Graeme Philipson, whose views I attacked a few posts ago, dislikes people who so much as question the new electronic order. How he would despise someone like Susan Jacoby, who thinks the US is becoming stupider and more ignorant. She believes the decline of reading is in part to blame. (Her other causes, ‘anti-rationalism’, populism and fundamentalism.)
She says, forget about what kids are getting from the screen; what are they missing on the page? In business terms, what are the opportunity costs of kids not reading books?
Which in turn makes me wonder (a) what do kids 11-19 actually read nowadays? (b) what did they read in the 1960s (or whichever period one selects) and (c) is anyone framing up the question in something like that way? It would be easy to kill any such project by pointing out that what’s read makes sense only if you consider how it’s read. But perhaps there’s a way around that.