Americans have a very high literacy rate. The problem is, though people can read, many of them don’t read. At least not anything longer than a tweet or a blog post. One-quarter of Americans haven’t read a single book all year. That can be said of one-third of American men.
One problem, reports Eric Metaxas, is that our attention span keeps dropping. In the year 2000, our average attention span was an already unimpressive 12 seconds. Now it’s 8 seconds. One journalist observed that this is less than that of a goldfish.
From Eric Metaxas, Be a Bookworm, Not a Goldfish: The Lost Art of Reading a Book – BreakPoint:
In the developed world literacy is higher than it’s been at almost any time in history. And that is something to celebrate. But is it possible that even in our high-tech society where so much communication depends on the written word, we may be slipping back into a kind of pre-literacy?
New data from a Pew Research study has me wondering. It turns out that more than a quarter of Americans didn’t read a single book this year, in any form.
And get this: One in three American men have not read one book in the last twelve months. And those with low incomes and no college education were even less likely to do so.
So what is going on here? We spend more time than ever reading texts, social media, and email—so why wouldn’t we be reading books, too? Well, a recent survey by Microsoft concluded that the average attention span is now a vanishingly brief eight seconds, down from twelve seconds in the year 2000. As the New York Times memorably put it, we now have shorter attention spans than goldfish.
