Where are the readers?

We write for many reasons. I have written, for example, to prove my scholarly credentials for tenure considerations, to share my hard-earned expertise with other professionals, to communicate with friends and relatives, to entertain children, and to confront for myself the demons lurking inside young people who kill.

My father started writing a kind of memoir when he was in his seventies; it seemed to be an exercise in remembering as well as a historical record for those who came after him.

I have read many Holocaust narratives that are testimonials to horror, written to bear witness so that no one would forget what happened to the millions who died.

My son-in-law, a drama critic for the Twin Cities City Pages, writes for a living, as do many journalists and successful authors

In THE MIDNIGHT DISEASE, neurologist Alice W. Fleming writes about writer's block and its flip side, the compulsive desire to write that can keep people hunched over a keyboard for hours,unable to stop the words from spewing forth.

For most of us, however divergent our motivations may be, there is the hope that our words will reach readers. It was unnerving, therefore, to stumble during the past week on three different arguments for the decline of reading. Nicholas Carr asks in the 2008 July/August Atlantic Monthly, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google. (Sorry; I haven't learned yet how to create links.) He notes that because of the ubiquity of text on the Internet, we may actually be reading more than ever, but it's a different kind of reading that may involve a different kind of thinikng than the extended reading of longer works of prose requires. He quotes Maryanne Wolf, a developmental scientist who wrote PROUST AND THE SQUID: THE STORY AND SCIENCE OF THE READING BRAIN, who worries that we are losing our ability to interpret text and to make the mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction.

A front-page story in today's NEW YORK TIMES (7-27-08) focuses on teens' abandonment of books for the Internet. The photo accompanying the story shows a family in their living room. Mom is reading a book; Dad is reading a newspaper. The two teens sit on the sofa with their laptops. The author points out that gleaning information from Internet texts requires the kind of critical thinking that we in the library world know as information literacy skills. However, the kind of Internet reading that most teens do for pleasure apparently requires little more than a lexicon of emoticons.

The third article to cast gloom on the future of reading was review in today's LA TIMES by Davaid Futrelle of DISTRACTED: THE EROSION OF ATTENTION AND THE COMING DARK AGE by Maggie Jackson. This is another diatribe on the consequences of digital telecommunication devices -- "the beeping Blackberries that we tote to the beach instead of the giant books we used to pretend to read." The reviewer isn't crazy about the book; he finds that ironically it lacks focus. However, it is one more piece of evidence that the cognitive demands of modern life may not lend themselves to reading the kinds of books that many of us want to write.

I'm not sure what to make of all of this. I spend a lot more time reading Internet texts than I used to and still find myself capable of sinking deeply into more literary prose. Admittedly, I write these days for other educated adults -- not for media-mad young people. But sometimes I wonder: am I blogging while Rome burns?