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07/15/2004 Archived Entry: "reading"

Some days I think this blog is turning into a response to WPA-L threads.
Now the debate is over "reading being in decline" (a response to some recent report). All the voices chime in, with one claiming "I didn't need a report to tell me that
reading is in decline. I see it every year in my first-year
courses when students produce constructions such as 'should
of.' Obviously, they've heard it and know what it means, but
they haven't, or haven't often, read it."
I'll sidestep the odd reasoning here in this statement only to point out: uh, folks, tell Amazon and the other book sellers that reading is in decline. That should produce a nice laugh. Books comprise one of the largest aspects of the entertainment business. That they are aligned with music, video, etc. is revealing for how the culture has integrated traditional literacy practices (reading) with the non-traditional (watching/listening). Reading McLuhan today as I work through ideas regarding juxtaposition, I was reminded of this remark in The Gutenberg Galaxy: “The new physics is an auditory domain and long-literate society is not at home on the new physics, nor will it ever be” (37). When we start claiming reading is in decline to watching/listening we are failing to account for the so-called "new literacy" (for want of a much better phrase at this moment, though I should just use Greg's electracy). Actually, electracy provides a good response for how it recognizes auditory (the usage of voice/sound in the riff). The question is: why are compositionists still not ready for the "new physics" as McLuhan describes new media? I was reminded yesterday of John Trimbur and Diane George's work on the missing Fourth C (Communication) of CCCC, which they trace to the 1962 CCCC convention. That this moment coincides with McLuhan’s work is no accident. At the moment one part of communication studies (represented by media studies) is trying to understand literate conventions in terms of the new (Havelock another figure here), composition sticks to the literate, non-technological, non-auditory. So, reading is in decline, we hear. Of course, it isn't. How we perceive reading may, in fact, be. Big difference.