Steamboats Are Ruining Everything

Literacy and votes

I insinuated a couple of weeks ago that if literacy levels were mapped against votes in the last election, a pattern might emerge. I have just squandered a few hours trying to cipher out this pattern, without much success.

This is a scatterplot, state by state, of the popular vote for Bush in the 2004 election graphed against the percentage of the population at level 1 or level 2 literacy in 1992. (For definitions of level 1 and level 2 literacy, look here; there are five levels, and level 1 is the lowest.) My election results are from CNN, and my literacy estimates are from the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey by way of the National Institute for Literacy's State of Literacy in America analysis.

To cut to the chase, blue-state cultural elitists should want the scatterplot to cohere into a line that slants upward as it moves right. Red-state cultural elitists should want to see a line that slants downward as it moves right. I don't see either, but a real statistician would want to do something complicated like a regression analysis, or at least weighting the points according to population, before he made any pronouncements. A real statistician might also want to get the numbers by county, which are available, or wait for the July 2005 release of the 2003 literacy survey from the National Assessment of Adult Literacy. But I do not even really qualify as a fake statistician.

The pro-Kerry, high-illiteracy outlier in the upper left is the District of Columbia. The pro-Bush, low-illiteracy dots in the lower right are places like Utah and Montana. If you draw a horizontal line at about 55% level 1 or 2 illiteracy, you'll see that every state above it (except D.C.) voted for Bush; most of these are in the South. But if you draw a similar line at about 34% level 1 or 2 illiteracy, you'll see that every state below it also voted for Bush (Alaska, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming). In other words, the most literate and the most illiterate states voted for Bush. The one safe conconclusion seems to be that states voting for Bush show a greater disparity in their literacy rates than those voting for Kerry.

Adventures in capitalism

The fetching shirt that Peter wore to the Housing Works party this evening is a Mr. Johnson "Sparrow," created by our friend Kim Johnson. Marketplace Radio tonight featured our friend Alisa Roth's report on New York City street vendors, during which your blogger may be heard as the translated-into-English voice of a Chinese street vendor. And Sixth Street Pilates, whose proprietor is my sister, has moved into spacious new digs now on the north side of East Sixth Street between A and B in Manhattan. Go forth and consume.

Innocence and Experience: Peter Terzian's interview with Alan Hollinghurst

"It would be nice if more blogs would link to my Alice Munro profile," said Peter, wistfully. While I am obliging, here's a more permanent link to Peter's Alan Hollinghurst interview, too.

And while I'm in sales mode, here in one place are all five of the recent numbered posts in which I come perilously close to arguing that people who voted for Bush probably cannot read. The hope is that the posts make more sense if read in order, rather than backwards. But perhaps not. I share with Scott McLemee doubts about the "use" of writing, doubts reminiscent of those I felt three years and two months ago.

5. Split states

The contrast I've been outlining between text and streaming media probably sounds familiar, maybe even obvious. Similar contrasts have been made before. Tocqueville, for example, wrote in the same vein when he contrasted the aristocratic and democratic styles of literature. Democrats, he predicted, would write more excitedly and less accurately, and they would take a much greater interest in the ordinary person and his ordinariness. Tocqueville doubted there was any point in lamenting the change; it would happen whether or not critics regretted it.

That's probably true of this shift, too. I doubt exhortation will raise the number of readers. How will the shift alter politics? Here I intend to sail off the map.

The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein proposed, years ago, that people waver between two ways of thinking about one another. In split-off states, people perceive themselves and those they are attached to either as all good or all bad. In what she calls the "depressive position," by contrast, people feel mixed emotions about both themselves and others. Although it may not sound like it, the depressive position is an achievement. Once you admit that some part of you hates some part of a person that you also love, you have to shoulder new burdens of worry and guilt. Will the person you love become angry with you? Will you hurt them? Ambivalence, according to Klein, is a state of high potential energy. Under pressure it's apt to break down into the more primitive but less conflictual all-good or all-bad feelings. It's easier to alternate between omnipotence and euphoria, on the one hand, and persecution and rage, on the other, than to balance melancholically between them.

Because conflicting texts can be read as it were simultaneously, they help readers to reach the depressive position with regard to politicians and their policies. It's possible with texts to judge for oneself---that is, to suspend judgment while considering both the good and the bad. Streamed reports, in contrast, may only be experienced in sequence: the good and the bad are always separated in time. The perceptions succeed one another without synthesis.

