In Saul Bellow’s essay, Hidden Within Technology's Kingdom, a Republic of Letters, he reveals to us that by the 1930’s the media was beginning to make the written word obsolete. Most of Americans are losing their since of literature. Bellow tells us of how Oswald Spengler, one of the most widely read authors of the early '30s, taught that our tired old civilization was very nearly finished. His advice to the young was to avoid literature and the arts and to embrace mechanization and become engineers.
Shocked by Oswald Spengler conclusion Bellow refused to me obsolete.He had faced the challenge and defied the evolutionist historians. A few years later, in an issue of The Wall Street Journal, Bellow came upon an old Spenglerian argument in a contemporary form. “Terry Teachout, unlike Spengler, does not dump paralyzing mountains of historical theory upon us, but there are signs that he has weighed, sifted and pondered the evidence. ” He tells us. Teachout spoke of our "atomized culture," and his is a responsible, up-to- date and carefully considered opinion.
He speaks of "art forms as technologies."Teachout explains to us that movies will soon be "downloadable", that is, transferable from one computer to the memory of another device, and he predicts that films will soon be marketed like books. Americans are in fact reading a lot less the they use to. Current surveys have that found an increasing number of adult Americans were not even reading one book a year. A new study examined how many 9-year-olds read every day for "fun" (54 percent) to the percentage of high school graduates deemed by employers as "deficient" in writing in English (72 percent).
Among new findings, on average, Americans ages 15 to 24 spend almost two hours a day watching TV, and only seven minutes of their daily leisure time on reading. Reading scores for American adults of almost all education levels have deteriorated, notably among the best-educated groups. From 1992 to 2003, the percentage of adults with graduate school experience who were rated proficient in prose reading dropped by 10 points, a 20 percent rate of decline. In 2002, only 52 percent of Americans ages 18 to 24, the college years, read a book voluntarily, down from 59 percent in 1992.Money spent on books dropped 14 percent from 1985 to 2005 and has fallen dramatically since the mid-1990s.
The number of adults with bachelor's degrees and "proficient in reading prose" dropped from 40 percent in 1992 to 31 percent in 2003. I believe that print media will soon become obsolete if it is not already obsolete. There are billions of cell phone users worldwide. It is much easier for them to get the bulk of their news and information online. Why would they go to a store to buy a newspaper or magazine, when all they have to do is turn on a cell phone?I believe with the advent of tablets and e- readers, there will be a time that print media is obsolete. I already find that anytime I am required to print something, I am shocked that in 2013 we can't have an e-solution.
With newspapers dying by the day, I think that e-media will be the thing left standing. What motivates us to read? Interest, engagement in the topic, desire to understand, having the choice and recommendation of those we trust leads us to a book. How often do we take the path less traveled instead of turning on a computer or the television? What might our society lose if people read fewer books?We may be slowly evolving to be less intelligent than our ancestors. Our technology may be getting smarter, but a provocative new study suggests human intelligence is on the decline. We are begging to lose our sense of literature and appreciation of the fine arts. As our society gains new technology we also lose our interest in reading and comprehending books, novels and poetry.
Who knows how far or how fast such events may occur? Perhaps in within the next 50 years all written literature will be obsolete. Could you image? No more books, no ability to read old English, no comprehension to Shakespeare’s plays or sonnets.Nothing but current text linguistics or posing for pictures to tell a 3 second story. I myself am not an active reader. Though every now and again I love to pick up a book and read Edgar Allen Poe, Stephan King, Charles Dickens or even a play or sonnet by Shakespeare (written how it was intended to be read).
I know the end of our written word generation will soon come and even for me (a girl who doesn’t often read for amusement), it still saddens me to see our literature slowly disintegrate into small ashes of memory. I do not wish for this era to end so soon.
