Reading Might Make Your "Smarter", But Does It Matter?

On the written and oral exchange of ideas

This week, the New Yorker ran a piece by Joshua Rothman entitled “What’s Happening to Reading?” We’ve all been exposed to the arguments around attention span; around memes, tweets and headlines besting deep dives and comprehensive awareness; and that less and less kids are reading entire books. I saw A.I. mentioned and initially, I was going to (self-fulfilling prophecy?) scroll by, because we seem to be constantly circling this drain.

“Today, the nature of reading has shifted. Plenty of people still enjoy traditional books and periodicals, and there are even readers for whom the networked age has enabled a kind of hyper-literacy; for them, a smartphone is a library in their pocket. For others, however, the old-fashioned, ideal sort of reading—intense, extended, beginning-to-end encounters with carefully crafted texts—has become almost anachronistic. These readers might start a book on an e-reader and then continue it on the go, via audio narration. Or they might forgo books entirely, spending evenings browsing Apple News and Substack before drifting down Reddit’s lazy river. There’s something both diffuse and concentrated about reading now; it involves a lot of random words flowing across a screen, while the lurking presence of YouTube, Fortnite, Netflix, and the like insures that, once we’ve begun to read, we must continually choose not to stop.”

Right, that’s ordinary enough. Scrolling, bite-size portions, group threads. But then! This portion caught my eye as an intriguing premise.

“Over the past few decades, many scholars have seen the decline in reading as the closing of the “Gutenberg Parenthesis”—a period of history, inaugurated by the invention of the printing press, during which a structured ecosystem of published print ruled. The internet, the theory went, closed the parenthesis by returning us to a more free-flowing, decentralized, and conversational mode of communication. Instead of reading books, we can argue in the comments. Some theorists have even proposed that we’re returning to a kind of oral culture—what the historian Walter Ong described as a “secondary orality,” in which gab and give-and-take are enhanced by the presence of text. The ascendance of podcasts, newsletters, and memes has lent credence to this view. “The Joe Rogan Experience” could be understood as a couple of guys around a campfire, passing on knowledge through conversation, like the ancient Greeks.”

Ok, so I wish Joe Rogan weren’t hosting the campfire, but this idea that with the advent of the Gutenberg printing press, civilization suddenly had the opportunity to disseminate ideas in an arguably faster (and sometimes, more consistent, if not more factual) manner gave me pause. In some cultures, it replaced not only rare handwritten materials, but also oral modes of dispensing and shaping concepts and stories. Unfortunately, the article then skips very quickly into A.I. and a somewhat muddled discussion that seems to explore quantity of information and malleable text over specific expertise and sourcing, but I remained marinating on this concept of - What did the advent of “publishing” do for us as a society?

If you’re here on this Substack, you probably enjoy reading and also probably value text that communicates something effectively (even if it’s only the creeping dread of a stalking killer in the latest thriller). While I’ve stopped to consider writing as an art form, as a truth mechanism, as entertainment, I rarely stop to consider how it’s comparable to oral traditions. It’s true I’ve made more of an effort to read books I can discuss and exchange interpretations of with a group after. But, something about reading this article made me pause and think why telling a “story” out loud, to others, has some unique strengths.

People who read a lot (this author included) tend to think they have some sort of intellectual leg up on the rest of the masses who are simply exchanging snappy memes and graphics and pithy two-sentence barbs on the internet. Your neighbor that talks about the one John Grisham book they read this year elicits only eye rolls. But all one needs to do to see the power of oral storytelling in reshaping a world view is walk into an evangelical church (or perhaps a motivational maximums OrangeTheory class). Here a leader shares a message, which is then carried out by the members who internalize and retell what they’ve heard, often personalizing it as their community refracts elements back.

This is not to say that the written word can’t be extremely powerful and effective. But, if we are talking about the sphere that makes up the “Marketplace of Ideas” then who knows what the person quietly digesting 240 books (or the authors they read) are actually contributing to that. Indeed, it seems like Joe Rogan or Jon Favreau (the podcaster, not the Marvel director, though maybe him, too!) is getting a lot more people talking than even the most prolific novelist.

The binary of oral versus written is, of course, a fallacy. Most people engage in an exchange of ideas across a spectrum. But reading this piece certainly made me consider that ideas in a vacuum are, in the end, just words. Maybe that’s why so many of us feel compelled to discuss what we read, because the actual edification comes in the sharing.