Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! I’m 44.4-46.6% of my way through the copy edit, depending on criteria used, no graphic as usual.

A word of warning: this is not my usual blog, it goes slightly longer, and takes a left turn along the way. Though you might think me discouraged by what I am about to share, I am not, and I ask you not to be either. Be energized, I know I am. So let us begin.

In a world without readers, where go the writers?

To the hell of impotent scribbling, one assumes. End blog.

I recently read an article bemoaning the decline in college undergraduates’ ability to read and digest coursework: that what for previous generations of students was standard has become burdensome. The rot, I learned, has started in high schools where the curriculum and the desire to teach to the test has reduced the appetite for doing something so outlandish as reading an entire novel. Apparently even watching an entire movie can now be too much for our future titans of arts and industry. Grade schoolers are slipping behind by their third year, and their outcomes are grim if they do not catch up.

A lot of this is anecdotal. And no, I have not fact-checked these links, this is not a Pulitzer entrant. I trust you, my discerning chums and pals, to use your hard earned critical thinking skills to evaluate the information you are presented with.

So I did a few searches on this subject, some of the fruit of which pepper the text above. First search I did not specify any time criteria, and quickly found we have been worrying about declining reading statistics in the United States since at least 2014. The sentiment probably goes much further back, both perhaps as a function of actual statistics showing comprehension declines, and the tendency for every generation to bemoan the next one’s lack of discipline and poor educational status in comparison to their own, when teachers were brutal and they had to conjugate calculus backwards uphill in the snow before breakfast. Twice.

But still, it was a consistent thread, and the unscientific consensus I witnessed was that it was getting worse. I refined the search to 2023 results alone, and the focus did switch more to struggles of the younger generations to read, and its negative impacts on learning beyond reading alone. Pandemic related setbacks and how to recover those lost years also figured large.

So I think that there has probably been a decline, especially if curricula have actually changed (as I saw reported/discussed), and longer form writing is abandoned to cater to shallower attention spans, which have also famously been claimed to have contracted sharply since 2000. Here is another article that gives us a slightly longer attention span, but also with a downward trend.

Why has this, is this continuing to happen? Theories abound. The pandemic made things worse, but the problem existed prior. The iPhone generation, raised on hand held screens since 2007, is now heading to college/is in college if you count those under five when the first iPhone made landfall. The negative effect of social media, and its transformation from text, to brief text and pictures, to video, to short form video, which let’s face it is normally played at double speed, consumes us. The dreaded all powerful algorithm, a subset of social media, the thing which demands our attention, and rewards us with dopamine hits if strangers like us, virtually, is subtly altering our social fabric, even perhaps the spaces in which we live.

So it’s money, as usual. Companies demanding our time, wasting our time, fragmenting our concentration, all to get hits on pages and justify their balance sheet spend on e-commerce and related marketing and advertising. We don’t shop, we are shopped, the walking product to be data mined. How charming. School boards and districts demanding more be done with less resources, quicker, and if students can’t keep up, lower the bar so they can at least appear to, on paper (figurative paper, of course). Don’t want to pay for more teachers or equipment do we? That would be scandalous. The pandemic is its own monetary beast in terms of impacts we are still living with, but however you slice it, it cost us. This wasn’t an extensive search, I’m writing a weekly blog, not indulging in untrained journalism.

 It does all beg a question for me, however. Why then, in this world of apparently shortening attention spans and decreasing literacy, with its concomitant reduction in ability to parse nuance or negotiate challenging written arguments, would anyone bother to write novels? Especially anything remotely complex?

Why write for readers who can’t read?

(They’ll listen to it on Audible. Oh, okay. I can blow a few thousand getting audiobooks made. Because the illiterate will still massively complain if the sound quality isn’t top notch, the poor darlings, or the narrator unengaging. Pay up, self-published author – pay up! The middle man demands his oversized cut! Ignore ROI! Speculate to accumulate, little creative, and give us your money! Rotten Mammon licks his fetid lips and smiles.)

To answer the question I posed before my spittle-flecked parenthetical: for me, it’s because I must. Poor bastard that I am. I want to. I like it. I want to get better. That alone is worth it, even for an audience of one. This is my mental discipline, to indulge in unto death or decline. That isn’t for everyone, however.

So for you, my chums and pals, I think you should write because there still are readers out there, despite the doomsayers, and possibly correct statistics whose provenance I have not researched, because this is not a Pulitzer entrant. If there were no readers left, if money was not there to be made from them, then the firehose of self-published content would be slowing down, (and it might be, but let’s see how the next few years shake out) and competition from AI and the arrival of novel farms would not be inevitable, in my opinion.

The future of barely literate readers and artificial writers is a depressing one, but those things will only exist if a buck is to be made, my friends.

And I made three of them this week. My slice of the pie. Yeah baby.