From The New Yorker:
A little more than a decade ago, I wrote an article for The New Yorker about American reading habits, which a number of studies then indicated might be in decline. I was worried about what a shift to “secondary orality”—a sociological term for a post-literate culture—might do to America’s politics. “In a culture of secondary orality, we may be less likely to spend time with ideas we disagree with,” I wrote. I suspected that people might become less inclined to do fact checking on their own; “forced to choose between conflicting stories,” they would “fall back on hunches.”
I’ll go out on a limb and say that I don’t think that I got this part wrong. But I’ve often wondered whether I was right about the underlying trend, too. Were Americans in fact reading less back then? And are they reading even less today? Whenever I happen across a news article on the topic, I wonder if I’m about to find out whether I was Cassandra or Chicken Little.
In assessing reports about reading habits, I keep in mind a couple of lessons from the research that I did a decade ago. First, although American adults seem to get a kick out of worrying about whether American children are reading enough, this is an enormous waste of time in the world in which we happen to live. Children who have any hope of getting into or remaining in the middle class are under great social and economic pressure to excel at academics, and, of all Americans, they are perhaps the least likely to change their reading habits of their own volition. Even the amount of pleasure reading they do seems likely to reflect the social pressure they’re under—not where America in general is headed.
Second, in studies of reading habits, the gold standard is asking participants to report hour by hour how they spent a particular day. It’s pretty much useless to ask how many books somebody read last year, because almost nobody remembers, and many exaggerate, to seem smarter. At the time I wrote my article, the best American data came from a time-use study begun by the U.S. Department of Labor in 2003, statistics that were then still only a few years old, and inconclusive.
. . . .
[B]etween 2003 and 2016, the amount of time that the average American devoted to reading for personal interest on a daily basis dropped from 0.36 hours to 0.29 hours. It would seem that reading in America has declined even further in the past decade.
. . . .
Women read more than men, it turns out, but time spent reading has declined steadily for both genders. If you break down the data according to employment status, meanwhile, you see that the unemployed do read more, but they, part-timers, and full-timers all read steadily less as the decade went forward. The same applies when you break down the data by race and ethnicity or by age; you see differences in the amount of reading, but a decline is taking place in almost every subgroup.
. . . .
[T]he number of average hours spent reading is perhaps less telling than two other statistics: the percentage of the population that did some reading, and the average time that these readers spent on their reading.
Here there’s a little bit of good news: the average American reader spent 1.39 hours reading in 2003, rising to 1.48 hours in 2016.
. . . .
In other words, the average reading time of all Americans declined not because readers read less but because fewer people were reading at all, a proportion falling from 26.3 per cent of the population in 2003 to 19.5 per cent in 2016. You could call this a compositional effect, but it’s a rather tautological one: reading is in decline because the population is now composed of fewer readers. And the assessment would be a little unfair: we don’t know that the survey’s non-readers are in fact never-readers. All we know is that, when Americans sit down to read, they still typically read for about an hour and a half, but fewer are doing so, or are doing so less often.
Link to the rest at The New Yorker