Behind the Times. George F. Will bemoans a purported drop in reading, in a column that is at once uncomprehending of what is really going on and ends in melodramatic nonsense:

Britain then [1940] still had the cohesion of a common culture of shared reading. That cohesion enabled Britain to stay the hand of Hitler, a fact pertinent to today's new age of barbarism.

What drivel! How did he get to such a ridiculous conclusion? Well, he started by decrying this short set of statistics:

A survey of 17,135 persons reveals an accelerating decline in the reading of literature, especially among the young. Literary reading declined 5 percent between 1982 and 1992, then 14 percent in the next decade. Only 56.9 percent of Americans say they read a book of any sort in the past year, down from 60.9 percent in 1992. Only 46.7 percent of adults read any literature for pleasure.

None of that leads anywhere near his alarmist conclusion. Quite the contrary, we have far more shared culture today, thanks to mass media, and are far more integrated over space, thanks to the Internet, than ever before.
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Until quite recently, (a) most people worked at an occupation (agriculture, manufacturing) that kept them away from reading and (b) the only fiction or news sources available to them were in printed form. Today, by stark contrast, (a)  a large proportion of people have to read for hours a day as part of their job. They are not eager to go from reading at work to reading at home, from reading as work to reading as leisure. Who can blame them? And (b) fiction and information of many types are readily available to them in visual and spoken form, so they don't have to work — and let's not pretend that reading isn't work — to be entertained or informed. Mass-marketed movies (in theaters and at home), TV shows, DVD's, videotapes, spoken books on audiotape, etc., etc., are widely enjoyed and create huge communities of shared experience. Much of TV is informational, from the most serious explications of crises in the past available on the History Channel to the litest-weight celeb gossip on E! And passive absorption of pre-packaged pap via TV screen is not the only way people take in entertainments and information in the electronic age.
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Will himself observes that:

By 1995 — before the flood of video games and computer entertainments for adults — television swallowed 40 percent of Americans' free time, up one-third since 1965. Today electronic entertainments other than television fill 5.5 hours of the average child's day.

"Electronic entertainments other than television" include not just video games but also surfing the Internet, "chatting" in Internet chatrooms and via Instant Messenger, exchanging emails, reading and posting to news groups and online forums on everything from celebrities to teen angst to sci-fi and even politics. The "blogosphere" has become a major hangout for millions of teens. And the bulk of things posted on the Internet are in written form, not pictures. So when kids are spending 5.5 hours on these "electronic entertainments other than television", they may actually be spending a very large part of that time reading and, even more amazing, writing!
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Moreover, neither Will nor any other commentator on declining levels of reading for pleasure acknowledges that the insane spelling of English makes reading very difficult, especially when people are dealing with a literary vocabulary that is hugely larger than the vocabulary used in ordinary conversation. Many unfamiliar words have bizarre spellings that make it impossible for people to know how to pronounce them, and each time a reader encounters such a word, s/he is irritated not to know how to pronounce it, and torn between looking it up and just skipping over it. You put a whole series of such barriers between reader and what s/he is trying to read, and you progressively turn readers away from print.
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We need to accept that the spelling of English is indefensibly absurd, and must be reformed. We've got to stop throwing good money after bad, stop wasting years and years of English class time on teaching people merely to decipher absurdly spelled words (like "decipher"), stop turning people off to print, and stop blaming rational people for being unable to cope with an irrational "system" that confuses and frustrates them.
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I am a spelling reformer. In my 20s (c. 1971) I created a phonetic spelling system for English, pretty much as an idle intellectual exercise, by means of which everyone could spell every word in English unambiguously by using a single short table, one spelling per sound, such that everyone else who knows that table can understand it, even to the point of knowing what accent one speaks (e.g., by whether one writes "tamaeto" or "tamoto", "glaans" or "glons", "luetenant" or "leftenant"). I used the resulting system for personal note-taking, in part to hide my thoughts from others. But then I discovered that it was easily readable even by people who had never seen the table nor the few explanatory notes that accompany the table — and secrets I thought safe weren't safe at all.
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I realized that if my system could be read easily, I might have something of value to society, so started to promote that system, Fanetik, as a spelling reform that could at least help people learn to read, whether it were adopted as a general-purpose spelling reform or merely employed as a brief transition to traditional spelling, then as pronunciation key thereafter. When the Internet came along, I created a website where people can go to evaluate this proposal, at http://members.aol.com/Fanetiks. And on June 1st of this year I created a different website, "Simpler Spelling Word of the Day", to promote nonsystematic spelling reform, one word a day: www.geocities.com/sswordday.
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If people who agree that the traditional spelling of English is preposterous and causes serious problems of functional illiteracy, avoidance of print, and enormous waste of educational resources, can agree on ways to reform spelling, they can, from the grassroots up, force change. One easy way to start is to consult the Simpler Spelling Word of the Day website (which contains a daily word and an archive of all the simpler spellings proposed so far) and use those spellings in their personal note-taking and correspondence, Internet chats, emails, online forums, etc. In time, dictionary publishers will see these spellings as "citations" , the base research material on which today's "descriptivist" dictionaries are based. At present, some publishers resist Internet usages as lacking authority. As one webpage that seeks to collect sci-fi terms for the Oxford English Dictionary states: "E-books, Web pages, and movies are not acceptable sources for the Oxford English Dictionary (though Web pages may provide useful historical information that can be used to track down print examples, and physical copies of movie scripts can be used)." Over time, however, such snobbishness will be increasingly indefensible, as even the most careful writers make ever greater recourse to the Internet to express themselves. Thus, if 90% of all materials published on the Internet were to use "mor" rather than "more", you can bet that "mor" would soon be listed in every reputable English dictionary worldwide. In a democratic age, dictionaries and schools must eventually yield to popular usage. (Responsive to "Literary Lag", New York Post, July 24, 2004)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:24 PM