In a tacit acknowledgment of this deficit, the streamed media have developed genres that put representatives of rival political camps in dialogue. But I don't think these shows overcome the problem. They seem rather to aggravate the tendency to take sides. Television's interest in fact checking, this past election season, had to me the flavor of a rear-guard action---or, worse, of an ideological fakeout.

Here my analysis runs out of steam. I think we are living through a shift in our political culture, and I've tried to describe it. But I don't have any idea what to do about it.

4. Swimming upstream

So far, I've (1) suggested that America's defection from textual to streaming media is a shift in the culture that needs to be understood, (2) reviewed some recent statistical evidence of this defection, and (3) presented some anecdotes from my own experience that may also reflect the shift. In this post, I want to consider how the differences between textual and streaming media affect the uptake of information.

I'll start by trying to answer a question posed by a reader yesterday: What's wrong with moving your lips when you read? Nothing, of course. Reading aloud might indeed be a response to the beauty of a text. In my own case, though, I most often move my lips or read aloud when I'm having trouble. It's a sign not of pleasure but that the process of reading has become effortful. A little effort won't usually deter me, but an economist would point out that even small deterrents are significant. If distractions or a lack of practice have made reading more costly of effort for many people than it once was, they'll be more likely to choose an alternative when they can. They'll flip through Power Point slides instead of reading a 1500-word Wall Street Journal article, or turn on CNN instead of picking up the New York Times. It's not reasonable to suppose that very many people take reading itself as a goal. Most people read with a motive---to be amused, to be brought to tears, to learn about the world. If they accomplish these aims by other means, what will they lose and what will they gain?

First, the absorption of certain kinds of information will be less efficient. Fluent readers can sift through the transcript of a television show in much less time than it takes to watch it. On the other hand, information about the demeanor, facial expression, and tone of voice of a person will be much richer in streaming media. A consumer of streamed media will probably pick up fewer legal details and may have a flattened sense of a story's chronology, but he will learn more about the personality of the people pictured, whether those people are the subjects of the report or the presenters of it. Emotions are probably conveyed more vividly in streaming media.

The finer the grain, the more anomalies are visible, and because they acquire more detail, readers probably notice more of the small inconsistencies in reported stories than viewers of streamed media do. Their faculties of suspicion may be proportionally better developed.

I chose the word "streaming" because it highlights another difference: It's much harder to replay at will a moment in a streamed transmission than it is to revisit a paragraph in a textual report. As you watch it, it trickles away. They key phrase here is "at will." Some streamed moments get selected for frequent replaying, and these repetitions become overwhelming in their ubiquity. But an individual viewer cannot select them. To replay a moment not selected for repetition requires great effort---maybe even a trip to the Museum of Television & Radio. Some transmissions are available now on the internet, but even when they are, finding the moment that interests you is cumbersome. Faced with a film or television broadcast, a reporter takes notes---reduces it to text---even if he has it on tape or DVD. Otherwise he can't work with it.

It is easy to compare two texts simultaneously. You just lay them beside each other. Not long ago, for example, the Times printed what Colin Powell told the U.N. about aluminum tubes early last year next to what we know about those tubes today. Also nearby on the page was a description of what Condoleezza Rice very likely learned about them in the weeks before Powell spoke. You don't read such a presentation in any set order; your eye jumps from one text to another and back again, oscillating between them as many times as you need to in order to satisfy yourself of the nature of the contrasts. In a streaming media, you have no such luxury. You must listen to the disparate texts in sequence, and after the last has been read to you, you probably won't be given a chance to hear the first one again. In other words, it is much more difficult in a streaming medium to present evidence that someone has contradicted himself or, for that matter, that any narrative contradicts another. If a contradiction is presented, you may decide to resolve it not by sorting through the competing claims but by recalling whom you trust.

Most conversations put a higher priority on solidarity between those speaking than on the sharing of facts not known to all speakers. But the differences between text and streaming probably shift the style of talk further toward solidarity, because facts are less likely to be available to speakers in much specificity. Conversations informed by streaming media are more likely to focus on interpretations than events, and you are less likely to have them with people with whom you suspect you will disagree, because the unpleasantness of dissent probably will not be offset by any gain in knowledge.

To sum up, a person who relies on text for his news acquires more verbal and legal detail about events and is likely to be more confident of his ability to judge between competing narratives. A person who relies on streamed media, by contrast, has access to more of the personal and emotional qualities in stories, but he experiences the stories in a sequence he cannot control, a loss which may impair his ability to judge how plausible they are.

Code Bleu

Tonight I cooked Peter a Roquefort and Parmesan soufflé.

