Reading Got Farm Women Through the Depression
daily.jstor.org
daily.jstor.org
The world has not moved away from a reading culture, it never had one.
I'm not sure if it's for better or for worse but this is vastly different than anything humans have dealt with for all of history.
Whereas my web browsing habits have probably changed for the better. I spend far less tine reading random nonsense now and most of my time spent on the web is spent either reading things at least I find productive or talking to people.
There's always been more to culture than print (as with any media), of course, and reading culture has never meant universal critical engagement with deeply thoughtful texts. But the place of print between the enlightenment and the rise of broadcast & networked media was huge -- it soaked up the space occupied by all media now.
Maybe the new things aren't worse than the old thing, maybe they are. But any picture that doesn't reckon with the fact that things are in fact different now isn't going to be a very accurate one.
The other difference is that Plato's Republic sits not too far away from 'The Crocodile Whisperer' in the book shop and library. YouTube and Netflix feeds on the other hand are tailored to what the user already watches and what they will most likely get them to click next, stuck in a loop never broken by serendipity.
The immediate availability of entertainment in the form of TV and movies on Netflix makes the idea of finding, picking up and reading a book less appetising and harder. The more someone reads (even if it is trash) the faster they can read and the wider their vocabulary becomes. This makes it easier for them to pick up more substantive books later on. Instead we see a generation of young people glued to their phones reading text written by their peers, watching the same trash they would read but without any of the benefits of reading.
The need for entertainment drove many young people to read in the past and that is a good thing!
i believe that's all they had. if they had other choices...
i do agree with OP. it just seems like whatever the era provided to you to occupy your mind.
How can you say that? Literacy was once a very strong proxy to wealth, and still retains a connection today. Books have been fundamental to many aspects of human history.
If Russia never had a culture of reading, then how does the Communist Manifesto drive an entire society, millions of people, to overthrow its familial leaders before the era of television?
It didn't. The central (though far from only) divergence of Leninism from classical Marxism to allow it to work in early 20th Century Russia, which wasn't the kind of advanced (even by mid-late 19th Century standards) liberal industrial capitalist regime to which the Communist Manifesto was directed, was the adoption of vanguardism, in which broad class consciousness and awareness of class theory by the proletariat was abandoned as a requirement for Communist revolution in favor of authoritarian leadership of the masses by a narrow intellectual elite.
A major justification for Leninism was the belief by Russian Communists of the time that what you describe could not happen in Russia.
(I don't assert that the reason for that is or is not anything to do with culture of reading, but the Communist Revolution certainly does not support your thesis in the way you suggest.)
Firstly, the leaders whom the Bolsheviks overthrew in October 1917 were not familiar to most Russians. The Provisional Government instituted after the February Revolution was a messy affair.
Committed Bolsheviks were a minority at the time of the Russian Revolution. However, there were just enough of them in the railroads, ports, army and other key infrastructure that they could carry out a coup against the Provisional Government.
As with many radical movements, most of the ordinary Bolshevik sympathizers had never actually read the foundational texts of Communism (Marx' writings are often a challenge even for intellectuals). They only knew some simple agitprop distillations thereof.
That the Communist regime spent the whole 1920s and early 1930s carrying out literacy campaigns and establishing written standards for most of Russia's languages also underscores how little of a culture of reading existed in the country pre-1917 outside the elite cities like Moscow and Saint-Petersburg.
It didn't and couldn't. That was the conceit and power behind Lenin's "vanguard" concept. Only a small minority needed to be ideologically driven; everybody else could and did join sides based on more practical, individualized motivations. See, generally, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguardism
That said, I'm not trying to opine on whether, when, and how popular book reading was or still is.
not disagreeing with your premise, but -
assuming this to be accurate (leaving out alot of factors),
nothing says small number of people couldn't read it and then go around verbally agitating everyone else.
that said literacy was fairly high in those times and i agree reading was very common
Personally, I grew up reading any sort of book and then switched to nonfiction and magazine articles. My habits haven't changed considerably with the internet. I may be an outlier but I don't enjoy video in general and don't watch it on TV or online.
My experience with recent children is that they read books, watch video on TV and online, play physically and with toys, and also play video games. That's almost exactly what my life was like growing up in the '80s.
Think of how much of a difference that makes in low and middle income countries. Maybe in the first world people have always been able to buy books for cheap (relative to their income), but the amount of reading opportunities people in low and middle income countries have with the Internet is, in my opinion, a new and beatiful thing.
Doesn't this completely invalidate your argument? If it's that much easier for folks to read an article about war crimes in South America committed by the US and the next about Kylie Jenner at a gala, how is that different from reading one section of a newspaper and then a different section?
Online that level of deep understand is there if you want it, but most people scrolling through a feed won’t seek it out.
They once said that about reading. The invention of the printing press made books cheap. Suddenly everyone was learning to read. They spent time with their noses in books rather than knitting sweaters, toiling in the fields or praying. Then it was TV. Then the internet. Then social media. There is always a new medium that threatens to "change behavior" to the detriment of society. Somehow we have muddled through.
I can't stand written novels or other non-tech/spiritual books. Same with audiobook or acted out narrated versions. I just have too many things fighting for my time and attention.
