Reading declines

New Yorker -  This year, as screens and social-media apps continued to fragment our attention, it felt like we finally began to grasp that there is a crisis at hand. In August, the journal iScience published a study by researchers at the University of Florida and University College London which analyzed how people across the United States—cumulatively nearly a quarter of a million, across twenty years—spent their time during a twenty-four-hour window. The data for 2023, the most recent year covered, showed that participants spent an average of sixteen minutes “reading for pleasure,” which included reading a magazine, book, or newspaper; listening to audiobooks; or reading on an electronic device. That figure, however, partially obscured a more striking finding: only sixteen per cent of the respondents read for pleasure at all during the day that was surveyed. In 2004, that figure was twenty-eight per cent. It is the trend line that is most alarming: in the past two decades, daily reading for pleasure has declined by about three per cent per year. It is a sustained, steady erosion, one that is unlikely to reverse itself anytime soon.