Sometime within the last month, I read a link concerning the fact that modern high school and college students were struggling with the concept of reading an entire book during the course of a semester (it was probably FOTB (Friend Of This Blog) Eaton Rapids Joe; he tends to find such things). The concept of reading an entire book, as I recall it, was genuinely stressful to the student in question: how, they wondered, could they be expected to read an entire book (instead of excerpts).
I would like to say I was shocked by the article. I was perhaps, surprised, but not shocked.
The decline of the ability to concentrate is neither new nor novel; likely it has been decried even long before I was born. But our societal lurch towards electronic media of all types, combined with a declining expectations, has accelerated the issues.
I suppose to be fair, I have always been a reader and so reading entire books has never been a problem. And I understand that there are people that struggle mightly in this area due to dyslexia. But I suspect that this is not the population that we are talking about. It is about people that genuinely feel they cannot - and should not - have to read an entire book.
After all, our information all comes in easy to digest bits and bytes: Short electronic communications. Animated videos that explain things in colours and pictures. Excerpts of a paragraph in length, followed immediately by an explanation.
Gone are the days of having to struggle through gaining information simply by reading or working out problems, where the text contained within it all the information needed to answer the question - but one needed to get out that information from the text, not just have it presented without the effort of finding it.
What does this lead to? Beyond just a population that cannot function without things been presented in a simple (or simplistic form), it leads to a population that cannot keep its attention focused long enough to accomplish much of anything. And anything worth accomplishing takes time and effort.
Add to that the idea that the excerpting of books and information reinforces the general sense of being in a hurry and rushing (two things I had never thought of, but certainly true), and it becomes even more critical that we encourage people to read books. Not just for themselves, but for the very nature of a functional society.
I cannot say it better than the original meme: Be countercultural. Read an entire book.
As a student, I had no time to read entire books. I was an avid reader as a kid and love to read now, but as a high school and college student, there were too many academic demands on my time as it was. I remember as a college student lamenting that I had no time to delve into really interesting topics.
ReplyDeleteI have a theory about the attention problem. I think in some part, we have inadvertently trained children to have short attention spans. I call it "Sesame Street Syndrome." My kids watched Sesame Street and I saw that good material was presented in short bursts, one after the other. The training for longer focus of attention has primarily been with video games, where the action is nonstop and hypnotic. By contrast, Fred Rogers said his program was designed for relaxed, thoughtful content. He felt children needed this.
The Sesame Street/video game generations are now grown and out in the world. I see the result in the movies they make, movies on the verge of chaotic - nonstop action, overly busy special effects, and no intelligent plot. It is indeed a detriment to a properly functional society.
Leigh - For college, we read almost exclusively (the perils of being in a social science). Perhaps to your point, we read only what we had to read - and that took enough time. And while we did have the occasional professor that assigned excerpts of books bound into a Kinko's volume (back in the day when it was legal), we still had to read a lot of things. And perhaps to your point secondly, I do not remember about 90% of those books.
DeleteYour observation about the "Sesame Street Syndrome" versus video games is an interesting one. There is a very much a sense that a generation has been trained up to either expect short intakes of "useful" information or wild-eyed non-stop excitement and action to entertain. If I think about hat, I compare it with movies from the 40's-60's where non-stop action was certainly not a thing (let alone as gruesomely realistic as they are now).
The results, as you point out, speak for themselves.
Huh. Reading a book is stressful, answering/talking on a cell is stressful, making eye contact in a face-to-face meeting is stressful, the younger generations have been a disservice by their parents in handling normal activities.
ReplyDeleteNylon12 - You would likely be surprised even in the workplace now what constitutes "stress". It is certainly not a promising future for American corporations.
DeleteI don't think that one of the social media apps, with it's low character count limit is any help here - it just reinforces the failures to get to grips with in-depth description/analysis etc.
ReplyDeleteWill, that is a great point. 140 characters makes one brief, and entering significant information on the Computer in a Pocket is often difficult at best, especially for the older generation (like me). Add to that the fact that so much of that communication is through pictures or memes, and we have damaged our ability to communicate beyond the most basic of topics.
DeleteI have done my part. My youngest said just a couple days ago that she was thankful she loves to read books because it provides much entertainment into her life.
ReplyDeleteEd, at least to of our three are pretty regular readers, and one is a decent one (she is just finishing her graduate degree; that is a lot of reading so maybe things will change when reading is for entertainment and not for classes).
DeleteI am so grateful it was a skill and hunger that my parents gifted and encouraged in me.
I had to read The Scarlet Letter in college. Big test... I hated that book with the heat of a giant star from high scruel days. I popped for Cliff's Notes on it. First line, "Don't just read this, read the book." I read the Cliff's Notes. Then, after all the notes, I was interested and checked the book out of the library and read it in a day. I was finally willing to invest my time and found it engrossing. I had no idea there were those ideas being posited.
