Like booze does, books and newspapers should come with a government warning.
It would read: (1) ACCORDING TO THE SURGEON GENERAL, PEOPLE SHOULD NOT READ DURING BLISSFUL IGNORANCE BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF AWARENESS. (2) CONSUMPTION OF BOOKS AND NEWSPAPERS IMPAIRS YOUR ABILITY TO NOT THINK, NOT CARE AND MAY CAUSE THE FORMING OF AN OPINION.
The nature of the Internet and the obsoletion of print media are encouraging the rising, scatterbrain generation to diminish its attention span, while some are embracing a less literate society because they prefer the accessibility of alternate forms of information.
It’s no secret that the printed word is suffering a slow death.
A 2007 report by the National Endowment for the Arts containing over 40 studies by different institutions details the sharp decline in the number of young readers over the last two decades. According to the report, a little less than half of Americans ranging from ages 18 to 24 do not read books for fun.
The year that report was released, 27 percent of adults did not read a book, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll.
In 2009, Pew Research Center reported that gains in online newspaper readership were not making up for the amount of people shunning print news.
My question is: What are the stakes?
Middle-aged people will have to find something else to do while they elevate their feet, and dog owners will have one less trick to teach their “best friend”—retrieving a paper from the front porch will be as foreign to my future kids as a person delivering milk to my door is to me.
But I fear that as news and volumes transition to a condensed, digital state, they will narrow in depth, and consequently, so will society. More frightening is the possibility that this trend reflects public apathy toward current events and widespread unwillingness to discover timeless truths.
There is a profundity to the concentration, dedication and craftsmanship invested in a book or full-length feature article by its author. Web content is rarely as vast and is often dictated by aesthetics and brevity.
My journalism textbooks teach me to maintain a fifth-grade vocabulary when writing. They explain that the public is, essentially, illiterate.
Mechanical engineering junior Ryan Bylard said he would rather watch a movie or play a video game than read.
“I definitely feel that reading is a big part of learning and being an intelligent individual,” he said. “I think people should make more of an effort to try and read. I guess it’s kind of a bad thing as society goes, but for me personally, I’m kind of hypocritical because I don’t read that much.”
Many students prefer electronic media to print.
Of course this is all unsettling to an aspiring writer like myself — imagine the look on a musician’s face if he or she heard that humans were evolving and would no longer have ears.
However, the loss of print media threatens more than just those with a bachelor’s degree.
Author of The Atlantic article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr writes that the immediacy of the Internet has come to “scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.”
We have been granted a great tool with the development of the Internet. We can now spontaneously browse nearly infinite amounts of information.
The web is tailored to its high speed, though, and the instant gratification we experience through Googling is now the standard.
Perhaps this is why so many people are allowing their bookshelves to collect dust.
Perhaps the development of the printing press, a landmark in the history of humanity, will be remembered as a stepping-stone to a more streamlined medium for sharing information.
The world is changing. It would be a great loss to society if the obsoletion of print media proves to be a part of that change.