The Forest Through the Trees

The Forest Through the Trees

What did we do before tweeting, texting, and Facebook?

We read the newspaper!

From The Stephanie Miller Show March 17

After perusing your reader response articles in regard to the demise of newspapers, I felt compelled to share some thoughts on reading that I have been formulating in recent years. Pardon me if my conclusions seem patently obvious. Until gaslights and electric lighting pervasive reading was practiced by precious few. True, before then, few adults were literate or educated beyond the fifth or sixth grades. Still, consider that it was changes engendered during this era (approximately 1850-1920) that led to increased high school and college graduation rates, increased activism-- especially in the labor movement, increased union involvement and support, the rise of the middle class, an appreciation for the arts, civic involvement, etc. America was growing up, and the promise of Jefferson's Declaration of Independence and Madison's (et al) Constitution, notably the Bill of Rights, was becoming more actualized, was becoming a reality; one might argue we were at last envisioning or inching towards a government "by the people, for the people, and of the people" instead of by the rich, for the rich, and of the rich. For the first time, a majority of Americans could read, analyze, or simply appreciate To Kill a Mockingbird, Black Boy, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Walden, even John Stuart Mill and the U.S. Constitution. The importance of books and reading cannot be overstated; in fact, Abraham Lincoln was perhaps only half-joking when he met Harriet Beecher Stowe and remarked playfully, "So this is the little lady who started this great big war."

If technology played a part in enabling more people to spend more time reading literature and science, thus enhancing their understanding of the human condition, injustice, evolution, and the cosmos, then technology--as in Orwell's eerily prophetic 1984--might also have the opposite affect. With the advent, marketing, added accessibility, popularity, and intrusiveness of television, cable tv, cell phones, the internet, text messaging, My Space, and Facebook we have seen the steady decline in worthwhile reading and the dearth of an educated public able to evaluate, based on a broad background in print-based knowledge, news, politics, even reality. Beyond a doubt, our democracy has suffered and will continue to suffer if we are tuned in to these narcotic-like devices and eschew reading.

Now lobbyists rule Washington. There is a revolving door between the corrupt, greedy corporations and the corrupt, greedy politicians. The fox has overrun the hen house. But we are to blame too. We tuned out... or perhaps tuned in to unreliable sources (Media Matters reports