How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine

Abstract

The evidence is mounting: people in general, and young people in particular, are doing more screen reading of digital materials than ever before. Meanwhile, the reading of print books and of literary genres (novels, plays, and poems) has been declining over the last twenty years. Worse, reading skills (as measured by the ability to identify themes, draw inferences, etc.) have been declining in junior high, high school, college, and even graduate schools for the same period. Two flagship reports from the National Endowment for the Arts, Reading at Risk, reporting the results of their own surveys, and To Read or Not to Read, drawing together other large-scale surveys, show that over a wide range of data-gathering instruments the results are consistent: people read less print, and they read print less well. This leads the NEA chairman, Dana Gioia, to suggest that the correlation between decreased literary reading and poorer reading ability is indeed a causal connection. The NEA argues (and I of course agree) that literary reading is a good in itself, insofar as it opens the portals of a rich literary heritage (see Griswold, McDonnell, and Wright for the continued high cultural value placed on reading). When decreased print reading, already a cultural concern, is linked with reading problems, it carries a double whammy.