New Era in Reading

Over the last few decades, there has been much handwringing about the state of reading in our country. Things had gotten so bad, according to some, that we were witnessing its actual demise. One would have heard (since we presumably do not read) that we were not alone in this predicament: the developed countries had conducted reams of research to demonstrate the declining place reading occupies in the lives of citizens.
The usual suspects were identified – TV, video games, smartphones, and all the other gadgets that compete – and had evidently displaced books to occupy our spare time. It would seem we were following an inevitable trend.
But what was that trend? At its most fundamental level, reading was simply a revolution in communications that occurred several thousand years ago when mankind invented writing. Before that, we humans had been communicating via speech for thousands of years since we started walking on two feet. Writing and reading were not immediately, much less enthusiastically, embraced. We note Plato’s record (in writing!) of Socrates’ complaint 2500 years ago that writing would weaken memories and the power of reasoning and questioning. In acknowledgement of such critiques, the elements of the oral tradition – memorisation, rhetoric, and recital – were preserved over the millennia.
The invention of the printing press nearly 600 years ago further revolutionised communication by making books – rather than laboriously written manuscripts – much more easily available to everyone in society. This created its own storm of protests: would the great unwashed masses have the discipline to imbibe the processes of thinking to make use of the knowledge contained in the books? We invented schools and libraries – not to mention popularisers called “magazines” and “newspapers” – to accomplish that task. Reading became part and parcel of our tradition: books signified “civilisation”. It is useful to remember it was not always so.
But the increased efficiency of books to transmit information created its own inexorable impetus. Before long, we were plunged through the invention of the telegraph and the telephone in the 19th century into the present revolution in communications represented by radio, movies, TV, computers, the internet, etc. And we return to the question of the fate of reading in an era of instantaneous digital communications.
Our intent in outlining the changes in communication methodologies or technologies is to emphasise the inevitable nostalgia engendered when we move from one dominant form to another. The point we want to make is that we cannot remain stuck in the past: when it comes to human affairs, change is inevitable. In grappling with the technique of communication, we cannot lose sight of the intent of communication. Contrary to the popular aphorism, we cannot afford for the medium to become the message.
Human advances and success have been based on our ability to communicate knowledge gained by one generation to succeeding generations in ever-increasingly faster ways. This is salutary in view of the exponential growth in our knowledge base. Rather than decrying the reduced prevalence of reading and insisting like Socrates about retaining the oral tradition, we have to marry the old tradition of books and reading to the new vistas open to us. It is perhaps ironic that the newer modes of communication may revive the foundations of the older oral tradition. If the reading of books decreases, to cope successfully with the explosion of information in the modern world, as mediated by artificial intelligence (AI), we may have to review our take on memorisation.
Mid last year, the Ministry of Education launched the “New and Revised National Literacy Programmes”, which were supposed to be the most comprehensive and ambitious literacy initiative in the nation’s history to revive reading. Our educational system will have to become au fait with the potential of the new technologies and combine them with the benefits of reading.
After all, even the advice of ChatGPT has to be read. The secret is not to insist on rote memorisation of arcane facts but on the ability to reason with and manipulate those facts that are now available literally at our fingertips.