A recent cover story in the Atlantic proclaimed that the "end of reading is here." In a New York Times opinion piece, David Wallace-Wells writes that he's not so sure about that. The idea of a reading apocalypse is a popular one, based on the notion that smartphones and social media are ravaging young attention spans. But a deeper look at the metrics tells a different, more nuanced story, he argues. Yes, Americans don't spend much time reading for pleasure—and they haven't for decades. Time-use surveys show average daily reading minutes drifting down slightly since 2003 (from 21.9 minutes per day to 18.3 minutes), but the real drop is among older adults, not the teens usually blamed for abandoning books.
The time spent reading each day among Americans 65 and older has plunged from 58.5 minutes in 2003 to 32.4 minutes today. By contrast, younger Americans are actually reading a bit more than they did 20 years ago, around 10 or 11 minutes.
- "To the extent that we can talk about the decline of reading as a mass phenomenon, it seems concentrated not among the next generation but among the previous ones. The pattern may seem counterintuitive, but it echoes some other findings about social media use and disinformation: For all the hand-wringing about the effects of new technology on kids, the impacts may be just as corrosive, if not more so, on their grandparents."
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