WHY READ WHEN CAN TWEET, TEXT, FACEBOOK, INSTAGRAM & TAKE SELFIES

Almost half the adult population didn’t read even one book in the last year. And you wonder why the average college freshman reads at a 7th grade level. If you don’t read books, you’ll never learn to read. I would venture to guess that the average American today is dumber than at any time in history. With all the knowledge and resources at their fingertips, they choose to amuse themselves to death with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, IGadgets, texting, and watching reality TV. You become educated by reading. You don’t become educated by having the American taxpayer provide you with a “free” education at a community college or $1 trillion of student loans to get a degree in African Studies or Lesbian Studies. If you want to become smart, read books. If you want to stay dumb, worship and stay addicted to technology. Huxley and Carlin were both right.

“Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.”- Aldous Huxley

“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” – George Carlin

Via Marketwatch

Majority of Americans never read novels

Published: Jan 12, 2015 10:01 a.m. ET

Most Americans don’t read fiction, but the residents of some U.S. states are far bigger bookworms than others.

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Most Americans don’t read fiction, but the residents of some U.S. states are far bigger bookworms than others.

The number of adults who read at least one novel, play or poem within the past 12 months fell to 47% in 2012 from 50% in 2008, according to a new survey of over 37,000 Americans, “A Decade of Arts Engagement,” by the National Endowment for the Arts, a government agency that promotes artistic excellence.

Fiction reading rose from 2002 to 2008, but has been dropping ever since — and is now back to 2002 levels. By comparison, 30 years ago 56% of Americans read fiction. The decline in fiction reading last year occurred mostly among white Americans, including women and men of various educational backgrounds; rates held steady among non-white and Hispanic groups, the report found.

Men are more likely to read nonfiction books than fiction, while the opposite holds true for women: 55% of women read fiction in 2012, and 48% read nonfiction, according to an update of a previous NEA report released in 2013. Young adults are more likely to read fiction than nonfiction books, whereas the oldest Americans (aged 75 and older) are more likely to read nonfiction books, the NEA found. Literary reading varied widely from state-to-state: It was 63% in Washington state, far above the national average, and 56% in Colorado, Rhode Island and Connecticut, but just 34% in Alabama, 36% in Virginia and 37% in Nevada.

Like newspapers, sales of print books are declining. Just 54% of Americans cracked open a book of any kind last year — print or digital, fiction or nonfiction. But novels have suffered more than nonfiction in recent years, according to research firm Nielsen. Total adult print book sales fell 2.5% to nearly 501.6 million in 2013 from 2012; adult nonfiction sales were broadly flat at 225.2 million, while fiction sales dropped 11% to 103.5 million. Emily Dickinson, if she were alive today, would have the biggest reason to be depressed: In the past decade, poetry suffered the steepest decline in readership for any literary genre. Only 6.7% of American adults read poetry last year, versus 12% in 2002, the NEA report found. On the upside, e-books are helping to offset this trend: 28% of adults read an e-book in 2013, up from 23% the year before, according to the Pew Research Internet Project.

The dip in fiction reading could be just temporary. “We have to be careful about making too much of changes from one point in time to another in examining any social phenomenon,” says Elizabeth Birr Moje, an education professor at the University of Michigan. Post-recession, people may be working harder or spending more time reading things other than books online, she says. And some speculate that the quality of books could be partially to blame for the decline. “Book publishers need to be more creative at developing new book ideas that attract and retain readers,” says Peter Hildick-Smith, president of market researcher Codex Group. “With only so many leisure hours each day, they have to up their game.”

Why the slump in reading fiction? Self-help books and biographies may have a certain utilitarian appeal, says New York-based author Christopher Sorrentino. “Who wants to spend two weeks reading a novel that you might not like very much?” he says. Novels do have obvious benefits, of course. Reading fiction — perhaps not surprisingly — can improve empathy, according to a study by researchers at the New School published in the journal Science last year. “That was sort of a ‘duh’ moment,” Sorrentino says. Whether a book is fiction or non-fiction may even be less important than what the book is about. Reading non-fiction along the lines of Ralph Waldo Emerson or Henry David Thoreau, for instance, might increase empathy, he says. But “it’s hard to imagine feeling more empathetic after reading [Thomas] Bernhard or [William S.] Burroughs.”

The waning literary leanings of American adults

Source: National Endowment for the Arts

In an era of social networking and sharing, it’s also harder to bond around the water cooler over a novel. Thousands of works of fiction are published every year, Sorrentino says, but only a few hundred come to the attention of a discerning reading public through newspaper reviews or celebrity endorsements like, say, Oprah Winfrey’s book club. Of course, there are occasional exceptions to the water cooler rule such as “Gone Girl” and “Fifty Shades of Grey.” “It’s really hard to read William Faulkner and go into the office and say, “What did you think of that last chapter of ‘Light in August’?” These days, people get their fictional narratives from complex characters on cable television, he says.

Another possible explanation: Narcissism. Americans may be more fascinated with their own lives than with those featured in great works of literary fiction: Some 56% of Internet users have searched for themselves online, such as by typing their own name into Google, according to the Pew Research Center. Studies also show that people’s attention spans are getting shorter. “Adults have been presented with a tidal wave of easily accessible and affordable entertainment, such as online social gaming, music discovery via YouTube and Vevo, and TV and movie sites like Hulu and Netflix,” says Jim Azevedo, marketing director of e-book distributor Smashwords.com. Americans spend 23 hours per week using social media, emailing and texting, a 2013 report by eMarketer found.

Amid broader cultural signs showing a move away from literature, publishers of fiction may be swimming against the tide. Students have been abandoning the humanities in favor of the sciences: The number of students taking bachelor degrees in humanities hovers at around 8%, less than half the number four decades earlier, according to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. And in a study released in 2013, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ranked Americans just 16 out of 23 industrialized countries in literacy. Media coverage of Alice Munro’s Nobel Prize might spark some renewed interest in her work, Sorrentino says. “I’m sure her sales will increase, but will her books appear on the bestseller list? I tend to doubt it.”