Anyone proposing to publish a polemic between hard covers about the decline of literacy and reading will, of course, find themselves preaching to the choir. If you read books, you will agree with this one; if you don’t, your negligence will not be touched by its fervour. I won’t say that it is a useless object; merely how unhelpful it would be simply to agree with its main point.
The decline of reading practices is quite convincingly demonstrated in surveys. Fewer and fewer people in the US and Britain read habitually, by their own admission. In one celebrated case, an entire cohort of English literature academics in America was unable to make anything at all of the first page of Bleak House. The trend seems to correspond with a decline in general intellectual ability, as reported in IQ tests. The explanation for this is given as the rise of smartphones and online distractions, which may have accelerated a process already observable since the introduction of screens of all sorts. In a fascinating, puckish study cited by James Marriott, the slow roll-out of cable TV across Norway’s challenging terrain is shown to correspond exactly to a small but measurable fall in IQ in each location.
