Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

In the current issue of The New Yorker, Caleb Crain has an essay entitled “Twilight of the Books,” which — if that weren’t already moody enough — carries the apocalyptic subtitle, “What will life be like if people stop reading?” All of this is placed in the context of a (long) review of Maryanne Wolf’s new book, Proust and the Squid, which is a non-fiction account of the biological process of reading, going all the way back to its origins in ancient history. But Crain uses his to review to point out that perhaps reading itself is ancient history. For instance, he points to the overall downward trend in terms of Americans and reading:

In 1937, twenty-nine per cent of American adults told the pollster George Gallup that they were reading a book. In 1955, only seventeen per cent said they were. Pollsters began asking the question with more latitude. In 1978, a survey found that fifty-five per cent of respondents had read a book in the previous six months. The question was even looser in 1998 and 2002, when the General Social Survey found that roughly seventy per cent of Americans had read a novel, a short story, a poem, or a play in the preceding twelve months. And, this August, seventy-three per cent of respondents to another poll said that they had read a book of some kind, not excluding those read for work or school, in the past year.

As you can see from the above, our standards are slipping just as fast as the numbers. Whereas, seventy years ago, people were asked if they were currently reading a book, they’re now asked whether or not they’ve read a book in the past year. What had been, in the not-so-distant past, a daily event seems today like an annual chore (kind of like filing your taxes or getting your teeth cleaned). Crain ties all of this to the shrinking circulation numbers from newspapers and the stagnation of book sales, showing that average Americans are increasingly choosing to spend their time away from the world of words. And, for Crain, the stakes are incredibly high and could have huge, unforeseen consequences: “If the eclipse of reading continues, the alteration is likely to matter in ways that aren’t foreseeable.”

Crain is here stretching for the “butterfly effect,” which is the notion that insignificant events can, through global amplification, have a huge influence (such as, a butterfly flaps its wings in India and causes a hurricane in Indiana). And, of course, Crain is right to some degree. These declining rates of book-reading mentioned above have a rising correlation somewhere else (such as in terms of movies or TV, not to mention new pursuits like the Wii and Guitar Hero 3). But Crain’s also preaching the usual doom and gloom, and I think he gives books way too much credit by implying that, if reading disappears, we’ll all be turned into either Philistines or CHUDs.

This kind of worry seems to me — instead of the “butterfly effect” — to be the “butterfly affectation.” Because it’s silly to think that, just because the butterfly that’s been buzzing around Eustace Tilley’s nose for the better part of a century will cease flapping its wings, that it will cause some kind of rip in the space-time-literacy continuum. In fact, as Wolf’s book seems to amply show, the act and art of reading has evolved over centuries, and it will continue to evolve. Just because tomorrow it may not look like what it looks like today, doesn’t mean that it’s not still reading (not to mention that one scenario is better than the other). But if Crain — along with Devo — happens to be right, and instead of evolving we’re all devolving, and reading is a skill we’re going to lose rather than adapt as something else, then I guess we’ll crawl back into that slime when we come to it. But in the meantime, with the invention of the Internet and all of the millions upon millions of pages of content that exists out there, people are indeed spending more time than ever reading, and I can’t ever see that totally disappearing.