It seems like OP is accurate in their assessment, it's surprising to see how many people read ZERO books in the preceding year.
But I have the internet and I can access rich content at my fingertips on topics I care to educate myself on in a way that wasn't possible when I was a child. I use this to do things like say to my 32 year old son "I'm having X health issue. I recall reading something about (y health topic). Please see if x and y are related and if there is something I can do about it."
An hour later, I have an email full of supporting links showing me that research shows there is a connection, these are the nutrients related to that problem and here is a list of foods with those nutrients. This has resulted at times in answer like "The answer to your problem is you need to eat a Reese's Cup." I eat a Reese's Cup and my agonizing, incapacitating pain drops dramatically to bearable levels.
The old way isn't necessarily superior. I used to read a lot of books when my mother would take my older sister and I to the library so my sister could spend hours doing research for her high school papers. I would lay on the floor in the children's room and read Dr. Seuss or whatever.
I can now access more high quality information on the internet via my cheap smart phone than probably any library has ever physically contained. And I spend large parts of my time reading on the internet and then I write to collate the information and keep track of the parts that matter to me.
I am always baffled by people acting like spending all day on the internet means pissing your time away shit posting on Facebook or Twitter and not doing anything at all intellectually valuable. I'm doubly baffled when I see such sentiments expressed on Hacker News, where a bunch of smart people hang out to discuss mostly written articles (audio and video tend to do poorly here) and many people here read the comment first because of the calibre of thought the audience provides.
I agree with you there's all sorts of useful and interesting internet content that's not reading crap on facebook. There's even literary discourse on the internet!
But what about books? Reading actual books is different.
But not reading books doesn't mean you don't have an intellectual life and spending your entire day futzing around on the internet does not mean your brain is clearly and unarguably going to rot.
That's all I'm trying to say.
When I was a child, I read a lot of comics. I also was one of the top students at school.
The mother of a same-age friend didn't want him reading comics because it was drivel. She wanted him to be one of the smart kids and wanted him reading important stuff.
My mother told her one day "What do you care if he reads comics? He's at least reading if he's reading comics."
I don't know if that helped my friend. I don't know if his mother changed her policy. But it sure as hell stuck with me all these years and it's been probably 47 years ago or something like that.
If I'm one of the smart kids, you can credit my mother's policy of letting me read drivel because it was at least reading.
Well, if Sturgeon's Law is true -- and I think it is -- that doesn't say much about reading or books ;)
They are a great source of ideas, and also lets one connect to the vast and long history of human progress.
While I don't say that reading books is superior to any other activity, I do think it is usually a rather beneficial thing to do, and ofcourse many people find it a pleasure in itself, irrespective of any benefits.
Most information on the Internet is observably crap. The thing about books, especially books that have managed to remain in print for a long time, is that they contain considerably less crap than a well curated set of websites.
The old way is in fact superior because it is Lindy.
I've gotten myself off the street and back into housing without going through some kind of homeless program.
Because I already do remote work to accommodate my medical handicap, lock down during the pandemic only lightly impacted my life. It was mostly business as usual for me, even though I'm a dirt poor writer, not a well-heeled programmer.
I'm reasonably satisfied with the results I'm getting, though I'm currently broke and don't know where my next dollar is coming from and that aspect of my life continues to aggravate the fool out of me.
That’s strange. Pain from low blood sugar?
Sure it’s not novels etc, mostly comments are chit chat, but still words.
Best thing you can do for your mental health is limit your intake of it.
The issue is our ability to resist the addiction, which more people need tools to handle. I appreciate what TikTok does by giving a custom video reminder to take a break and go do something else.
I’d really like to see all major platforms forcing users off after a given amount of time. Of course this directly competes with profit incentives so would likely need to be regulatory.
“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.
But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.
As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”
—
“What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate. In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility.”
—
“Huxley believed that we are in a race between education and disaster, and he wrote continuously about the necessity of our understanding the politics and epistemology of media. For in the end, he was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.”
—
“This idea – that there is a content called “the news of the day” – was entirely created by the telegraph (and since amplified by newer media), which made it possible to move decontextualized information over vast spaces at incredible speed. The news of the day is a figment of our technological imagination. It is quite, precisely, a media event. We attend to fragments of events from all over the world because we have multiple media whose forms are well suited to fragmented conversation.”
—
“Together, this new ensemble of electronic techniques called into being a new world – a peek-a-boo world, where now this event, now that, pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again. It is a world without much coherence or sense; a world that does not ask us, indeed, does not permit us to do anything; a world that is, like the child's game of peek-a-boo, entirely self-contained. But like peek-a-boo, it is also endlessly entertaining.”
—
“The reader must come armed , in a serious state of intellectual readiness. This is not easy because he comes to the text alone. In reading, one's responses are isolated, one's intellect is thrown back on its own resources. To be confronted by the cold abstractions of printed sentences is to look upon language bare, without the assistance of either beauty or community. Thus, reading is by its nature a serious business. It is also, of course, an essentially rational activity.”
[1] http://robertdarnton.org/sites/default/files/First%20Steps%2...