Bits for Rent

There was a series of ads run when I was just entering grade school, all of which tried to drive home this one zany idea: reading is good for you. The ads, paid for by Reading is Fundamental, one of the oldest if not the oldest non-profit organizations in the country, usually featured a celebrity or athlete giving a short PSA about how important it is to read, and some other words of encouragement. While the impact of the campaign is hard to judge in retrospect, thinking back on it now makes me question just how much time children, teenagers, and even college students, spend reading.

Reading is Fundamental featuring Shaq

Granted, I come at this topic from a very biased perspective. Among my close friends, I can only name perhaps a handful that read at their own leisure. The rest will only pick up a book if it has a name like Dan Brown or Harry Potter on the cover. (Those I know reading this that are fans of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight books, you don’t count because you are sparkly non-humans. Sorry.)

I, on the other hand, read voraciously. Not that I can crush a book in a few hours — I’m actually slow as hell — but I just find it to be an enjoyable experience. A good novel can be just as exciting to me as the latest LOST or Breaking Bad. Plus, I’m sort of a sponge when it comes to information; I’m willing to learn about almost anything, and a lot of the fun in reading a book or watching, say, the Discovery channel is learning about cool shit you would normally never have noticed.

So why is it that the newspaper industry is withering into a frail, forgotten relic of the past and that this new online-enabled generation is so averse to paperbacks? Have Americans finally shucked the last remnants of tradition from their lives or is this part of something larger? I can think of three pretty good reasons for why paper is out, and everything else — movies, TV, gaming, music, youtube, et al — is in:

1. The Move to Online Has Made Reading More Difficult

This is something that a lot of people addressing the fall of print tend to overlook. When reading text online over a long period of time, our eyes feel far more strained than they do when we read printed text. A lot of this has to do with the nature of the display. When we were using CRT monitors, information was being spit out onto the screen in much the same way tube-based televisions work: a line of colors was sprayed onto the glass one line at a time, filling in vertically from top to bottom. This process normally takes place at a rate of 60 or 75 Hz, which means that each line would be “refreshed” every 1/60 or 1/75 of a second. So, when you see footage of a monitor flickering in the background or when your monitor actually begins to flicker, what you’re seeing is actually the switching of the image from the old data to new data. The faster this switch occurs, the more it seems like it was one image. Think of it like spinning fan blades: the fast the fan goes, the harder it is to distinguish the individual blades. By speeding up a refresh rate, we fool our eyes into thinking they’re seeing a solid object, rather than flashes of data.

Still with me? Good.

What this all boils down to is that monitors, since they cannot display solid images, make reading difficult. They are much better suited to displaying video, like a television set, because the motion inherent in that medium masks the constantly refreshing lines of data. Thus, if we are sitting in front of a computer, our brains are naturally going to push us towards watching something on Hulu or Youtube than towards an article from the New York Times. With technology pushing us more and more into a world full of electronic displays and digital data, it makes perfect sense that reading has begun to fall off. It is simply not conducive to the lifestyle we are all adopting.

Thankfully, however, technology works like a pendulum, always coming back to its point of origin before proceeding onward again. New display technologies such as e-ink and OLED (organic light-emitting diodes, for the nerds) promise to make staring at a screen far easier on our eyes. The former, used in e-book readers such as Amazon’s Kindle, displays a static page of text, thereby mimicking the look of printed text. It feels incredibly natural to look at, and serves as a solid replacement for carrying a book or newspaper around with you. Plus, the ability to have thousands of books on one device is a convenience all in of itself. So long as we continue to push for development of these kind of replacement products, reading may still have a shot. “Books” as we know them may not continue to exist outside the world of academia for much longer, but the ideas carried within the will always have a home somewhere.

2. A Surplus of Entertainment

This one is pretty straightforward. Simply put, the internet is a vast ocean of content. There are websites hosting video, only bit players in the online world, that have enough content to let you watch something new every hour for years. Most of them, you haven’t heard of. Others, such as Hulu, Crackle, and youtube, upload so much new material that it would take dedication and a large helping of omnipotence on the viewer’s part to try and consume it all. And that’s just video. We also have audio websites, such as Last.fm and Pandora, that let us find new artists, listen to our favorites, and create our very own personalized radio stations. Plus, there’s a whole world of free web games out there. Kongregate, for example, hosts thousands of titles, has multiplayer and community features, tracks achievements for registered users, and charges nary a penny to do it. And this is just some of the stuff online that I happen to know offhand. We also have iPods, Nintendo DSes, PSPs, smartphones and other handheld devices to carry with us in our back pockets, ready to entertain us at a moments notice, with no need for a light so that you can read at night or a place to sit, since you can’t really walk around reading without running the risk of crashing into someone or something.

The world is, quite literally, at our fingertips. Knowing that, do we really still have time to see if Professor Langdon finds the next clue?

3. The Fickle Consumer

The title is rather self-explanatory. As devourers — because at the rate at which we receive information, be it from twitter, facebook, youtube, whathaveyou, it really is devouring — of media content, we like the flexibility of being able to choose what we’re going to entertain ourselves with in our free time. I can go on Hulu right now and pick from watching an episode of Fringe, or maybe Family Guy, or maybe The Daily Show, or maybe I’ll watch a movie. But nothing is forcing me to watch any of these, or even watch something at all.

Compare that to reading a book. When you crack open the cover on a novel, you feel an obligation to continue reading that damn stack of paper until you’ve reached the end. Most likely that wouldn’t occur in one sitting. But as that book lies on your nightstand, or your desk, you look at it with a sense of foreboding — it must be finished. It isn’t right to stop reading it after three chapters. You’ll never know what happens if you stop now. With TV or film, the commitment is hardly ever more than a few hours. With a book, it could take you months before you reach the last page. That bothers us, a lot.

And so, reading is not beloved, but begrudged. We know that it can be fun — the success of Harry Potter proves it — but yet we also know it can be very tiring, even boring. Hell, “textbook” is practically slang for “bore you to death.” Reading has failed because the nature of the process is unforgiving. A TV show can have a bad episode or scene, but still be worth watching. (Heroes somehow keeps getting renewed, after all.) A book, if its bad, has no fallback. There are no hidden pages glued together; the entire package is there, before your eyes, irreparable for all eternity. So we divest ourselves of reading, of going to the bookstore and picking up a random novel on the shelf, of sitting back on a rainy day and transporting ourselves into the mind of great storyteller. We turn on the TV instead, and tune out.

If you’ve stayed with me this far, did you tune out while you were reading some of this? Did you want to go check someone’s status updates, or just wish I’d get to the damn point already? Did that youtube link just send you off on a tangent of viewing that you never recovered from? Perhaps one of the above is true for some of you. Even so, don’t let the irony of the moment be lost on you. As you just read 1600 words on the slow death of reading, you were in fact preserving that very enterprise. So thank you, for reading, and for valuing words just a little bit more than something else that could have kept you busy for as long as this took to finish. Even if it was just this once.