(Revised and ready for review)

Technology and the Literary Society

-- By YuShi - 17 Dec 2009

"I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle."

-Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Atlantic, July/August 2008.

The Problem

I stumbled across Carr's article while flipping nonchalantly through an old copy of The Atlantic a few weeks ago. The catchy name of the piece jumped out at me, but it was Carr's story about his diminished attention span that soon caught my attention. His anecdote might as well have described me. A voracious reader all throughout middle and high school, I have not read a full novel for leisure in a few years. The last book I attempted to read, Anna Karenina, I barely got past the midway point of the novel before giving up for good. It is not that I no longer have the time or the passion for reading - it remains an ardor of mine and I still read a decent amount during winter and summer breaks - but my reading habits have changed. Like Carr, I have a short attention span while reading and my mind frequently wanders, no matter how interesting the text. The days of my sitting down with a Bronte or Austen and reading for both content and style seem so long ago; nowadays I find myself perusing mostly short stories and magazine articles, things that I can begin and finish in a short amount of time. I resort to poetry to satiate my craving for style and eloquence.

Some Stats and Studies

A study conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) offers some quantitative measurements for our changing reading habits. The most glaring finding is that Americans are simply reading less now than they did before: the percentage of 18-24 year olds who read at least one book that was not required by school or work fell from fifty-nine percent in 1992 to fifty-two percent in 2002. While there is no proof of a causal relationship, this seven-percent drop coincides with the rise of the internet.

Studies also suggest that even when people do read, they are probably not reading as closely as they once did. The NEA report claims that in 2004, fifty-eight percent of middle and high school students surveyed admitted to using some other form of media while reading. The Carr article also references an interesting and revealing study conducted by researchers at University College London. In tracking visitor activities to two sites that provide journal articles and e-books, the UCL researchers discovered that people frequently read only one or two pages of a book before switching to another one, and rarely do they ever return to the source they were reading. Hence in the researchers’ opinion, the internet seems to have given rise to a kind of reading where people “power browse” instead of sitting down and reading a book in the way that the activity is traditionally understood to mean. These studies seem to corroborate the unfortunate changes that I am observing in myself.

What to make of these changes?

Ultimately, I decided that – at least for myself – while my literary habits have certainly changed, the changes have not necessarily been for the worse. I have a much better eye for picking up information quickly, and am better at separating what is important in a piece of writing from what is there for ornamental purposes. Additionally, my changing reading habits seem to also have influenced the way I write; I am more focused on conveying content and less driven by style. I write quicker than I used to, as I no longer force myself to painstakingly think through each sentence to make it as nice-sounding as possible. Given the profession that I am about to enter into, these changes are not altogether bad ones.

What does this mean for society at large, though? While these changes in reading habits might suit the legal profession in certain ways, their impact on society as a whole is very intriguing to ponder. If people are not reading as deeply as before, and are not allowing themselves the time to absorb and admire beautiful prose, will we lose eloquence as a result? Or will eloquence be redefined? If people’s reduced attention spans are preventing them from enjoying full novels, then will novels continue to be the bedrock of literature? Or will novellas and essays shape our literary future? I do believe we will see a shift in our literary habits, but I feel that it will be a change that reflects people’s needs and preferences. Technology will not bring the end of literature, but will simply reshape literature into something that resonates with tomorrow’s society – and that might means novels with shorter chapters or a proliferation of short stories like never before. More dramatically, maybe magazines will be the new novel. In any case, I do not believe that technology is making us less literary, because being “literary” is a fluid concept whose definition changes as society changes, and what form it ultimately takes is a fascinating question that might not be answered until well after our lifetime.

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