culture. Something was driving a type of anti-intellectualism in American culture.6
Alternatively, an attempt to explain these trends reminds me of another book, Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985). In an argument inspired by Marshall McLuhan’s idea “the medium is the message” and Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World,7 Postman argued that rigor in public discourse and pedagogy were being disrupted by television. TV had enabled the invasion of entertainment into education. Postman saw categorical differences between TV and print, which, given TV’s rise, had become an impediment to how people processed arguments. Although I think Postman’s idea are somewhat hobbled by a type of neo-Luddism, I think there is something to the application of McLuhan’s idea including the nature of the attention required by different media. It is certainly a possibilities that the mechanisms of information distribution have continued to train us to consume information in smaller and smaller bites. We moved from the treatise to pamphlet to article to sound bite to 140 characters to 15 second reels. There is something to this idea, but it would also seems like there would be more people who reject this age of distraction (and vehemently). This doesn’t seem to be the case. Instead, we are mostly willing participants. Plus, we aren’t having to chase down numerous Ted Kaczynski types. And as an ardent long-form reader and internet junkie, I am puzzled why there isn’t an embrace of the abundance provided by current media.
If we look at media usage trends, it does seem that the more fragmented medium of the internet is winning. A study published in Psychology of Popular Media Culture by Twenge and colleagues suggests there is a tradeoff between mediums. I think in some respects it is impossible to dismiss that internet media is crowding out long-form reading. I think this is something people like me are inclined to do because we know that we read extensively and are not troubled but edified by the sources that the internet offers up. The fact I settle on a different balance doesn’t negate the existence of the internet-versus-print media tradeoff. Fuurther, I do much of my reading on screens or actually as listening via bluetooth headphones. In a world without smartphones and the internet, I may actually read even more or even more deeply and rigorously than I do today.
However, the preference for internet media doesn’t entirely explain some of the anecdotal accounts like Kotsko’s about today’s youth struggling to parse difficult texts and reason in rigorous and sustained fashions. Scrolling social media feeds shouldn’t necessarily degrade our cognitive capacities. We still are capable of plenty of intellectual production and technical sophistication. And as we can see, these arguments have been tendered before by Postman about TV and Bloom about relativist philosophies in education. It is likely unfair to smear the competency of Gen Z despite their heavy smartphone use. If the smartphone is a portal to distracting and addictive short-form entertainment, it should be doing this to essentially everyone in a similar way and should be degrading our attention spans and blocking our intellectual curiosity. Maybe this is the case. If we take a more circumspect position, I think we can conclude that we are enmeshed in a long-run trend that’s driven by something we can’t quite pin down. It is likely that both culture and technology are involved but we’ve yet to figure out the details.
Reading is a critical faculty for humans, a special skill built on top of our language instinct. It has been the foundation on which we’ve built modern civilization, enabling human knowledge to build cumulatively. We should be careful to preserve and propagate this faculty in its highest form. We are not in danger of losing it, but we do seem to be be in danger of falling out of practice.
I am going to borrow some of Dr. Twenge’s chart, but I encourage readers to also check out her piece. It is an important and quick read.
The relationship between internet technology and alleged changes in teen behavior and/or health is an area of vigorous debate among social scientists. This is usually most salient for mental health trends rather than reading behavior though. The position contra to that of Twenge and Jon Haidt can be found here and here. Unfortunately, this is a challenging question to study and answer definitively. We are left with the data we have and our intuitions.
In some of my other posts, I have commented on demographic, economic, political, and cultural changes that really kicked on in the 1960s. This includes things the “Big Sort,” where American’s have increasingly formed regional clusters based on cultural affinities.
See my review of The Canceling of the American Mind
There are many other books that get at similar cultural shifts in America around this time that seem to resonate with contemporary complaints. Another example includes Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism. These types of polemics and cultural investigations are often engaging and edifying reads
Allegations of anti-intellectualism in American culture are not new either. Historian Richard Hofstadter wrote a book in 1963 on the subject, outlining a tension between access and excellence in education. He saw America’s Protestant tradition as inimical to intellectual achievement and high culture. Perhaps he was right. However, there are pros and cons to American anti-intellectualism.
Postman was particularly inspired by novel’s invented pleasure drug called soma, which dulls the faculties of the citizens of the World State.
What's striking to me most is the decline of reading among the intellectual class. I had a conversation once with a well known "public intellectual" from an Ivy League university. He told me he doesn't read books because usually the author writes an article about it, and he just reads the article to get the gist. During the course of our conversation, I connected what he was saying to something I had read in Plato's Republic. He was stunned that I was reading Plato, like, for fun. I was stunned that he travels all around the world, speaking as an intellectual, and doesn't read books.