Isolated "content consumption" vs deep reading and discussing

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“There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: he may be considered as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer combines these three — storyteller, teacher, enchanter — but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer.” Vladimir Nabokov

I am very pro people reading. I work in a library. Last year when I was asked what session I would put on for Ideas For Freedom, Workers’ Liberty’s weekend of discussion, debate, and education, I proposed a session “Why you should read books”. I write for and sell a newspaper.

I agree with Marriott and Daniel Randall that there is an interconnected problem of media literacy, reading, social media and thinking. I am worried about that.

Marriott argues we are all becoming stupider because smartphones mean we are not reading books. Books are uniquely good, complex thinking is inseparable from reading and writing and underpins democracy and social progress. Marriott’s initial essay contained serious errors which were largely avoided by Daniel. If we are going to have a prolonged debate in the paper on the essay, those need to be addressed.

Simplistic explanations

Lots of factors drove a massive increase in reading in Victorian Britain. The technology was in place (better cheaper paper and faster printing); literacy increased dramatically, rising wages because of unions and reduced tariffs affecting food meant more people could afford books; the removal of the window tax in 1851 meant people could see books inside their homes. Material conditions are many faceted. Reading is so intertwined into our lives that many factors affect how and what we read.

Of course, smartphones and social media are part of the issue, but they are not the full picture.

Standardised testing has a corrosive effect on children and young people’s engagement with text. Instead of teaching people to read whole books, to think to be intellectually curious, we teach them to pass tests, often with crafted model answer frameworks. Before working in a library, I worked on a phoneline for the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) the Quango responsible for developing and maintaining the National Curriculum in England. I worked there during the 2008 SATs fiasco where the system performed so badly that the QCA and KS3 SATs were both abolished.

After the announcement of the end of SATs a teacher called me to ask if the end of the KS3 tests meant he should start teaching the whole book rather than one scene of a Shakespeare play. I told him he was always supposed to be teaching the whole book but in truth his method was the logic of the entire system – drum in test answers, not discover literature.

Marriott also gives no attention at all to austerity; its effect on education and literacy. Could the fact hundreds of libraries have closed, that education at all levels is in funding crisis, that people are poorer with less social support have any bearing on reading habits? There are many other factors to consider the mental health crisis, health effects of covid which are ignored to fuel the simplistic reading.

The world of print is orderly, logical and rational

Marriott makes the absurd claim that the “world of print is orderly, logical and rational” in contrast to the “more emotional, more angry, more chaotic” non-print form. It is certainly true that “to engage with the written word”, as the media theorist Neil Postman wrote, can be “to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning.”

Books have many advantages, you can experience ideas from another time and space, you can go back and check, writing helps us clarify things. But we should not overstate their difference, and we certainly should not claim the difference between writing and speaking is that of reason vs emotion.

A series of lectures or in-person meetings does not need to be angry or unreasoned. It would be terrible if we were to lose deep reading and writing but also terrible if we lost human speech and listening. The spoken and written word overlap and inform each other for good and ill.

The fact that Marriott thinks TikTok is uniquely dangerous because you “can charm your audience into submission” suggests to me he has not read many books or love letters. Are books not too spaces of “rage”? Do they not cause people to “weep”? Treasure Island is clever and crafted; it is also exciting. The Colour Purple can teach you things and make you cry. Reading Marx can teach you economics, make you sad, make you laugh, make you angry.

Much of the potential of literature is the exact opposite of the order and calm Mariott projects. As Keats said of Shakespeare: “...several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason...”

Some books benefit from clarity and clear reasoned argument, others make you think because you have to work to understand them and leave some questions unanswered. If on a winter's night a traveller the 1979 experimental novel by Italo Calvino, will teach you more about reading and writing than Marriott. It is also chaotic. It is the complexity possible in the written form that makes creating such dizzying, beautiful chaos possible.

Not just books

Marriott’s desire to place books in a special category also leads him to ignore that the “post-literacy” deep-reading problem is happening in other areas too. The majority of films are designed to be watched whilst double screening. Plot points are repeated, themes are literally explained in dialogue, every so often there will be something very loud to get your attention, leading to patronising and unedifying experiences.

There are fewer public debates, fewer in-person meetings, fewer in-public intellectuals. Speech has not taken over text; complex public and social intellectual life has been pushed out in favour of isolated content consumption. The public infrastructure of social democracy – reading groups, workers' education – have disappeared with the defeat of the labour movement.

“Moved by irrational appeals and prone to mob thinking”

Daniel does not pretend Marriott is a socialist but his belief in enlightened administration as the route out of our current crisis is wrapped up in his thesis, it is not simply incidental.

He speaks of illiterate medieval peasants as “moved by irrational appeals and prone to mob thinking.” Certainly, we would not want our political programme decided by medieval peasants – but were they wrong to be moved? Medieval peasant mobs carried out militant actions against tyrannical rule, they drove more social progress than the Catholic scholars who wrote and read extensively. Is it only books that distinguishes the worker from the peasant? Is the world divided simply into periods and classes of reader and non-reader?

Daniel has written convincingly on how much of the left lost its way when it split the political off from the economic, and political action assumed an overdetermining intellectual, moral and voluntarist character. It seems odd to me that he is so soft on this liberal variant.

Reports of the death of reading are greatly exaggerated and often repeated

We should know we are not alone in worrying about the loss of deep reading. As long as there has been mass reading there has been fears that we are doing it less, or doing it wrong.

Cheap novels, radio, cinema, literary cliquishness, narcissistic autofiction, academic pretensions - many potential assassins have been accused since the “reading revolution”. Literary rescue missions pepper the history of writing. Medieval Latin was shaken up by renaissance bad boys Dante and Petrarch. The Romantic poets insisted writing in “the language really used by men”. Bell hooks drags a new oral tradition into scholarly writing.

New social movements and struggles will emerge and with them will bring more culture including reading and writing that demands sustained attention. It is possible we cannot reinvigorate writing without reinvigorating our broader social world, as Trotsky says “to create it, the poet himself must feel the world in a new way”.

We are right to worry and sound the alarm because that is part of the process by which writing reinvents itself but we should not imagine we are inevitably walking into literary oblivion. Marriott sets out to convince us that if nobody ever read a book again the world would be a lot worse – sure, is anyone arguing the contrary?

My primary worry with Marriott is that his writing is more of a manifestation of the insubstantial, instant and outraged literary style of the internet than a concrete analysis of it.

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