The headline is simple but does what it can to rattle the alarms:
The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone.
The author spends a lot of the essay pointing out how the numbers and proportions of male/female students, writers, readers, etc. have changed over the decades. Yes, duh. They’ve dropped across the board.
Oh, how he longs for the days of Kerouac!
But the deeper idea is one that I’ve been messing around with for a while: people don’t read, which means they don’t know how to read, which means they don’t know how to distill the media they do consume. Media literacy is at an all time low.
And, with the loss of reading comes a hit to empathy. Reading literature helps you understand people who are outside of yourself – something key in a world that is perpetually divisive. Do you know how to talk to your neighbor?
In the postmortem to the election the left wondered where their Joe Rogan was? Why didn’t they have a media environment they could use to disperse their rhetoric? Whatever problems the Democrats think they have, a podcast isn’t going to fix it.
The problem is, unfortunately, deeper.
Young men nowadays look to online outlets for their cues on how they should act. Consuming a video, even one with captions, comes at the brain in a vastly different way than how one reads a book. But reading is difficult, it isn’t inherent, and is a wholly isolated experience. So how do we sell the idea of reading more, and reading better, to a generation that seems more fixated on social media connections?