I was alerted by the Literary Saloon to an Ipsos Reid survey commissioned by CanWest News Service and Global Television. According to the study which surveyed 1001 people across Canada, 31% of adults across Canada had not read a single book in the past year. A similar poll conducted in the U.S. found 27% of adults there had not picked up a book in the past year. I don't like to get too much into Canada/U.S. rivalries, but I am a bit surprised that Canada was behind the U.S. in this regard. I suppose I thought of Canadians, on the whole, as a bit more educated, literate and, well, reading, than this study reveals.
Interestingly, as Misty Harris reports in Canadian book readers fall behind the U.S.: poll at canada.com, the 69% of Canadians who said they did read in 2007, did so voraciously, reading an average of 20 books a year. And what I find even more interesting is the regional variations across Canada: B.C. residents read about 33 books a year, Atlantic Canada 22, Ontario 19, Alberta 18, Quebec 16, and Manitoba/Saskatchewan 15 books. What I find disturbing is that, at least as reported in Harris' article, the Eastern provinces are lumped all together, instead of being listed separately (Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island), and the Territories (Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut) are not included at all.
We seem to be surprised, and perhaps embarrassed, every time such a report comes out. There is much talk of declining literacy, especially among members of a generation increasingly caught up in the pop culture world of the internet (facebook, MySpace, YouTube, etc.), and gadgets like iPods and cell phones, a world often shallow, consumer-driven, and wetterwendisch.
Educators certainly notice (I was one, briefly, and have also had many conversations with professors on the matter), from elementary school through university, a deterioration of language, critical thinking, and research skills. Information has become easily accessible, but is spread out wide and shallow like manure, and many young people no longer learn how to separate the wheat from the chaff. Some of the available and frequently accessed and referenced information is packaged as democratized knowledge (see Wikipedia), a dangerous concept that sounds good on the surface but can easily slide down the slippery slope towards truthiness (1 : "truth that comes from the gut, not books" (Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report," October 2005); 2 : "the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true" (American Dialect Society, January 2006).
But according to Janet Eger, a spokeswoman for Indigo Books, "readership in the Canadian market is remaining steady." A much more interesting and revealing question, I think, is what it is people are reading, and the quality of what is being read. According to the Ipsos Reid survey, fiction was the most popular genre among Canadians last year, at 56% of those who had read at least one book. Mysteries and thrillers were also at 56%, while non-fiction books were at 46%. (Is there something odd about these percentages?) How much, I wonder, of the fiction being read is formulaic fluff. That is certainly the bulk of what I see people reading on buses, trains and waiting rooms. Literacy may well be on the decline, even if readership isn't. Maybe people are reading just as much as they have for generations, but are reading less of quality and substance, reaching instead for the easy, escapist, entertaining fluff that kills time and tickles the mind but doesn't require much independent thought and engagement with the text. There is, of course, a place for genre fiction, and some of it does tackle more substantive issues that demand engagement and stimulate deeper thought.
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