Books and Reading in the 21st Century

     ⋮   Audio version below

If we consider the amount of media each of us has access to on an average day, the sheer quantity is staggering. We are inundated by local, state, national and international news headlines, cable news talking heads, must-see TV shows, hours of bingeworthy content from streaming services, podcasts, seemingly infinite streaming music, blockbuster movies, the newest video game consoles, social media on multiple platforms and much more. All of these are accessible everywhere we go and on every device we own. All these media platforms offer free apps and every one of those apps wants us to accept push notifications so we can be kept up-to-date on everything all the time. Clearly some of the most coveted commodities in the 21st century consumer time, attention, clicks, dollars and subscriptions. As a reaction to the overload of digital media, there has been a renaissance in analog and unplugged pastimes like tabletop gaming and vinyl records. Some coffeeshops have gone so far as to advertise that they don’t offer free Wi-Fi in a very public attempt to bring back pre-technology socializing (and, somewhat ironically, to create social media buzz around their business). Complicating the debate even further are hybrid digital and analog experiences like augmented reality. Whether you think the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, from the turn of the 21st century to today, the landscape for all forms of media has exploded at a dizzying rate. Where do the old standbys of books and reading fit into this sea of media? Where are the national headlines about poets publishing new chapbooks? How do novels compete with the current golden age of prestige television? Or to be more pointed, is reading gaining, maintaining or losing ground compared to other media?

There is currently a lot of anxiety about the detrimental effects of technology in general and its impact on reading and on younger people specifically, and some of it is legitimate. In Psychology Today, Michael Ungar outlines the relationship between excessive cell phone use and increases in depression, anxiety and suicide. Speaking about his own step-son, Ungar writers, “...it nags at me nonetheless. All those hours doing nothing when there are great books to read and skills to learn. He never builds anything. He never reads a novel. He never talks about the world he is experiencing.” This anxiety is usually paired with a fear that people are reading less quality content. Andrew Perrin of the Pew Research Center writes that, “About a quarter of American adults (24%) say they haven’t read a book in whole or in part in the past year, whether in print, electronic or audio form.” David Demby’s article “Do Teens Read Seriously Anymore?” expands on this worry as he posits that, “It’s very likely that teen-agers, attached to screens of one sort or another, read more words than they ever have in the past. But they often read scraps, excerpts, articles, parts of articles, messages, pieces of information from everywhere and from nowhere. It’s likely that they are reading fewer books...yet what happens as they move toward adolescence? When they become twelve or thirteen, kids often stop reading seriously.” The interrelationship between technology, mental health and literacy is an ongoing national debate, and most pundits typically see traditional reading as losing more and more ground.

For all the hand-wringing about the death of reading and print books, they have proven to be surprisingly resilient. Perrin also reports that those who do read tend to read a lot. 16% of respondents reported reading 6-10 books, 12% reported reading 11-20 books and 14% reported reading an impressive 20+ books last year. Contrary to Demby’s assumptions, people under 50 are actually reading significantly more than those over 50. Pew also reports that though the number of e-book readers is up from previous years, in 2018, 67% of respondents read a print book compared to 26% who reported reading an e-book and 18% who listened to an audiobook. And although big box bookstores like Borders and Barnes & Noble have been hurt or have completely closed by competition from online retailers, NPR’s Paddy Hirsh reports that “Between 2009 and 2015, the number of independent bookstores grew by 35 percent.” Far from technology turning 21st century America into a post-literate society, print books have found ways to adapt, persist and thrive in a digital media saturated environment.

In fact, technology has opened new opportunities for authors, readers and books. Audible subscribers can stream audiobooks via Bluetooth on their daily commute, Spotify listeners can listen to poets like Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath and Carl Sandburg read their poems in their own voices. Libraries now allow users to check out e-books from home on their own devices, and fans of a certain age can listen to LeVar Burton’s podcast Levar Burton Reads, where the actor reads and discusses his favorite short stories. Most savvy authors these days maintain a social media presence too, so it’s easy for readers to follow and interact with writers on Twitter and Instagram. In fact, if we consider that award-winning television shows are frequently based on print books (Game of Thrones and The Handmaid’s Tale to name just two) and that the entire DC and Marvel cinematic universes are based on decades of what were originally print comics, it’s easy to see that instead of print books being separate from digital media, they are frequently primary sources of ideas for it. Add onto these ingenious ideas like the spread of Vendit library vending machines that contains print books and DVDs, the French tech start-up Short Édition that creates public vending machines that dispense short stories instead of snacks, or the can-do community spirit of little lending libraries in front of people’s houses and it becomes clear that books, reading and literature are alive and well in the 21st century, even if they look different than they did 50 years ago. How technology and literature will interact 50 years in the future is an open question.

Another explanation for the resilience of literature has less to do with technology and everything to do with reader’s motivations for reading in the first place. In another Pew Research Center report, respondents listed the reasons they read as, in order: learning, gaining knowledge and discovering information, the pleasures of escaping reality, the entertainment value of reading and relaxing while reading, among others. Reading clearly satisfies a need for readers. It’s noteworthy that respondents listed learning above entertainment for their reasons to read. Beyond these typical explanations though, reading good books might just be beneficial for long-term health. A study by Bavishi, Slade and Levy and published in Social Science and Medicine found that “a 20% reduction in mortality was observed for those who read books, compared to those who did not read books. Further...any level of book reading gave a significantly stronger survival advantage than reading periodicals. This is a novel finding (in both senses of the word), as previous studies did not compare types of reading material; it indicates that book reading rather than reading in general is driving a survival advantage.” Readers live longer than non-readers. Is there any better reason to pick up a good book?

This anthology isn’t focused on all categories of books though. Literature is a specialized subset of the total books published in a year and it occupies a special place in American culture, even if it only rarely captures headlines compared to other forms of media. Literary reading and thinking are specialized and valuable skills too, and the qualities, values and types of literature, and the short story genre in particular, are all worth a deeper discussion.