Venkatesh Rao on Substack: "I like the insight on silly takes about MFA lit. But I don’t know why… a) people find declining book reading depressing; it’s like finding it depressing that too few people write assembly code these days or can read/write cursive. Higher-abstraction new media naturally marginal…"

I like the insight on silly takes about MFA lit. But I don’t know why…

a) people find declining book reading depressing; it’s like finding it depressing that too few people write assembly code these days or can read/write cursive. Higher-abstraction new media naturally marginalize lower-abstraction old media. Depressing for book writers maybe. Not for the human condition,

b) Distraction etc has nothing to do with it. Thinking of TV, twitter, tiktok etc as “distraction” from reading is like thinking of Python, AWS lambda, etc as “distraction” from writing assembler and C. The whole argument is repeated endlessly but is basically writerly self-importance.

While I was simultaneously active on twitter and longform I found that people who read my threads only vs essays only simply had different processing styles. Both engaged in interesting ways. Some did both. I myself read perhaps a dozen books last year but also watched probably a 1000 hours of tv and consumed maybe 2000 hours of online shorter media.

Frankly I’m glad most of humanity does not read or write books and has lost its historic reverence for the priestly classes that make it out to be some sort of deep virtue as opposed to an unevenly distributed preference.

Yesterday, I saw an interesting if expectedly depressing survey of America’s reading habits in the Washington Post. The expectedly depressing part is that few Americans read many books. “46 percent finished zero books last year and 5 percent read just one,” Andrew Van Dam writes. “So, if you read more than two books in 2023, congratulations! You’re in the top half of U.S. adults.” Of course, the “death of reading” has been written about my entire life and there’s nothing new to say. We live in a time of maximal distraction, maximal entertainment options, and minimal attention spans. The only thing this data reminds me is that people who blame the decline of reading on “MFA fiction” or “literary snobs” or whatever other grudges they have are a bit silly. Most Americans aren’t reading much of anything. They likely aren’t reading whatever small press literary fiction novel recently annoyed you and then swearing off books forever.

Lincoln Michel

Jan 14, 2024

2:26 AM