Contextualizing Changing Reading Habits in an Ever-Changing (Internet) Society

-- By LinusKatzenbach - 04 Dec 2024

Reading habits are changing

A shockingly large share of 46 percent of Americans didn't read a single book last year, a recent study found. This constitutes not only a decline compared to the past, with only 39 percent of Americans who did not read any book in 1982, but, perhaps even more dramatically, one that can be observed in every group of society regardless of gender, race, education, and age, and which only seems to accelerate in its pace.

Considering the above, taken together with the fact that this steady decline of reading habits is most notably happening among younger members of society, a trend that was likely further accelerated by school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic, it does not come as a particular surprise that Rose Horowitch in a recently published article in The Atlantic, found, by talking to many esteemed professors in the field of literature like Professor Nicholas Dames from Columbia University who has taught Literature Humanities since 1998, that even in highly selective, elite colleges, many students are overwhelmed by reading assignments and have trouble staying focused even on shorter texts.

Understanding and making use of this fact requires, first, to explore the reasons for this observed trend (which will be attempted in the first part of this essay), allowing, second, to evaluate this development, and contextualize it with that of society as a whole (forming the second part of this essay).

Why are reading habits changing?

One often-told (as well as not-new, having been already perceived by Professor Eben Moglen back in 1997, describing the battle of platforms for their attention as a "market for eyeballs") and obvious explanation for the staggering decline of books read especially by younger people is the constant temptation by electronic devices diminishing attention span and making it increasingly difficult for students to focus on longer texts. In an observation conducted by Gloria Mark, who received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in psychology, it was found that the average attention span in 2004 was measured as long as two and a half minutes, and since drastically decreased to 75 seconds in 2012, arriving at a low of about 40 seconds in recent years.

These observations can, at least partly, be explained by the nature of the internet, and especially social media, of having rapidly changing content and constant interruptions making us accustomed to quick sound bites and short videos. As an example, a recent survey has found that the ideal video uploaded on TikTok, teenagers' favorite social platform, has a length between 21 to 34 seconds, with many users saying they find longer videos "stressful". Another finding by Gloria Mark suggests that these interruptions between rapidly changing video have been wired into our brains to an extent that we begin to create them ourselves, most impressively shown by the fact that the average American checks their phone 144 times a day.

Are these changes just reflections of changes in society?

It was shown in the first part of this essay that the modern human's diminishing attention span and the development of the modern internet can, in fact, be so closely linked together that it appears to be accurate to regard our ability to focus on an activity such as reading a book as being stolen by our electronic devices. As an, more than expected, result, today's students are mostly not reading books from cover to cover anymore, leading to more and more schools no longer teaching kids to read books, having the effect that college and university teachers have no other choice than assigning less extensive texts and fewer books, creating of course a vicious cycle of stolen focus and ever-decreasing attention span.

Less reading has some obvious immediate disadvantages. For example, it was found that reading for just six minutes can reduce stress levels by 68%. Children who read at home have a higher success rate in school. Also, reading improves sleep quality as well as increases vocabulary and overall writing skills.

However, the development could also be seen as a mere reflection of changes in modern internet society. With the availability of the whole internet (which is used by 96% of Americans) in a few seconds on a smartphone (which is possessed by 91% of Americans), for example, it can be argued that the knowledge of facts becomes less important transforming the skills being valued in modern society like having something that could be called "Digital-Age Literacy". In 2017, Dell and the Institute for the Future (IFTF) released a study that predicted that 85% of the jobs the learners at that time will work in do not yet exist. This correlates with the finding that it will become increasingly common to switch jobs more often, with already today the average tenure for employees aged 25-34 being approximately 2.7 years compared to 9.6 years for those aged 55-64, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In this highly dynamic job market that provides future and current employees with nothing but uncertainty about its future development, the skill set needed for a "successful career" has changed and will change dramatically. Thus, it can be argued, students are more shifting their priorities than losing their skills by focusing on things that seem more important than century-old literature. By doing so, however, they might lose the ability to do "deep reading" which is associated with an increase in critical thinking and self-reflections, which isn't so much improved by only skimming texts.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it seems to me that the critic that "the youth doesn't read anymore" is too one-sided. A distinction has to be made between ever-important skills that are being stolen from teenagers by the attention economy of their digital devices on the one hand, and other aspects of traditional reading that are no longer contemporary and, in the context of a changing world of work in the Internet Society, are rightly no longer prioritized by today's students, on the other hand.