Everything Blog is Good for You

The release, this past November, of "To Read Or Not To Read," a National Endowment for the Arts study billed as a "comprehensive analysis of reading patterns in the United States" (it was based on an analysis of data from about two dozen studies from the federal Education and Labor Departments and the Census Bureau as well as other academic, foundation and business surveys), no doubt made Ideas readers nervous.

Voluntary reading (i.e., for pleasure) among Americans is in decline, according to the NEA. Less than one-third of 13-year-olds, for example, are daily readers, a 14 percent decline from 20 years earlier; and among 17-year-olds, the percentage of non-readers doubled over a 20-year period, from nine percent in 1984 to 19 percent in 2004. Meanwhile, American 15-year-olds ranked fifteenth in average reading scores for 31 industrialized nations, behind Poland, Korea, France, and Canada, among others.

What are high school and college-age Americans doing with all that non-reading time? As you might expect, they're watching TV. On average, according to the NEA's study, Americans ages 15 to 24 spend almost two hours a day watching TV, and only seven minutes of their daily leisure time on reading. Dana Gioia, chairman of the NEA, said the statistics could not explain why reading had declined, but he pointed to what the New York Times called "the proliferation of digital diversions on the Internet and other gadgets" (presumably including smartphones, iPods, and video games).

Start bad-mouthing TV, the Internet, and video games and it's just a matter of time before popular-science writer Steven Johnson, author of the 2005 book "Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter," will smack you to the curb. Which he did a few days ago, I see, in The Guardian (London). According to Johnson, the studies compiled by the NEA mostly exclude "screen-based reading" from their data. Which is "preposterous," he writes, because "of course the single most dramatic change in media habits over the past decade is the huge spike in internet activity." Excising screen-based reading from the study altogether, he adds, is "like doing a literacy survey circa 1500" -- when printed books were taking off -- "and only counting the amount of time people spent reading scrolls."

In other words, young Americans today aren't reading less than young Americans were a generation ago. "What separates the Google generation from postwar generations," Johnson opines, "is the shift from largely image-based passive media to largely text-based interactive media." Young Americans are watching less TV, in this scenario, and spending more time online, reading blogs, Facebook pages, and other websites.

Touché, right?

Perhaps not. Writing for the website The American Scene, Alan Jacobs, a professor of English at Wheaton College in Illinois (and sometime Ideas contributor), takes issue with Johnson's breezy dismissal of the NEA's report.
He argues that "small-bite app-switching reading" via a computer screen most likely isn't as useful for one's "intellectual, or moral, development" as "long-form reading."

In conclusion, Jacobs writes:

I suspect that the NEA report has some significant problems, and that it's based on a somewhat romanticized notion of the Good Old Days of reading, but Steven Johnson's not the guy I would turn to to get the straight dope on the matter.

UPDATE: Brainiac reader Sunil Iyengar sends the following email.

As director of Research & Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts, I want to observe that there were several feats of misrepresentation in Steven Johnson's article, ranging from a repeated misspelling to a far more serious mistake: his assertion that the NEA report, To Read or Not To Read, somehow excluded or "excised" reading online. This is a gross factual error, and it forms virtually the basis of his whole critique.

Contrary to Johnson's claim, the majority of studies cited in To Read or Not To Read asked Americans how frequently or how much they read anything for pleasure whatsoever, of any genre, type, or format--whether print or online. The report also included 2-3 studies that had asked exclusively about online reading.

I welcome the serious discussions and debate sparked by our report, but I hope Steven Johnson and others can work from facts in the future.

Yours sincerely, Sunil Iyengar (Director, Research & Analysis, National Endowment for the Arts)

Via Footnoted, a Chronicle of Higher Education blog.