How we read (or not), Part I

An AP wire story recently reported on findings released by the National Endowment for the Arts that concludes, based on multiple sources of research, that Americans are reading less. A whole lot less.

The study suggests that book readers are more active in general — exercising, keeping up on current events, even voting more than bibliophobes. NEA Chairman Dan Gioia goes so far as to say, “People who don’t read, who spend more of their time watching TV or on the Internet, playing video games, seem to be significantly more passive.”

I think it’s misleading to lump the Internet in with the rest of these so-called inducers of passivity. We call the Internet an interactive medium for a reason. True, you won’t burn as many calories posting to a blog as you will running up the stairs to the stacks at the central library. But there’s an implication here that I’ve heard before, and really irks me — that reading online is somehow less worthy than reading while curled up with a good book. It reminds me of the bias that Science Fiction isn’t real literature (this view isn’t nearly as prevalent as it was when I was growing up).

Before classics were classics, they were first run offerings to the public to take or leave. I say give the blog movement a bit more time to mature and history is going to remember some of the more interesting and eloquent bloggers with as much reverence (and, no doubt criticism) as the praise and condemnation heaped on those old farts who make the “Top One Hundred Novels of the 20th Century” lists.

Also, my sense is that since the Internet and email have become everyday parts of life, a lot more people are a lot more inclined to be active in the art of communication—via one-on-one exchanges, public comments, and instant messaging.

I’ll bet Court Jesters and other folks that made their bread and butter via the oral storytelling tradition got pissed off when Chaucer et al started taking over their scene with the written word. But is anyone going to condemn the advent of the printing press as a bad thing? Reading online is not less than reading books, it’s just a different means of gathering information.

I read online content for the same reasons I read books (and yes, I still read books, and plenty of them). For me, it’s a good mix of work and play. On the work side of the equation, I put myself out there as an expert in social media. That means I have to constantly read up on what’s happening in order to keep my finger on the pulse of 2.0. Keeping up with anything in the tech sector requires diligence in reading online. The dead tree magazines are inevitably full of old news.

I have my guilty pleasures, too, the online equivalent of reading tabloids, I suppose. I make no excuses for this reading and am quite fond of the folder that holds the category of posts I’ve labeled Time Wasters.

Every day I dedicate two or three hours to the sport of seeing what new has posted, getting most of my subscriptions delivered via Google Reader. (Aside: It does piss me off that I can’t subscribe to Myspace blogs via Google reader — am I missing some way of doing that?) Hell, I even have a vanity search that lets me know when my name shows up in someone’s blog.

I’d say I’m reading more than ever. My internet reading time has cut into my TV-watching time, not my “regular” reading time. How about you? Are you reading more or less these days? How much of it is online?