Who Needs Books? by Lynn Coady

Author:Lynn Coady [Lynn Coady]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781772121209
Publisher: The University of Alberta Press

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN?

Noted tech-buff and icon of “serious” literature, Margaret Atwood, is one of the few authors of her generation who has seamlessly embraced the new digital technologies and is almost singular in her refusal to rend her clothes and lament the end of literary culture. She has gone on the record as dismissing the dual-bugbears that 1) young people aren’t reading and 2) traditional publishing is doomed, with a distinctly unruffled shrug. Writing in The Guardian, she reflects on being scolded for having said so:

I got into trouble a while ago for saying that I thought the internet led to increased literacy—people scolded me about the shocking grammar to be found online—but I was talking about fundamentals: quite simply, you can’t use the net unless you can read. Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones.”[13]

This is an important point. Every time I hear someone bemoan the smartphone generation—specifically, how you can’t go into a coffee shop or ride a streetcar without being confronted by a horde of inattentive screen-zombies staring at their phones, I always wonder if it has never occurred to the bemoaner how many of these people are reading. After all, online video is always only video, but the variety of reading we can do online is endless. You can read texts, emails, The New Yorker (which has a splendidly designed app for this purpose), newspapers, Twitter, Facebook and—yes—books. I recall a similar complaint in the 1980s when the social blight du jour was the Walkman, which prompted the phenomenon of young people wearing headphones in public, deliberately cutting themselves off from the outside world. But, I remember thinking, what’s wrong with listening to music everywhere you go?

Atwood goes on to reflect on how one of the co-founders of Wattpad (an online, free reading and writing platform with an international subscribership in the millions), told her about receiving a letter from an old man in a village in Africa. The village, she wrote, “had no school, no library, no landline, and no books. But it had a mobile phone, and on that they could read and share the Wattpad stories. He was writing to say thank you.”[14]

This is a startling and counterintuitive anecdote when you consider the fact that only 40 per cent of the world’s population has access to the internet—something we in the western world generally chide ourselves to keep in mind when we discuss the influence of digital culture. But how exhilarating to think that a village with no access to any of the traditional institutions of literacy—schools, books, libraries—can have its isolation and lack of resources so mitigated by a single piece of online technology.

Here are a few quick, recent findings from the publishing world and its attendants that bolster Atwood’s point. In September 2014, a Pew survey of more than six thousand Americans found that millennials—that’s right, twenty-somethings, the demographic

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