Once apon the time people payed people to deliver big chunks of ice to their home to keep their food cold. Then came the freezer and refrigeration, and there was a system shift, and the people selling ice were in trouble. But the need of keeping food cold was still a need people had, and since it was a need it was a market and job market for other people making freezers and fridges. Today no one griefs the companies that delivered ice. We did an effectivisation in how the serice was delivered, but people are still willing to pay a lot to keep their food cold. We had a bunch of technical revolution when it comes to storytelling and writing. From the written language showing up, to theater showing up, to the mass printing showing up, to books becoming extremely cheep to produce, to movies, to computer games, to the internet. The need for good stories is still there. And people will still be willing to pay for it in some form. Sooner or later the demand will come up with a way to keep the ones supplying them in business. But it won't be sticking to selling ice, metaphorically. The old system is outdated. -- ((And speaking about musicians. Even before downloading started 98% of all full time working musicians got most of their income from touring and gigs. It was just the top of the top that eared a lot from recordings. And seen from that perceptive, have people downloading your music is an excellent way to spread your music, get gigs and earn money.))
What evidence do you have for this? I just did a quick search, and as I suspected, literacy rates are going up.
Don't you know the world has been going downhill since the stone age? The youth is always becoming ruder, the politicians more corrupt, people less educated and sophisticated, morals looser, and so on. Reading an ancient Greek text on the state of the world is eerily similar to reading people's opinions about today's world.
I read a newspaper report online that stated that literacy rates in the US have fallen 25%. I also know from direct experience. I have an 18 year old son in 2nd year uni. Very few of his friends are book readers, but they all love video and mp3s. Speak to any older teacher and they will tell you that generation y seem to have shorter attention spans and communicate in sound bites because of the influence of multimedia.
people do read less than they used to, but isn't "literacy" technically just the ability to read and write (and to comprehend what they read) and has nothing to do with how much or how often they read? after just one or two generations, i don't believe there can really be a significant increase or decrease in a nation's overall ability to read and write. of course, i'm also curious about how literacy rates are measured to begin with. how big is the sample size? what is it compared to? does the newer sample size represent the entire population of the country? does it reflect the change in population over the years? does it include people whose native language isn't english? and so on and so forth.
I don't know what the rate of literacy is in America, but even if it were increasing, that doesn't necessarily equate to an increase in the number of Americans actually reading literature on a regular basis. The book-buying public is definitely on the decline, as identified by a recent National Endowment of the Arts study. Also, teens & young adults are not only reading less compared to the past but are also reading less compared to the other age groups. When you consider the amount of time spent on the many digital distractions available, the findings for the general populace, particularly the teen/YA age group, make sense.
I'm seeing from multiple sources that the US literacy rate is at 99%. That doesn't leave room for it to have fallen by 25%. Perhaps the number is reversed, and what you read is that the number of illiterate people has increased by 25%? As an example, if the literacy rate were previously 99.8%, and it went down to 99.7%, then the number of illiterate people would have increased by 50%. (from two tenths of one percent to three tenths of one percent.) ChickenFreak
Wikipedia got an article specifically on literacy in the US and different method that have been used to examine it and define it.
Literacy is the ability to read and write, so I think you just used the wrong word to describe what you want to say. But I agree with you about how people are reading less than they did 30 or 40 years ago. I'm just not sure if anything drastic can be done to change this sad fact.
From print to screen, reading has just switched to another form. I believe e book sales have been steadily increasing, so there just seems less of a need for printed books.
The fact that they don't read books doesn't mean that they don't read at all. The vast majority of content on the internet is text, engaging with (reading and writing) text is something that the majority of internet users now do on a regular basis. Furthermore, saying that a shorter attention span is a bad thing is totally arbitrary. A long attention span isn't necessary anymore, and we shouldn't be trying to encourage kids to have one. They need to be able to deal with huge volumes of information, images and text, sort through it quickly and comprehend as much as possible. A short, focussed attention span is crucial for that. Our generation is much more aware of the importance and power of images and interaction; text-based communication no longer holds the privileged position it has done for most of history.
While I agree that shorter attention spans are not necessarily a bad thing, doesn't the ability to read literature or interest in reading it require longer attention spans? Also, if anyone's interested, here's a link to a New York Times article that references the study I mentioned above.
The study speculates as to why kids aren't reading. I find myself wondering if it's partly because of the (in my opinion, counterproductive) increase in homework in the United States. Kids coming home from a six-and-a-half-hour school day then have to sit down and spend time doing worksheets and spelling drills. None of this involves much reading for school, and when it's all over I doubt that the kids have much time or motivation left for reading for pleasure. ChickenFreak
Not necessarily. I have the attention span of a goldfish, but I have a degree in English Lit. I read in small chunks, rarely more than 15 minutes at once, so it can take a week or two to finish a book of even relatively short length, but I find my comprehension during those short bursts to be quite high. Besides which, I don't really see the fact that kids aren't reading novels as much anymore as a bad thing. The novel is a relatively recent medium really, only a few hundred years old, and while it's been in vogue for most of the time since in the Western world, there are plenty of other forms that could replace it, and that are arguably much better suited to the constraints of modern life. For some people, sitting down with a novel is a luxury, and rightly so, but I don't think we should be quick to correlate literacy, attention spans and reading habits. I suspect the relationship is (statistically) far more complex than it would seem.
I agree - I home ed my kids and it is very rare to meet a child that has been home ed from the start (ie never been to school) who doesn't read novel length books or at least lots of non fiction books on a regular basis. My kids education is based off reading not writing. They have never been 'taught' to read either, I do show them how to spell out words when they ask. It is interesting that in the UK everyone used to 'read' for a degree - now with the exception of the likes of Oxford and Cambridge, and a few others we now 'study' for a degree. Degrees are much more these days about being 'taught' rather than 'learning'. There is a huge difference between being taught how to do something and learning how to do something. I got to see the change in degrees when I first started at university I was in an old style term based degree course, where the emphasis was on independent learning - it was arranged into three terms at the end of every ten weeks there was a month long break. In my second year we changed to semesters which went over the holidays and they were shortened - the change ment work was given over the holiday time. It left a lot less time for reading and I had to rely more on being taught and using accepted sources instead of exploring. Actually i do think it's a bad thing - independent thought and ability seems to be reducing. My first year of uni we had a choice of assignments I picked the one entitled What Do We Know About Roman Women? (I like the ambiguous questions easier to answer lol). The lecturer comes into the course at the end of it and asked why despite people expressing an interest in Roman Women only one person had done the easiest question on the list. The universal response was they couldn't find any information or books in the library. She then held up my bibliography which was in the days before I realised three books were sufficient for a 2K essay lol - it contained around fifteen books. Thing is they weren't in the history section - I got books from sociology, geology, biology, psychology - most were anthropology. Evidence that a large number of people intelligent enough to get to university could not use a library. My best friend runs courses for students now on how to use libraries.
