Changes in the Nature of Reading?

In the past year my reading has consisted of

Online reading of classics at Project Gutenburg (on a Ravenloft inspired bout of 19th Century Gothic Horror atm)
Online reading of Text books at Google Books
Wikipedia articles
Enworld
Lots of online RPG modules
Aelyria PbP
and maybe 3 books from the local Library

(I'm not including the gardening books on my bookshelf, the magazines I subcribe to or my dictionarys (I use to read that for fun))
 

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What are you lamenting? That people don't have time to read or that people don't read the classics? I read physical books all the time, mostly fantasy with a smattering of scifi. You could not pay me to read something like Tolstoy for fun. I'm 43 in case that matters. I'm also a total geek, computer programmer by day, and yet I don't own a smart phone/tablet/ereader. I don't carry a laptop around with me. I commute 2 hours a day by train. I see lots of people reading kindles and ipads. And I see similar numbers of people just sitting staring at Outlook composing an email or waiting for an email to arrive. (I personally enjoy watching a game of Angry Birds on a tablet. It's nice and big and you can see it several seats away.)

But when I'm hanging with friends, we don't discuss what we are reading because there's only so much time to spend together. Better to spend it keeping up with important matters or real life, like how smart my kid is. :)
 

What are you lamenting?

If you're asking me I'm not lamenting anything in particular, I'm making an observation about how technology may be changing reading habits based on the type of technology that's being used to read off of.

But let me ask you a question out of curiosity. You're 43 (younger than me) and I don't commute as my home is my office. So the observations you mad interested me. Do you think commuters and people who travel on business (regularly, I have meetings but two or three every two weeks or so) prefer reading off things like Kindles to books (I know you can't generlaize completely, just asking your opinion) because Kindles feel more like laptops and so the technology sort of integrates with their other work devices?

I hadn't really thought of it that way before, that there might be a sort of "work familiarity" or synchronization between devices, but now that you mention it, that's an interesting possibility.

I'm also interested in the idea of technology as both an aid to efficiency, but also having the unintended consequence of possible fragmenting society by making so many different types of materials available that few people are reading (or listening to) the same things. Anybody have an opinion on that?
 

Do you think commuters and people who travel on business (regularly, I have meetings but two or three every two weeks or so) prefer reading off things like Kindles to books (I know you can't generlaize completely, just asking your opinion) because Kindles feel more like laptops and so the technology sort of integrates with their other work devices?

I think commuters may prefer reading from e-readers more than folks who don't have long commutes not because the technology integrates with their other work devices. I think they may prefer it because it is a convenience.

My wife, for example, frequently drives an hour to where she's working. She isn't reading while commuting, as she's driving. She reads during lunch hours, and occasionally when work is slow. She's a medical professional. She doesn't spend much of her day in front of a computer - her work devices are stethoscopes and syringes.

She likes the e-reader for the convenience. Ever see a novel in Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series? The things are monsters. When she starts getting near the end of one, she wants the second with her to start if she finishes the first. That would mean she'd have to carry two major physical objects around.

Or, she could just carry one Nook.

This, compared to me - I do spend most of my day in front of a computer, but I don't have an e-reader. Of the two of us, I'm the one who deals with tech at work, and I'm the one who knows how to get devices to work better. But she's the one with the iPod Touch, the Nook, and the feature-phone with the slide out qwerty keyboard. She has the newer laptop, too, by the way, and she's the one who regularly uses a GPS device.

She has those devices not because they integrate with her work technology but because they make her life easier. I don't have them because I don't have the same patterns as hers, so they're not as useful to me.
 

But she's the one with the iPod Touch, the Nook, and the feature-phone with the slide out qwerty keyboard. She has the newer laptop, too, by the way, and she's the one who regularly uses a GPS device.

Where I come from we say that's because, "she's the woman." :)

I use technology too for work, but away from work I don't want it around me. I carry a cell phone, in case I have to make an emergency call, otherwise it's in my backpack, not on my person or even on. I carry a compass and a map, not a GPS, though I got one for Search and Rescue purposes.

If I didn't have a family and needed a cell-phone for their security I wouldn't have one. Didn't have one for eight years til my wife convinced me of the security advantages.

Really I can't say how I'd react to an e-reader. I'm ambivalent, but I don't have one yet cause I just think the technology hasn't developed enough yet to interest me. It doesn't yet do what I think it ought to be able to do. I'm not against them though. Just not yet interested.

But ya got a good point about the convenience. Like a cell phone they're probably very convenient.
 

I'm also interested in the idea of technology as both an aid to efficiency, but also having the unintended consequence of possible fragmenting society by making so many different types of materials available that few people are reading (or listening to) the same things. Anybody have an opinion on that?

