CNN informs us that, “reading for pleasure has fallen drastically over the past 20 years”. This will shock no one.
According to the report, reading rates have declined about 3 percent per year since 2003, for a total decline of 40 percent since then.
As is always the case when dealing with a country as diverse as the United States (and over two decades, to boot), aggregate numbers provide an incomplete picture.
The greatest reading declines have occurred among African Americans and rural Americans. No big surprise there, considering that these two groups are the most dependent on public education.
I also suspect that some of the decline can be attributed to the dying off of older generations. Since 2003, millions of members of the Greatest Generation (the WWII generation) and the Silent Generation have left us. My maternal grandmother (born in 1922) was a very avid reader. She might have been counted among our readers in a 2003 survey, but not in 2023.
CNN talks about the need to “make reading cool again”. According to a survey from Date Psychology, reading is the hobby that women find most attractive in a man. But no one really believes—or even suggests—that women value a well-read man over one who is tall, good-looking, and high-earning. So don’t expect your local library to be filled with young men hoping to improve their romantic and sexual odds.
What is behind the continuing slide in reading rates? We can blame electronic media to a point. But electronic mass-market media is now a century old. Even in my grandparents’ youth, it was possible to be entertained without reading very much. Radio became popular in the 1920s and 1930s. Television was common by the late 1950s.
Yes, the Internet is one more distraction. But we may reasonably ask: are people spending hours on TikTok because they’re not too bright to begin with, or is TikTok eroding the great minds who constantly tune in there?
When I watch TikTok (something I very rarely do), I don’t feel more stupid afterward. I do note that most of the people on TikTok are idiots, as would be anyone who would spend much time watching that drivel.
The simple truth (and few are going to want to hear this) is that American society has been dumbed down over the last three generations. The gradual but steady decline of the American mind began around 1970. This was the result of the cultural, moral, and intellectual rot of the 1960s—not any new technology.
Back to my grandparents. Neither of my grandfathers graduated high school. Yet both men were literate and read for pleasure. My paternal grandfather, in particular, always had a paperback book within reach. A man born in 1909, with no high school diploma, who never held a computer mouse or an iPhone.
Technology may or may not be corrupting us, it may or may not be undermining our democracy. But it is definitely not making us smarter.
-ET