James Marriott
speaker
547 appearances
7 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 31 Aug
James Marriott’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 5.
Appearances
Newspapers are declining.
People are at home all the time.
They're not socializing.
They're having friends less.
And it's not particularly hard to understand why when screens arrive, talking about the idea that reading is actually quite hard to do, like concentrating on a page is quite difficult, interpreting text is quite difficult.
These are cognitively taxing processes.
whenever you have the choice between a page and a screen, people choose the screen.
It's easier.
It's more passive.
It's more exciting.
It's more visual.
It's just less cognitively demanding for us.
And that sort of seems like a minor point, but we can just see it's playing out on a vast social scale now.
And I think has been since really the 1950s, the 1960s.
This is why the Neil Postman book is so important.
And when I was writing my book, thinking about where to begin the story, when you look at the first people talking about the decline of reading,
I was able to naively go into it thinking this is a recent phenomenon.
Actually, it begins in the 60s.
Some of the best data for the decline of reading comes from the Netherlands.
And the really dramatic declines are happening in the 50s and 60s and 70s as television comes into people's homes and people start reading less.
Showing 521–540 of 547 · page 27 of 28
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