The Red States may talk about gay marriage, but I wanted to make sure they know what they're up against.

3. Read My Lips

The subway is a laboratory where reading habits may be observed daily. As it dips under and rises above ground, it travels between the textual and the streaming worlds. When the F train surfaces above Gowanus Canal, cell phones ring, and people check their messages. For two stations, it becomes slightly harder to focus on your book, to shut out the world by mere will power. (Earplugs, here and everywhere, are the contemporary intellectual's vade mecum. Don't leave the house without your bits of foam.) Then the train dives again, and it's more quiet.

About a year ago, I noticed a woman on the subway moving her lips while reading a Harry Potter book. I admired her bravery---her New York insistence on having her pleasure no matter how it might look. But it brought home to me that fewer and fewer people read without effort. Once I started to look for them, people who read while moving their lips turned out not to be that rare. Usually the motions of the mouth muscles aren't full; you most often see just a faint rhythmic tremor in the lips. Sometimes looks deceive, and what you're actually watching is a person reading silently while lip-synching a song that's playing on his iPod.

Here's the rub: Lately I've noticed that I do it, too. If I hit a dry sentence or a dense one, and a conversation near me is seeping through my earplugs, I mouth the words on the page. It helps me focus. Maybe it's a sign of incipient mental decay. Maybe I've lip-synched to my iPod so often lately that lip-synching to my book feels natural. Or maybe it's not possible to fix your attention on text while something viva voce is distracting you, unless you do something to bring the text into the fleshly world.

Here's another instance where I've caught myself not just moving my lips but even reading snippets aloud: In the last year or so, even websites as highbrow as the New York Times have started running ads that move. It's very hard to read the deliberately neutral prose of the Times while a brightly colored image is flashing and whirling in a box embedded in the same column. I go through phases of deactivating Java and Flash, but I always relent and return the keys to them, because of some interactive map or chart I'd like to see. When the web was young, it was possible to surf it in text-only browsers like Lynx. No longer. A couple of weeks ago, I downloaded a clip of Jon Stewart berating Tucker Carlson, which I had missed because we don't have television. I enjoyed the confrontation, but it occurred to me that I had taken another step away from text, that I was learning a new habit, acceding to the internet's probably inevitable progression from a textual to a streaming medium. The web now resembles a collection of magazines, but it seems likely to me that in a decade it will resemble a collection of television channels.

If you sit at one of the tables with internet access in the Rose Reading Room of the New York Public Library, you discover that something about having internet access seems to license people to answer their cell phones. People at the internet-deprived tables are much less likely to answer a call.

A few years ago, Microsoft commissioned a study of reading, in order to figure out why people are reluctant to take on more than a thousand words or so at a time on the web. It's one of those reports that goes to some length to state something that used to be obvious. Apparently there's something called "immersive reading," where people are capable of sitting still for two or three hours, absorbed, forgetting the merely physical processes of eye movements and page turnings that convey the contents into their brains. ("We never do anything well," says Hazlitt, "till we cease to think about the manner of doing it.") Almost everyone I know takes this experience for granted, but the statistics I wrote about yesterday suggest that we shouldn't. Fewer people, it seems, have the appetite or aptitude for immersive reading. It seems to be losing ground to interactive and streaming media.

2. Decline? What decline?

Some of the most literate people I know have written that the decline in reading in America has been exaggerated and is unworthy of serious concern. The July 2004 report on reading by the National Endowment for the Arts came in for a lot of this pooh-poohing. None of the pooh-poohing convinces me.

The NEA found that the proportion of American adults who had read any work of imaginative literature in the preceding year declined as follows:

1982	1992	2002
56.9%	54.0%	46.7%

These numbers are dismaying, and the deeper you go into them, the worse the news is. First, note that not only has the percentage of literary readers declined but the rate of loss has accelerated. Second, if you break these numbers down by age cohort and by education, you discover that the decline obtains in all categories. In other words, every age group read less in 2002 than it did a decade before. If you look at the age charts and read them diagonally---that is, if you track the reading patterns of a single age cohort through time, instead of comparing, say, twenty-four-year-olds of 2002 to twenty-four-year-olds of 1992---the numbers also decline. Fewer forty-year-olds read literature today than did thirty-year-olds a decade ago, and those who do read, read fewer books.