ReplyDeleteSometimes, you need a boost.
STxAR - That is a fair point; certainly "dropping in" from 10,000 feet on a work which may have been written not in your lifetime can be challenging: different time, different beliefs, different ethos. And I am shocked that Cliff's notes would actually say that.
DeleteThat points to two problems, perhaps. The first - on the educator side - is to explain what the Cliff's notes books did: Why should you read the book? What makes it worth reading? The second is that it can breed the habit of looking to summaries first and then maybe reading the book - which turns into only reading summaries or (nowadays) looking to the InterWeb and AI to tell you all about the book.
We were supposed to pick up the parallels, the moral points, all the allegories. I didn't have that in high school. But after getting all the english lit points explained in black letters, I understood what the author was trying to do. And that made it interesting. I cut my teeth on WW2 history, auto- and biographies and so light sci-fi (Omni mag and John Carter). A morality play disguised as a book was too much for my adolescent headspace.
DeleteSTxAR - Understood. And I suspect that many of the books I got a lot of I would not have done so if I did not have teachers that could help with such things. Teaching makes such a difference in the matters.
DeleteJohn Carter. Another thing we share (Arguably his best science fiction series, although it fell off in the end. Carson of Venus was also enjoyable for the first four books (but again, fell off). I never got into Pellucidar at all; he tried to do too much and then had to walk it back.
The Scarlet Letter is my favorite book, has been for 55 years, because my experience in high school was similar to STxAR's – surprised that I could be so engrossed by a book that was (then) 120 years old. I couldn't put it down, either, and still have trouble setting it aside on subsequent re-readings. Modern technology has done us a disservice in all the ways you mentioned.
ReplyDeleteWarren Bluhm - I do not believe I have ever completely read The Scarlet Letter; based on yours and STxAR's recommendation, I may look it up.
DeleteThe idea of an "Old Book" has cheated many a person of literary greatness. Dostoevsky is good in everything I read of his, and Moby Dick was a surprisingly enjoyable book to me as well.
One wonders would happen if the publishing industry took an extended holiday and we were forced to make do with what we have. What treasures might we discover?
A long ago work colleague (from long before the internet explosion) once said of reading - that the pictures were so much better than film or TV. He (and I) belonged to a generation brought up on reading and letting our imagination provide the colour and pictures.
ReplyDeleteWill - I am almost always disappointed by book to movie conversions. They are usually so much less than the works themselves - yes, partially because you cannot fit everything into a novel into a 2-3 hour movie, but because directors cannot leave well enough alone. There was a French remake of The Count of Monte Cristo last year that was almost passable, until the made the message more "modern" and ignored the last third of the book. Even The Lord of The Rings, one of the best in my book, still suffered from editing the farther it went in. The Fellowship of The Ring was pretty spot on for the book, The Return of The King shared a name and some of the plot points, but not much else.
DeleteUseless factoid for today - my sister-in-law was for a time a student of JRR Tolkien at Oxford.
DeleteWill, part of me says that would be awesome. The other part of me fears I would find out all their flaws.
DeleteI agree with all the comments, but....as my favorite used bookstore proprietor once said: "A great problem with books is that 90% of them should have never published, because they just weren't good enough".
ReplyDeleteIt's because of that particular insight that I don't feel guilty about quitting on a book that I don't enjoy. Live is too short.
Anon - I read a similar sentiment in A.G. Sertillanges' book The Intellectual Life last night. In that case, his sentiment was "read small" - in other words focus your reading on works worthy of being read. And while I cannot speak for every genre, certainly science fiction and fantasy seems to have largely fallen off in the mid-1980's/early 1990's and never returned.
DeleteOf the thousands of books I have read, I can only think of one particular book I was unable to finish, although I tried mightily. It was a post-apocalyptic work, which should have been a shoe in for me. Instead, about 100 pages in a time traveling wizard showed up and I gave up. It was so unreadable that for some reason the cover - a mutant gila monster - is burned into my brain.
You nailed it, TB. There will always be a remnant of folks who love to read, and I will always be a part and I am pleased to say my wife and children, and two of three of my in-law children, are also readers. I am encouraged that there seem to be more books clubs than in the past, and I think much of that is our desire for community. So that's a double win. But I am concerned about my grandchildren and everything that competes for their time, especially electronics.
ReplyDeleteBob, like you I will always read until I cannot (my mother read up to her last three years or so, when Alzheimer's took over. Perhaps it was just the same page, but she read every day).
DeleteI am pleased about book clubs (The Ravishing Mrs. TB belongs to one) as it does fill that desire for community, something which you rightly note. To be fair, even the men's Bible study I am a part of could be considered a book club of sorts.
The future remains much more hazy. My biggest fear is that everything becomes so electronic that, in the event of a major disaster, works which have survived up to 3,000 years are lost because they only exist on line.