We aren’t just reading less; we are getting less out of what we read
As we stumble through the 2020s, there is a growing worry among literary folk that Westerners in general and Americans in particular are reading less and less.
While it seems ironic, and perhaps self-defeating, to address this phenomenon in print, as opposed to, say, on a podcast, or even more succinctly, with a string of emojis, I will do my best.
The question is then, are we reading less? The answer is, I’m afraid, “yes” and “no,” and in both cases, the explanations of “why?” and “what does it mean?” are the bearers of bad news.
But first, some numbers.
In one of the most comprehensive studies available, done over the course of twenty years (2003 to 2023), a research team from Great Britain and the United States tracked the reading habits of some 230,000 individuals, ages 15 to 66 plus. What they found is that, yes, without question, over the past twenty years, Americans are reading less—lots less, especially when that reading did not involve work, that is, when they read for “pleasure.”
How much less? Well, across the entire dataset (meaning among all people in the survey), the average daily time spent reading dropped from 25 minutes in 2003 to about 15 minutes in 2023.
While this number, on its own, is not good, the drop in the total number of individuals who reported that they read for pleasure is even more disconcerting: From 2003 to 2023, the number of those surveyed who said that they “actively” read for pleasure dropped from 28% of the total to 17%.
Surveying the data charts of this study, there seems to be a statistical bright spot in an otherwise gloomy picture: The amount of time that participants reported reading to children has held steady over the past twenty years.
I write “seems… bright” because when we dig into the data, even just a little, we find the amount of time that we read to children has been, on average, for the past twenty years, practically nonexistent: Averaged across all participants, reading to children amounts to about one minute daily. Only 2% of all participants in the study said they regularly read to a child, and among that small group, the time held steady around 28 minutes per day.
So, not only are we reading less, and the number of us who read at all is shrinking, we are doing little, at least by way of example, to encourage our children to read.
But there is a catch: Although we are reading less for pleasure, we are reading (maybe better, “staring at”) “stuff” on screens at an increasing rate.
Data compiled by the American Optometric Association indicates that over the past ten years, the number of Americans in the workforce who spend an average of 5.5 hours daily working with a screen has climbed by 20%. Most of these screen-bound workers spend their days with spreadsheets, org charts, and page after page of facts and figures.
In other words (so to speak), we are “reading” things, just not as many words, and not anything that we want to read, that is, for pleasure.
This type of text, which is focused on quantitative information (think: how much of “this, that, and the other”), is called prototext, or more commonly, protowriting. Like the clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia dating back to 3300 B.C., which focused entirely on information about grain harvests, slaves bought or sold, taxes, and so on, the type of information that we are reading is more about amounts and less about ideas. Spending lots of time with prototext tends to focus our thoughts more on quantification and less on contemplation.
What does this mean, and is it necessarily a bad thing?
Well, many analysts who bother with this sort of thing predict that our drop in reading indicates rough times ahead which, by definition, are not good.
First, we should note that historically speaking, relative to our European counterparts, we Americans have always been more fixated on the quantification of processes, a “how much of ‘this’ do I need to do to get ‘that’” approach to life. While quantification has helped us grow into an industrial superpower, it is not without its problems.
As I argue in my book, Landscapes of Grace, hyper-quantification engenders an over-mechanized view of life, leading us to believe that processes, even those that are organic, are only working correctly when they are working mechanically, like, say, a vending machine or a lawn mower: You put an exact amount of X in (like coins or gasoline), and then you have a “right” to expect an exact amount of Y out, say, candy bars or square feet of cut grass. Life is not driven by our calculations (it’s the other way around), and, as the saying goes, often seems unfair, and just as often there is no “why” for it.
A view of the world as a machine disrupts our ability to connect with it and, since we tend to avoid what we don’t understand, drives us indoors, increasingly, into a screen. What’s more, a quantitative perspective on physical existence spills over into our views of things metaphysical, leading many to judge activities like prayer as a vending-machine-type transaction: Something that you put specific things into (certain words), expecting specific things in return. Demanding transaction, we forget that prayer, at its most fundamental level, is meant to change us, not change God.
Beyond the views of ourselves and the worldview that prototext tends to engender, there is a growing number of thinkers who are concerned that our decline in reading is but the slouching calm before a very disruptive political storm.
In his soon-to-be published work, The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society, James Marriott, Oxford scholar and London Times columnist, muses over the possibilities.
In a scant two hundred pages, drawn heavily from articles on his Substack, Marriott speculates that the drop in reading signals a drop in deep thinking and a resulting decline in complex thought.
I agree with him. Reading, and its physically acted-out companion, writing, are not natural behaviors for us humans. Both require the memorization of abstract symbols (think individual letters and punctuation marks), and then the reordering of those symbols into other symbols (think words and sentences) that then stand in for ideas and concepts. Given the cognitive difficulty of this exercise, it is a wonder that we ever bothered to learn to read and write at all.
As Marriott further points out, our ability to become literate, and then pass this skill along to subsequent generations, was absolutely required for the advanced reasoning employed in theology, philosophy, science, and history, which, in turn, were the cornerstones of our present-day Western society.
Pull these foundational stones away, and, notes Marriott, what tends to happen is a tumble backwards into public discourse that is more emotive, non-rational, and tribal; that is, all the habits that we find in non-literate societies where raw charisma in public figures (be they on a screen or in the center of a village) beats out logical, rational thinkers.
This increased attraction to emotion-driven discourse, be it spoken or in print, often precedes the decline of stable, functioning democracies, and tends towards an “us vs. them” outlook on the world. Such polarization frequently overrides hard-won socio-political inhibitions, and leads otherwise thinking peoples into conflict.
This was the case in post-World War I Europe. It was assumed that the horrors of that war, the “war to end all wars,” were so bad that Westerners would never willingly go to war again. However, under extreme economic pressure, millions of Europeans lost patience with the democratic processes of their societies and willingly threw themselves into the “vibe,” as we would put it, of demagogues like Germany’s Hitler, Italy’s Mussolini, and Spain’s Franco. Once in power, these madmen intentionally burnt the whole world down.
Is the current drop in American literacy the harbinger of an impending democratic collapse? This is a difficult question to answer, first and foremost because nothing is inevitable until it happens. But the gathering storm of data does not look good. Our Founders knew well that a vigorous democracy depended on an informed citizenry. That was the whole point of the First Amendment.
While no one can foretell the future, I believe it is true that when we stop reading, stop thinking deeply, and spend most of our time staring, we become vulnerable to “charismatic charlatans,” as Marriott puts it, who themselves are not deep thinkers. The danger of charismatic leaders is not that they are attractive to us, but rather that they tend not to be thinking, or at least thinking deeply, about what might happen to them, and us, by way of their actions.