by Marianne Janack
When I ask people if they actually read all the things that they were assigned to read during their college education, they all tell me that they didn’t. And, in fact, I didn’t either.
I got behind in a Nineteenth Century Russian Literature course (so many giant books!) and resorted to the 1980’s version of AI to prepare for the final exam: Cliffs Notes. When I was taking a Shakespeare class, I decided to listen to several plays rather than read them. I had to go to the music library at my university, where I listened to old-fashioned records. The plays were supposed to be listened to at a speed of 32rpm; I listened to them at 72rpm. Hamlet sounded like one of the Chipmunks, as did Horatio, Romeo, Juliet, Henry IV, Richard III, and Falstaff.
In his book The Call of Stories, Robert Coles confesses his own reading shortcuts. Rather than read a book he was assigned in his high school English class, he relied on a plot summary that he’d found. His mother was horrified. The book wasn’t written, she said, to be someone’s quick study. It was meant to teach its readers something about being human.
And, of course, there are many such books. Many of us are assigned them in college or high school. And many of us use some kind of “quick study” shortcut to give the appearance of having read those books. We read the summaries, but not the actual book: more efficient, and it gets the job done. Or so we tell ourselves.
I kept a diary of what I read over a 24-hour period: I read labels at the grocery store, directions on an aspirin bottle, street signs, emails, an article about how liberal democracy is doomed because written content is being eclipsed by video content, a recipe for something I was considering making for dinner, and several chapters of a book I was reading with several colleagues: Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.
I read a lot, and watched no video, but I’m not sure that my reading did much to support my participation in liberal democracy.
The claim that a culture of literacy (as opposed to an oral culture) is essential to the development of the kinds of people who can participate in democracy is often traced back to Walter Ong. Worries about the death of democracy are not new, but the threat now seems to be short video content. There is the widespread worry that people’s attention spans are becoming short as a result of a diet of shortform video entertainment; but there is also the worry that we are moving out of the literate stage of history and into a post-literate age (or back toward an age of orality). What these mean for liberal democracy and the habits of mind (or, in Ong’s terms, “consciousness”) that are required for that form of social and governmental arrangement is the brave new world we face.
But the statistics about reading are murky. Different surveys have reached different conclusions about how much Americans read now and read in the past. Are we actually reading less? If we count how much time we spend reading and responding to text messages and email messages, or reading reviews of products on Amazon, or directions on the things we buy from them, it becomes less clear that people are reading less.
But, we might say, much of that reading is instrumental, or, in the case of me reading Regime Change, gossipy tittle-tattle that doesn’t necessarily seem to be virtuous. But then is reading itself something to be encouraged?
And then there’s audiobooks.
“That’s not reading!” one of my friends said when I told her that I’d been listening to a
Booker Prize-winning novel by Ian McEwen. And, of course, she’s right: it’s not a process of passing one’s eyeballs over a written text. But oddly enough, reading text messages is such a process. So if I think that I ought to read more, I could serve that goal by reading more text messages and emails, or the backs of cereal boxes.
Which all raises the question: is reading itself valuable? Or is it what we read that’s valuable? Is reading a recipe as good as reading Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit? Is reading that Hegel tome as good as reading a police procedural or a gossipy account of personal vendettas and political hopes? Is listening to classic novels or books as good as reading them? And is that pastime equivalent to listening to an entertaining comedy?
It seems that the conclusion we ought to draw from this is either that there’s nothing particularly important about reading, or (perhaps more troubling) that we should be thinking about what and why certain kinds of content are worth spending our time on, and certain kinds of content are not—that some content is better than other kinds, and that the medium is irrelevant.
In The Call of Stories, Robert Coles reports a conversation he had with his brother about their parents’ “strange habit” of reading novels to each other and discussing them each evening. They were, Coles’s brother insisted, prejudiced against the radio, which was the medium that Coles and his brother preferred for entertainment. Coles and his brother loved to listen to “The Shadow”, “Fibber McGee and Molly”, “Amos and Andy” and “Easy Aces” on the radio. But they were forced to do this in the cramped family kitchen, sitting in uncomfortable chairs, and to use a smaller radio; their parents commandeered the comfortable living room (where the large Philco radio set lived) to read novels by Tolstoy, Chekov, Dickens, and Eliot. Eventually, however, Coles came to think that the novels taught people important things about being human, and started including them in his courses for medical students.
And, of course, we learn things from reading instructions, or novels about Donald Trump’s presidency, or gossip columns. And from Cliffs Notes or plot summaries we learn what a book is about. Perhaps it’s not reading itself that is essential to liberal democracy, but the kind of reading that takes seriously ideas and arguments, or presents us with ways of thinking about ourselves and others that might make us better friends, neighbors, and actors in our own lives. Maybe liberal democracy is overrated—Plato would probably say that it is. But maybe its flourishing depends less on the media we use and more on what that media delivers to us.