The most common retort to this bad news focuses on the NEA's definition of literature, which excludes nonfiction and graphic novels, among other genres. This might be an answer, if there were reason to believe that there is a large, new group of people who over the course of a year read literary nonfiction but scrupulously avoid reading any novels, poems, short stories, or plays. I doubt there are very many such people who are really new---that is, for whom there was no corresponding population in 1982 or 1992. But even if there is such a sizable new population, the NEA's data show that they cannot be affecting the overall decline in reading by very much. In 1992 and 2002, the NEA also asked respondents whether in the previous year they had read any book. The answer:

1992	2002
60.9%	56.6%

In other words, the ratio of people reading any book at all also declined. The dropoff is not as steep as that in literary reading, but there is no insulation from the bad news in the notion that people are reading John Adams biographies instead of Jonathan Franzen novels.

Nor is it any defense to note that the decline has been lamented for a long time, and that despite the alarm, the culture has survived. It is true that there is little chance that reading will ever go extinct. Nothing suggests that novels will abruptly cease to be published. But a shift away from literature might still produce a qualitative change in the culture. It is not necessary for a change to be total in order for it to be significant.

Nor is it any defense to say that there have never been very many serious readers in any culture, in raw numbers, so it's no surprise that as the population expands, the percentage of readers declines. Or, a corollary of this, to say that the raw number of book-purchasing readers remains high, and the publishing industry still puts out a high volume. In a democracy, where every adult citizen may vote, it's the proportion of readers, not their raw number, that is likely to affect the political culture.

The NEA's numbers---and those in the Pew Research Center's similar report on newspaper readership, published a couple of years ago---suggest that a tipping point has been reached. Text is no longer the first way that most Americans learn about their world or imagine their world. Since the advent of television, we have been moving from a textual culture to a streaming culture, but some dam broke in the last half-decade, and the changes have been accelerating. At some point, once we have reached a new equilibrium point, the acceleration will stop. We will then be living in a different world.

1. Blame

It's John Kerry's fault. It's Gavin Newsom's fault. It's the Democratic Party's fault. It's the fault of the New York Times. None of this is so, though of course it would be satisfying to find a scapegoat. Over at n+1, Ben Kunkel has argued, much more plausibly, that it's the fault of the people who voted for Bush. They are, he points out, adults.

Still, there's a widespread sense that this result isn't just bad news, that it has to be explained. There's been a rash of speculation about how to put the results in historical context. In particular, people seem newly fascinated with the eternal problem of how political parties correspond to one another and to themselves across time. Does the Republican party of George W. Bush have anything to do with the Republican party of, say, Parke Godwin? (Who? Yes, exactly.) A lot of this is cartographical. Which earlier map does the map of the 2004 election most resemble: free states vs. slave states in 1860 (neato mouse-over version here), the 1896 contest between William McKinley vs. William Jennings Bryan (map here), or, somewhat less persuasively, Woodrow Wilson vs. Charles Evan Hughes in 1916? Others prefer maps with non-historical correlations. Princeton's Robert J. Vanderbei has put put together a map that displays both voting results and population broken down by county, and in a chart for the 2000 election, someone has correlated college education and Gore vs. Bush votes.

It's my suspicion that if you could map by state the data contained in this report by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, you might find something even more interesting. Unfortunately, it's beyond my abilities as a research geek to figure out how to extract that information from their dataset, even though it's publicly available. My short answer is this: reading, as a means for understanding the world, is in precipitous decline in America, both in newspapers and in books. I think we are living through a shift in the culture that has been lamented, minimized, ignored, and explained away. It needs, however, to be understood.

Code Pink

I want to share some very frightening news with you. Not more than an hour ago, in a park nearby, I ate a hummus sandwich. It was prepared for me by my boyfriend. I know that most Americans will find this more frightening than any policy memos setting forth a legal framework for torture, which the Bush Administration may have asked its lawyers to prepare. But I thought I should tell you anyway.

What's worse, my boyfriend made another such sandwich for me on Tuesday. I don't know about you, but this is sort of thing that scares many people a lot more than the idea that the United States traffics undocumented prisoners seized in Iraq to and from Guantanamo Bay in defiance of the Geneva Convention. My boyfriend did not make such a sandwich for me between Tuesday and today, because we were temporarily out of cucumbers. How can anyone feel safe? Polls show that people find these details much more terrifying than the fact that our President and Vice President lied about what they knew about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction in order to persuade the public to support their war.

Even worse, my boyfriend deliberately chose a brand of pita bread that did not contain high fructose corn syrup. I hope the American public will be able to remain as calm in the face of this news, as they did when confronted with a campaign of lies insinuating that the Saddam Hussein regime was behind the attack on New York and Washington that took place on 11 September 2001. I trust they will be able to distinguish false alarms from real danger.