"Twilight of the Books" by Caleb Crain

It does not really come as a surprise to me that reading has declined over the past few decades. I tend to think that, in general, this generation of kids and teenagers has gone away from doing things such as reading books to doing things like surfing the Internet and playing electronic gaming systems like XBox. These forms of modern entertainment make it harder to just calmly read a book. A quote from the sixth paragraph of the article seems to support my belief: "As far as reading habits were concerned, academic credentials mattered less than whether a person had been raised in the era of television. The N.E.A., in its twenty years of data, has found a similar pattern. Between 1982 and 2002, the percentage of Americans who read literature declined not only in every age group but in every generation -- even in those moving from youth into middle age, which is often considered the most fertile time of life for reading. We are reading less as we age, and we are reading less than people who were our age ten or twenty years ago."

I was actually kind of surprised that some of the statistics were not worse. The statistic in the second paragraph of the article said, "In 1982, 56.9 per cent of Americans had read a work of creative literature in the previous twelve months. The proportion fell to fifty-four per cent in 1992, and to 46.7 per cent in 2002." I would have thought that the percentage drop would have been greater in the 20 year period from 1982 to 2002 because technologies like the Internet were used by many more people in 2002 than in 1982.

I agree with the scholar Walter J. Ong's speculation "that television and similar media are taking us into an era of "secondary orality," akin to the primary orality that existed before the emergence of text" (fourteenth paragraph of the article). With the advent of new technologies, we seem to be moving away from face-to-face interactions to indirect ways of communication (e-mail, for example).

This article raises an important concern, "that reading books for pleasure will one day be the province of a special 'reading class'" (seventh paragraph of the article). It makes you realize the huge impact that technology has had on how much time this generation now spends reading for pleasure as compared to previous generations.