The latest salvo in the on-going debate over the future of reading comes from the New York Times' Motoko Rich.
There's this great photo accompanying the story in which the Sims family (great name!) of Old Greenwich, Connecticut, is gathered in their living room. Mom is clutching a newspaper, Dad a book, and their two teenage kids are staring at laptops. Son Zachary, it turns out, consumes something like 200 RSS feeds a day, an amount of content that Mom finds "mind boggling," but not particularly distressing. But more concerning to the parents is the great deal of time daughter Emma's spends online playing games and connecting up with friends.
Thing is, both kids appear to be doing the very same thing. But they're clearly engaged in different pursuits. And that's basically the Steven Johnson argument -- that we're using a bunk definition of "reading" if we're limiting it to ink-and-paper books and newspapers, and not taking into account all the text we take in online. There was this great story from the British Library's main reading room a few months back where old-timers complained that the new batch of researchers just didn't look like they're working, because they're click-click-clicking away at computers instead of being hunched over tomes. That definition of "working" is fairly dated. Our definition of reading is also pretty archaic.
Now me, I like books, like 'em a lot. Ever since I was a wee one, I've loved putting the effort into seeing through one person's vision for a few hundred pages of commitment. I do struggle a bit to find time for them now. Time spent consuming all the wonderful stuff online -- whether it's Boing Boing or nytimes.com -- is time not spent reading full books. Whether or not that's a loss for the universe is the big question, but I do personally find myself wishing I spent more time on actual books.
Of course, the boring but probably pretty spot-on answer to this is, ho-hum, balance. Maybe we all are gorging a bit on digital content right now, what with it being all free and delicious! So maybe something useful the National Endowment for the Arts -- a big participant in these reading debates -- could do is to mock up a reading pyramid like the one we have for food. Give us a useful guide to balancing our textual consumption.
