Something alarming is happening with reading in America. Leisure reading by some accounts has declined by about 50 percent this century. Literacy scores are declining for fourth and eighth graders at alarming rates. And even college students today are complaining to teachers that they can’t read entire books. The book itself, that ancient piece of technology for storing ideas passed down across decades, is fading in curricula across the country, replaced by film and TV and YouTube. Why, with everything happening in the world, would I want to talk about reading? The business podcaster Joe Weisenthal has recently turned me on to the ideas of Walter Ong and his book 'Orality and Literacy.' According to Ong, literacy is not just a skill. It is a specific means of structuring society's way of thinking. In oral cultures, Ong says, knowledge is preserved through repetition, mnemonics, and stories. Writing and reading, by contrast, fix words in place. One person can write, and another person, decades later, can read precisely what was written. This word fixing also allows literate culture to develop more abstract and analytical thinking. Writers and readers are, after all, outsourcing a piece of their memory to a page. Today, we seem to be completely reengineering the logic engine of society. The decline of reading in America is not the whole of this phenomenon. But I think that it’s an important part of it. Today we have two conversations—one with a journalist and one with an academic. First, Atlantic staff writer Rose Horowitch shares her reporting on the decline of reading at elite college campuses. And second, Nat Malkus of the American Enterprise Institute tells us about the alarming decline in literacy across our entire student population and even among adults. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected]. Host: Derek Thompson Guests: Rose Horowitch and Nat Malkus Producer: Devon Baroldi Links "The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books" "Testing Theories of Why: Four Keys to Interpreting US Student Achievement Trends" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Today, the decline of reading in America. So I recently read a wonderful short story by the science fiction writer Ted Chiang, which is called The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling. It's featured in his collection of short stories entitled Exhalation. And this short story unfolds along two parallel tracks.
In the modern narrative, which takes place sometime in the near future, a journalist is assigned to cover a new technology called re-mem, which allows people to film their entire lives and play back memories on a retinal projector. In other words, it's a technology that grants every person perfect photographic memory of every event in their life.
A little bit like that great Black Mirror episode written by Jesse Armstrong. And this journalist explores the ways that re-mem changes people's lives, how it resolves fights between couples over who said what to whom, how it makes it impossible for certain people to forget fights in their past that they might want to forget.
But what makes this story so cool is that the modern sci-fi narrative is interspersed with another story that's set in the past. Here we have a Christian missionary introducing written language to a young man named Djingi in a preliterate African tribe. And Djingi initially finds the technology of writing very strange and not helpful.
His tribe has relied on oral tradition to remember and to share knowledge. But over time, Jujingi learns to read and to write, and he realizes that the process of reading is changing the texture of his thought, his own relationship to the past and to ideas.
And as he changes, he begins to have fights with the elders in his tribe when they tell one story and he can consult a written document that tells another. And the story by Ted Chiang, The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling, essentially pings between these two narratives.
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