It may make me sound a bit of a cumudgeon )I'm 39btw) but recently a 'teen- 20' radio show had a competiton asking listeners to finish a few common phrases including "Hunky ~" (meaning to be fine, well) and "Kick the ~" (meaning to die).

I was shocked at just how many of the callers got the answers wrong, with replies ranging from Hunky Tonk Man to Hunky Muffin.

Anyway there may be some merit to the supposition that 'todays youth*' do not have the same culutral references as previous generations did and this may be due to having much more focussed (and thus narrower and fragmented) access to information...

*damn typing that is killing me!
 

I was shocked at just how many of the callers got the answers wrong, with replies ranging from Hunky Tonk Man to Hunky Muffin.

Made me laugh. Out loud.

I'll tell ya something else that tickles me. My kids say stuff to me all of the time like, "Hey dad, some random guy is on the phone to talk to you."

I say, "that's not the definition of random."

To which they say, "didn't you guys say 'random stuff' when you were a kid?"

"No girls, we usually tried thinking first."
 

I haven't been much of a library user- I go there for research mainly- but for my reading habits, I just buy buttloads of books.

That said, my own personal bit of info on this topic: when I was in my first year of law school (1993), I did as I usually still do- I carried a book with me, usually science fiction or fantasy.

So one day, I was sitting down in a lounge area between classes, noshing on a bagel & some tea while reading a book. About 15 minutes into my break, someone looked over me an asked, incredulously, "What are you doing?

"I'm reading a book," I responded, cautiously...thinking I had possibly missed a class or something.

"For FUN?" was the reply.

And then it all came into focus: almost nobody around me was a reader. There I was in a graduate level program in which the skill of reading was paramount in importance and nobody else was a reader. Sure, most read the local paper, and some read things like the Wall St. Journal or Time Magazine or The Economist. But books? Nope: not unless they were assigned.

Which then explained to me why I was one of the few people who understood what a "Sword of Damocles" was when the professors used it as a metaphor for a particular kind of law and other references to classical literature, myth and legend. While that might not be surprising in society as a whole, I had a different expectation from people who had already had 4 years of college. And clearly, so did the instructors.

When I went back to school for an MBA in 2003, the story was similar, but not as pronounced. I found a LOT more readers in the smaller MBA school than in the law school I attended.

So...yes, I DO think that there is a shift in reading habits, even among the most educated among us. (At least, in the USA.)
 
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And then it all came into focus: almost nobody around me was a reader. There I was in a graduate level program in which the skill of reading was paramount in importance and nobody else was a reader. Sure, most read the local paper, and some read things like the Wall St. Journal or Time Magazine or The Economist. But books? Nope: not unless they were assigned.

Which then explained to me why I was one of the few people who understood what a "Sword of Damocles" was when the professors used it as a metaphor for a particular kind of law and other references to classical literature, myth and legend. While that might not be surprising in society as a whole, I had a different expectation from people who had already had 4 years of college. And clearly, so did the instructors.

When I went back to school for an MBA in 2003, the story was similar, but not as pronounced. I found a LOT more readers in the smaller MBA school than in the law school I attended.

So...yes, I DO think that there is a shift in reading habits, even among the most educated among us. (At least, in the USA.)

Sad Dan, but I've long noticed the same myself.

However if it makes ya feel any better I think, from my observations, there is a group in the middle, between drop-outs, and the supposedly highly educated, who do still read a lot. (And I can't imagine being truly educated without reading, you just can't attend enough lectures or classes or even field experience through trial and error to get your whole education that way.)

With modern technology I can't really tell ya what they're reading, but I see a lot of them doing it.

Maybe, and I don't really wanna put this in terms of class exactly, but maybe there are three groups of people in this regard: those who don't read because they have no interest in it and think it will do them no good, those who don't read because they think they are too good to read and it is therefore unnecessary, and those who read because it strikes them as natural and useful to understand things, and to understand how others throughout time and in different places have understood things.

Again, that doesn't say what they read. Merely if they do, or don't.
 

About 7 years ago, one of my profs told me something that a European colleague of his told him that is tangential to this.

The man said, "if you want someone who is the best in his field, hire an American. If you want someone who is good enough and won't be boring at a cocktail party, hire anyone BUT an American."

The speaker's point: Americans will learn whatever it is they need to do a job, and will take pride in that skill...but may learn it to the exclusion of anything of deep cultural significance, whereas other societies seem to value having a well-rounded education (arts, literature, culture, politics, etc.) more highly than we do.

The sad thing is, even though it's a stereotype, I've also seen the grain of truth from which it sprang all too often. I can't tell you how many guys I know- educated guys- whose conversation rarely strays outside the boundaries of their last session of Medal of Honor or a couple of TV shows. The question "Read any good books lately?" is almost like throwing out conversational spike strips.
 

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