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Dec. 16th, 2011 05:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ann_leckieTaking a weaving-in-ends break--I hate weaving in ends--and pondering a link I saw earlier in the week.
The title of the post is "Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on why people no longer read."
Read that last sentence again. "Reading is at an all-time low."
Really? Lower than before writing was invented? Ok, that's cheating. Lower than shortly after writing had been invented and only priests and scribes could do it and books were stacks of clay tablets that had to be laboriously copied out by hand? Really?
Reading is at an all-time low now, lower even than in the 4th century CE, when once again books had to be copied by hand, and it was mostly the wealthy who learned to do it? And even then they might be astonished at someone who could do it without moving their lips? Really?
The author goes on to suggest that the reason reading is at this "all-time low" is because getting books is too easy.
You know, now I think about it, that totally explains why, once the printing press made access to books easier and cheaper, people read so much less. I think it would be a cool alternate history idea, don't you? One where the printing press and increasing literacy led to the development of popular fiction. Maybe even, say, not-terribly-successful doctors might write for these publications on the side and discover it was more lucrative than their dayjob!
But no. That's unpossible. Because making reading easier must, of course, make people not value it and lead to the ultimate decline of reading.
The author of the post does suggest that maybe there's some nostalgia involved here, that maybe everything looks better in the past because it's the past, but then says, "All I can say is, it seems as if Conan Doyle’s opinions about the ease of reading leading to its decline are just about dead on. You really only appreciate things you’ve had to work and sacrifice for, not things that are handed to you on a silver platter."
Right. Best thing for reading, make books difficult to get. That'll get more people reading, you betcha. And then my favorite bit:
You know why this is my favorite? Because first off, he's conflated "reading" with "reading stuff I consider classics." He actually did that a few paragraphs earlier, but he's never actually acknowledged the two things aren't the same.
But second off--my favorite favorite--is that "apart from the genre classics" bit. I mean, besides Doyle, Verne, Swift, and so on who reads old stuff? Surely Barnes and Noble doesn't print up cratefuls of cheap editions of Austen and Melville and Wells and so on because anyone buys them, no, and even if anyone did, that would be an exception, like the Gutenberg download numbers for those same classics, which are, surprise, significantly higher than the numbers for obscure works.
Besides the aqueducts and the roads and it being safe to walk the streets at night and, you know, so on, what have the Romans ever done for us? Absolutely nothing, that's what.
I could add a few paragraphs about how angry and irritated I get at "people don't read because it's too easy to get books" makes me. I bet people don't eat when it's too easy to get food, either. Bet people would breathe more if air weren't so easy to get, huh? All those folks you know who don't have jobs? It's because they're too easy to get! I mean, seriously! People don't read because it's too easy--can you actually say that with a straight face?
But I have to weave in some more ends, so I won't add those paragraphs.
The title of the post is "Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on why people no longer read."
Look at that last paragraph. “Reading is made too easy nowadays…” What would Conan Doyle think if he were alive today? In his time, people at least had to bestir their lazy rumps from their sofas and trot down to the library if they wanted to read. Now we have Project Gutenberg and Google Books and dozens of other free e-book sites, legal or not. Yet it seems that reading is at an all-time low.
Read that last sentence again. "Reading is at an all-time low."
Really? Lower than before writing was invented? Ok, that's cheating. Lower than shortly after writing had been invented and only priests and scribes could do it and books were stacks of clay tablets that had to be laboriously copied out by hand? Really?
Reading is at an all-time low now, lower even than in the 4th century CE, when once again books had to be copied by hand, and it was mostly the wealthy who learned to do it? And even then they might be astonished at someone who could do it without moving their lips? Really?
The author goes on to suggest that the reason reading is at this "all-time low" is because getting books is too easy.
You know, now I think about it, that totally explains why, once the printing press made access to books easier and cheaper, people read so much less. I think it would be a cool alternate history idea, don't you? One where the printing press and increasing literacy led to the development of popular fiction. Maybe even, say, not-terribly-successful doctors might write for these publications on the side and discover it was more lucrative than their dayjob!
But no. That's unpossible. Because making reading easier must, of course, make people not value it and lead to the ultimate decline of reading.
The author of the post does suggest that maybe there's some nostalgia involved here, that maybe everything looks better in the past because it's the past, but then says, "All I can say is, it seems as if Conan Doyle’s opinions about the ease of reading leading to its decline are just about dead on. You really only appreciate things you’ve had to work and sacrifice for, not things that are handed to you on a silver platter."
Right. Best thing for reading, make books difficult to get. That'll get more people reading, you betcha. And then my favorite bit:
Looking at the download numbers for some of these books tells a pretty sad story. The Project Gutenberg edition of Through the Magic Door has only had 126 downloads. Parnassus on Wheels has 61. The Haunted Bookshop has 126. (And how many of those were web bots on search crawls?)
Apart from the genre classics like Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, Jonathan Swift, and so on, how many of us are in the habit of sitting down for an hour of entertainment in books that are over a hundred years old?
