
Reading Got Farm Women Through the Depression - samclemens
https://daily.jstor.org/how-reading-got-farm-women-through-the-depression/
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ridhwaan
Our culture is moving or has already moved away from a reading culture.
Instead of spending free time reading, people watch Netflix, Youtube, TikTok
etc. I think that has huge consequences on human behavior. Where as once
people would read the newspaper and be able to think about what is happening
in the world, people today scroll through their feed where in one instant they
are reading an article about war crimes in South America committed by the U.S.
and in the next instant what Kylie Jenner wore to the MET gala.

~~~
dean177
“The new thing is bad, people should do more of the old thing”. If people
couldn’t watch Netflix they certainly wouldn’t be using that time to think
about important issues.

The world has not moved away from a reading culture, it never had one.

~~~
save_ferris
> it never had one.

How can you say that? Literacy was once a very strong proxy to wealth, and
still retains a connection today. Books have been fundamental to many aspects
of human history.

If Russia never had a culture of reading, then how does the Communist
Manifesto drive an entire society, millions of people, to overthrow its
familial leaders before the era of television?

~~~
wahern
> how does the Communist Manifesto drive an entire society, millions of
> people, to overthrow its familial leaders before the era of television?

It didn't and couldn't. That was the conceit and power behind Lenin's
"vanguard" concept. Only a small minority needed to be ideologically driven;
everybody else could and did join sides based on more practical,
individualized motivations. See, generally,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguardism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguardism)

That said, I'm not trying to opine on whether, when, and how popular book
reading was or still is.

~~~
monadic2
I agree with your statement, but I feel like it's rather splitting hairs in
terms of the entire conversation. Both the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks came out
of Iskra (and it's impossible to describe Lenin without it), and reading
culture very much fueled the rise of the vanguard and Lenin's immense
popularity. The narrative passing from Lenin to Stalin was also driven by
essays in newspapers by political figures. Reading culture was _inseparable_
from political culture at the time!

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elamje
I think we underestimate how many people understand social media, YouTube,
Netflix, etc. are/can be bad for us.

The issue is our ability to resist the addiction, which more people need tools
to handle. I appreciate what TikTok does by giving a custom video reminder to
take a break and go do something else.

I’d really like to see all major platforms forcing users off after a given
amount of time. Of course this directly competes with profit incentives so
would likely need to be regulatory.

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blueridge
Excerpts from Neil Postman's book, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985):

“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't,
thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal
democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had
not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another -
slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's
Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and
Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome
by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is
required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw
it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that
undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that
there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted
to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley
feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity
and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley
feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we
would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial
culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and
the centrifugal bumblepuppy.

As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and
rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into
account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell
added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are
controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear
will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us. This book is
about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”

—

“What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual
devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from
one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate. In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big
Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no
need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a population becomes
distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of
entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk,
when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a
vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear
possibility.”

—

“Huxley believed that we are in a race between education and disaster, and he
wrote continuously about the necessity of our understanding the politics and
epistemology of media. For in the end, he was trying to tell us that what
afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing
instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about
and why they had stopped thinking.”

—

“This idea – that there is a content called “the news of the day” – was
entirely created by the telegraph (and since amplified by newer media), which
made it possible to move decontextualized information over vast spaces at
incredible speed. The news of the day is a figment of our technological
imagination. It is quite, precisely, a media event. We attend to fragments of
events from all over the world because we have multiple media whose forms are
well suited to fragmented conversation.”

—

“Together, this new ensemble of electronic techniques called into being a new
world – a peek-a-boo world, where now this event, now that, pops into view for
a moment, then vanishes again. It is a world without much coherence or sense;
a world that does not ask us, indeed, does not permit us to do anything; a
world that is, like the child's game of peek-a-boo, entirely self-contained.
But like peek-a-boo, it is also endlessly entertaining.”

—

“The reader must come armed , in a serious state of intellectual readiness.
This is not easy because he comes to the text alone. In reading, one's
responses are isolated, one's intellect is thrown back on its own resources.
To be confronted by the cold abstractions of printed sentences is to look upon
language bare, without the assistance of either beauty or community. Thus,
reading is by its nature a serious business. It is also, of course, an
essentially rational activity.”

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golf3
Americans were always voracious readers before television, has nothing to do
with women or the Great Depression.

~~~
ruffrey
That's interesting. Do you know of any hard stats comparing to other
countries?

~~~
eddyl
This probably isn't exactly what you're looking for, but you might find Robert
Darnton's essay "First Steps Toward a History of Reading" interesting. [1] It
mostly covers the early modern period, if I remember correctly, not
contemporary reading practices.

[1]
[http://robertdarnton.org/sites/default/files/First%20Steps%2...](http://robertdarnton.org/sites/default/files/First%20Steps%20Toward%20a%20History%20of%20Reading.pdf)

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philtable
TikTok will get them through this one.

