Is Reading Going out of Fashion? Habibul Haque Khondker

Is Reading Going out of Fashion?

Habibul Haque Khondker

Published April 01, 2005

I have a feeling that more and more people are quitting the habit of not only smoking but also reading. Quitting smoking, though a good idea, is often involuntary. The cost of smoking keeps rising, the government and non-smokers nag more, community becomes more intolerant, and people become more health conscious. But what explains quitting the reading habit? Are there social forces at work that make us turn away from the habit of reading?

It seems that diet is one of the key metaphors of our time. Many people are on a diet when it comes to reading or serious intellectual activities. Some are on a diet in the sense of avoiding food so that they can remain slim forever with no excess fat; others do the same for reading. They avoid it as if too much reading will make them lethargic, immobile with their heads in the cloud. Not that people are not reading at all, some are reading but they are reading mostly ï¿½how to booksï¿½, books that are practical guides. People are reading things that are deemed to be useful for career enhancement. My concern is reading for the joy of reading. Reading widens our horizons as late Guru Syed Mujtaba Ali, a Tagore and Goethe aficionado, once lamented that we do not have eight eyes like the flies who can see many things all at the same time. For us poor humans, we can enhance our capacity to see many things all at a time and widen our vision only through reading. While on an intellectual diet we may read books on real diet but not books containing words of wisdom by Mujtaba Ali.

But is it the case that modern society is putting blinders on us so that we can only see limited things. In the age of specialization reading narrowly may be more productive. Specialization often produces a tunnel vision and it is rewarded in the world of experts and specialists. What happened to reading for its own sake?

I put this question to a number of young people aged 19 to 22. These are some of the sample answers:

ï¿½In the past people needed to read books to find out about things and places, now they can go to those places to see things for themselves, or see those places on television, or they can access information via Internet so they do not need to readï¿½.

ï¿½Time is scarcer now. There is hardly any time for reading, especially for Junior College students who spend all their time doing home work and preparing for the A-level examinationsï¿½.

ï¿½In the past people did not have enough entertainment, therefore, they had to read for pleasure; now there are so many ways one can entertain oneself that make reading unnecessaryï¿½.

A seventeen year old said: ï¿½Rather than reading a book, one would like to go to a movie based on that book. You know the story, what will happen at the end faster. In two hours you know basically what is there to know. Why read a book which is expensive both in terms of time and cost?ï¿½ Modern society is making us impatient. We need to get to the end now and not after 230 pages. Graffiti on my colleague Maribethï¿½s T-Shirt says: ï¿½Life is short, eat the dessert firstï¿½.

Is it part of the phenomenon that sociologist Ritzer called, ï¿½McDonaldizationï¿½? We want not only fast food; we also want fast banking (ATM machine is to a bank, what McDonalds is to a restaurant). We want McPaper, newspaper that can be read very fast say between the starting and get off points on a bus ride. When USA Today was launched in the 1980s it was immediately labelled as McPaper. Recently my intellectual colleague Anne complained after a trip to US that in her hotel they supplied USA Today and not the New York Times. We want everything as fast as possible. We want a fast track education and then we want to be rich fast. We want a fast car as we want a faster computer and even speedier Internet connection.

Is decline in reading texts a sign of the rise of the digital society? Is the arrival of information society undermining knowledge society? In the US a survey conducted by National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) last year found that literary reading is in dramatic decline with fewer than half of American adults now reading literature. But fewer than half is not all that bad when we compare that 3 out of 20, a figure I arrived at when I asked a bunch of 20 young people whose honesty, if not reading habit, is impeccable. The US study found an overall decline of 10 percentage points in literary readers from 1982 to 2002, which translated in actual numbers, meant a loss of 20 million potential readers.

The July 2004 NEA survey also found that literature readers watched an average of 2.7 hours of television each day, while people who do not read literary works watched an average of 3.1 hours daily. When I read Bimal Mitraï¿½s Kori Diey Kinlam (in two volumes over 1500 pages) as a secondary school student I had no access to television. We had electricity, radio, and books but no television. And all the members of the household ï¿½ my late father, mother, and other siblings took turns to read the book. My mother at 82 still recommends Bengali novels to me as she squints to read. We did not have the distractions of satellite television, hand phones, MSN chats, online gaming, Blackberry, and PlayStation2. Thanks God for that.

Bob Herbert of the New York Times wrote in his obituary on Arthur Miller, the great American playwright and the public intellectual, ï¿½Mr. Miller understood early that keeping the population entertained was becoming the paramount imperative of the U.S. We're now all but buried in entertainment and the republic is running amok. Mr. Miller is gone, and if we're not wise enough to pay attention, his uncomfortable truths will die with him. (He felt, among other things, that most men and women knew "little or nothing" about the forces manipulating their lives.) I wonder how widely generalizable these words are today!

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Dr. Habibul Haque Khondker teaches Sociology at the National University of Singapore.