You know why this is my favorite? Because first off, he's conflated "reading" with "reading stuff I consider classics." He actually did that a few paragraphs earlier, but he's never actually acknowledged the two things aren't the same.
But second off--my favorite favorite--is that "apart from the genre classics" bit. I mean, besides Doyle, Verne, Swift, and so on who reads old stuff? Surely Barnes and Noble doesn't print up cratefuls of cheap editions of Austen and Melville and Wells and so on because anyone buys them, no, and even if anyone did, that would be an exception, like the Gutenberg download numbers for those same classics, which are, surprise, significantly higher than the numbers for obscure works.
Besides the aqueducts and the roads and it being safe to walk the streets at night and, you know, so on, what have the Romans ever done for us? Absolutely nothing, that's what.
I could add a few paragraphs about how angry and irritated I get at "people don't read because it's too easy to get books" makes me. I bet people don't eat when it's too easy to get food, either. Bet people would breathe more if air weren't so easy to get, huh? All those folks you know who don't have jobs? It's because they're too easy to get! I mean, seriously! People don't read because it's too easy--can you actually say that with a straight face?
But I have to weave in some more ends, so I won't add those paragraphs.
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Date: 2011-12-17 08:21 am (UTC)That notion that reading is at an all-time low (which, as you point out, is probably not true; maybe it's down from some point in the past, though even that's debatable, but it's not at an all-time low) because books are so easy to obtain is, it seems to me, a faulty application of a principle that works in one category to another category--where it doesn't work. And it's applied there wrongly because the person doesn't understand or notice the key differences between the categories.
There are some things that one **does** value less when one has more of them, but those things are luxury goods and frivolities, part of whose value comes, precisely, from their difficulty to obtain or from the fact that they are treats. Really good alcohol, diamonds, and candy fall into this category. If you make these things very easy to obtain, their value goes down.
Obviously this category doesn't include things like food or air: you can't live without food or air. But it also doesn't include books. Not everything that's not a necessity is a frivolity or a luxury (unless you're a Yorkshireman). There are things in between, and those things we are delighted to have become more plentiful and more affordable--appealing clothes, for instance, or household appliances, or automobiles. Some of these things can shade in either directions. *Some* degree of clothing is a necessity; some other degree of clothing can be a luxury or frivolity, but there's a huge middle ground that's not either thing.
So yeah, I think it's a spurious argument to say that people don't read because books are so easily available.
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Date: 2011-12-17 02:16 pm (UTC)Yes, exactly. I can think of individual, physical books that might fit this category, but not "books" as a whole.
And the thing that makes me so spitting mad about "people don't read because it's too easy" is its corollary--it would be better for reading and writers if access to books was restricted in some way. Harder. Except, I do actually think of reading as a necessity. Maybe not reading for fun, but reading well. Culturally, not reading at all really limits one's options, and you're going to tell me a kid is going to read more if they don't have easy access to books? Really? Maybe a middle-class kid in a comfortable neighborhood will read as much anyway. Mithras knows I walked and took the bus to libraries and bookstores (and paid for things with my scraped-together allowance) but I was lucky, really--there were buses, there were bookstores, there were libraries, and I wasn't dealing with a badly-funded school district, or parents under tremendous stress from working three jobs each just to put food in my stomach, or smaller siblings I was responsible for because it was life or death for my parents to get to work because one missed paycheck would mean hungry kids and nothing to pay the rent. Are you going to tell me those kids are going to read more because they have to work so freaking hard to even find a library nearby? Or, my sneaking suspicion, are you (a fictional construct who I am ranting at, not you you) going to tell me they just didn't value reading enough?
That's the bit that makes me really mad.
But yeah, I agree. He took one principle that works in one context and generalized it to where it doesn't work, because he didn't actually understand how it worked to begin with. And five minutes reflection on actual history would have done the trick, really.
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Date: 2011-12-18 04:57 pm (UTC)He (and ACD, in his earlier age) are both guilty of what I've come to call Academic Dunning-Kruger syndrome: because they are so profoundly ignorant of the reading, thinking, and learning habits of people outside what they believe is the "right" environment of learning, they think that none of it is actually happening.
(Please note: there are plenty of academics who aren't blinded by their ivory walls. I'm talking about the ones who are.)
It's very easy to sit in one's echo chamber with a bunch of like-minded people and be convinced that you are the lords of all things Superior. It's a human trait we see in everything from the people who declare what literature is acceptable to the high schooler who declares what the cool kids are supposed to wear, to all religions of the form "You only get to heaven if you do X."
Its vanity, pure and simple. "Everybody wants to be us" says Meryl Streep's character at the end of The Devil Wears Prada. Well, no, dearie, everybody you know wants to be you, but in a world of 7 billion people, that's not a very large proportion.
Some days I think the best thing about the internet is that it confirms that, in fact, lots of people have different preferences, and that people whose preferences don't align with one's own are not necessarily--in fact, almost certainly not--uneducated schlubs.