My Mumblings on Reading, Writing and the Field of Literature with Media

I read quite a bit. It's how I like to spend time. If it's via my feeds, a magazine subscription I've stacked up, an academic journal or a good ol' fashioned book; my face will show you my current state of mind as to what I'm reading. I've once been labeled "binge reader"^[1] for spending so much time reading books by bell hooks in succession, something I try to do once every two years; as I read the books she's referenced and make connections to my life - though challenging because it focuses on a more traditional Black American family structure. I enjoy reading as it's been a way to not relinquish my ability to imagine over to television: something I've begun to understand as its primary form, an imposition of its^[2] perspective of a story. It's not a novel concept; folks like Guy Debord and Jonathan Cracy have contested this as the "natural" evolution of things like radio and early film. We had a brief counterrevolution with this in the 80s and 90s with the rise of things like VHS and to a lesser extent, DVD-RWs in the 2000s, but folks began to want the more "premier experience" that you found in more commercial places, like theatres. It's harder to perceive this in the short term (over a decade-long window, for example) but when it's zoomed out to just double that, the perspectives on it get a bit frustrating to find ways not to acknowledge. I do find it hard to nudge folks to read books, even those aligned to their interests. It could be my approach! There's a documentary I watched some time ago that made mention of the nature of literature in early Europe and how the government and church worked hard to prevent people from doing so. It was tied to how it was encouraging people to revolt (which, when not spoken from the lips of a bureaucrat, means the laborers are organizing too quickly). People had to take measures to have printing press move on water to avoid being seized by authorities.

It's fair, then, to say at a point in time, people were hungry to read! Perhaps not everyone, but there was a large enough group of folks who were eager to learn, share or just laugh at the captured moments of others. I think that's falling off hard. It's difficult to see that within the spheres I'm in immediately within the tech sphere, at least online. However, stepping a bit outside of that, thinking of people I know who spend a lot of time (or effectively work) on places like TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Twitch, this is less of the case. Unlike groups like Pew or Gallup, I'm not going to make a claim that this is representative of the entirety of a group of people. I can say that I'm not necessarily a recluse and that even then, the amount of people I find that read, even not solely for pleasure, makes up a very small demographic of the people I know and have experienced^[3]. There's also Terrance's post about the skill required for both reading and writing that made me wonder if I should try to make video forms of my blog — but I immediately dashed that aside.

There was a post on Instagram that Dexter made that truly sparked this. More people in my generation and younger (so those who are at most 31 and younger - the youngest end of the "millennials" and the "elder Gen Z" community) do not use long form reading as a primary vector of information discovery. In fact, his prediction was that it'd turn into a "luxury" for those who have time to read. This makes sense given the increasing course work students have, the amount of work outside of school that they have take on (thinking of my own family in this case) and how very little institutional efforts have been made to encourage reading as a means of discovery. It's not to say that reading is more important than anything else. It's also not to demean other forms of storytelling - it's not the oldest by far. It makes things like Reading Rainbow seem like a form of nostalgia for folks. There's a moment before James Baldwin visited the Nation of Islam for the first time that I think about a lot about those who acquire books for entertainment and not for growth:

Here was the South Side [of Chicago] — a million in captivity — stretching from this doorstep as far as the eye could see. And they didn't even read; depressed populations don't have the time or energy to spare. The affluent populations, which should have been their help, didn't as far as could be discovered, read, either — they merely bought books and devoured them, but not in order to learn; in order to learn new attitudes.^[4]

This isn't meant to be all doom and gloom. In fact, we see books being adapted for film all of the time; meaning that there's an interest in the form still, ranging from the legendary Octavia Bulter's Kindred to the infamous Game of Thrones^[5]. Netflix, for one, has been adapting quite a few into limited series with amazing casts, in recent day. Two that I enjoyed first as a TV show and then got very interested by the books are examples of a way of it being a form of "lead generation". But by that time, there's a chance that the book has caught on and accrued a lot of attention. This also requires acknowledging how with the growing "content" industry, there's going to be a lot of cross-pollination to create more and more things for people to consume their time with, especially in ways that Cracy describes as "anti-social"^[6]. Netflix is perhaps easy to single out, but in retrospect to the generational gap mentioned above, people can watch these intense and dense worlds on a small device, all to themselves — alone.

My concern is that this might shift the focus of newer writers and authors to make content that can be made "infinite", produced and reproduced on loop such that distributors now capture a lot of the value. I imagine that authors are consenting to this business transaction (it's all business) but what does that say of the craft of writing; of writing stories — if that stories are not meant (or designed) to be read but watched? Again, this is not to ignore the craft of show writing — I am very happy for those working on shows like Abbot Elementary, Mr. Corman, Dark Matter and other shows I'd liked. This makes me question how I choose what I read (and watch, listen, etc) since the explicit nature of society is to model and suggest human behavior around consumption. I think of those of us living in the West, especially in the privileged West where we can "nestle up" to a nice read under a stormy read with no immediate worry. What is it that we read that helps deify (or reify) this social order? Is the escape a way of ignoring the potentiality of action that could make this action more commonplace? Why is it that it's now almost a luxury to read but almost no one does it?

I'm hoping to write more about what I read; not just in a passive review way — although it's very difficult to provide in-depth reviews on everything but in a way that allows me to be more self-referential in a constructive way. Perhaps things and behaviors like that, with use of the Internet but also contemporaries in the offline spaces like libraries and book stores, can help squelch this fear I have.