If you want to read more, you must watch the above video.
In this entertaining 17-minute video, Alexander Macris, Senior Vice President of Alloy Digital and general manager of Escapist magazine, makes an analogy between the plummeting nutritional value of the average American diet and the average American content diet, and puts forth a compelling argument for why we all ought to read more (and harder) books: they will literally make us smarter.
The flip side of the argument, of course, is that reading less, and reading simpler content, makes us dumber.
Macris is not the first to suggest that Americans are getting dumber — in 2012, Stanford geneticist Gerald Crabtree caused a mild furor by suggesting that the process of random mutations over the past 3,000 years were bound to have made us dumber. (Other scientists dismissed his assertion as a “conceptual fallacy”, calling it “trivial as opposed to controversial.”)
But whereas Crabtree was just positing a hypothesis, Macris is presenting data:
- Average reading levels of Americans, from the past and today
- Reading level of textbooks
- Reading level of best-sellers
- Average shot-length of US films (MTV-style editing)
- Declining sentence and paragraph length (correlated with the timing of TV and the Internet’s introduction)
He also takes on “screen media” — TV, movies, and Internet content. According to sources in the talk, consuming screen media causes “damage to our deep cognitive processes.” Ouch.
As a writer for a primarily online audience, I feel the pressure to “dumb down” my writing acutely. The Flesch-Kincaid readability score — the same one mentioned in the talk — is built into my SEO plugin. Google’s algorithm is literally encouraging me to dumb down my content.
Note that we’re not speaking here about clarity. I strive to write as clearly as possible, so that I may be understood. There is, however, a natural tension between clarity and precision — one of my writing heroes, R. Buckminster Fuller, writes quite clearly, but often invents or redefines words in his quest for precision. Because of this, Flesch-Kincaid scores him 14.6 — best understood only by college graduates (according to Amazon, 88% of books are easier to read.) Yet I find his books thrilling and deeply satisfying.
Macris comments on this phenomenon:
Best-sellers were once books that challenged the college-educated mind, and they are now books that are easy for 5th graders. Four and a half extra years of education . . . to do worse [on reading tests].Alexander Macriss
As an educator, this last point makes me cringe. Our education system is failing, failing, failed.
If there’s a bright spot here, it’s the following:
The better you are at reading, the better you are at thinking…A high volume of reading increases knowledge, broadens vocabulary, and reduces cognitive decline of aging. Reading makes you smarter. Alexander Macriss
So, although our education system, our popular music, and our screen media have failed us, we have a clear recourse for self-improvement: self-directed hard reading, paired with conscious consumption of challenging, sonorous & melodic music, like Mozart.
If we care about the health of our minds as much as we care about the health of our bodies, we need to begin balancing our content diets.Alexander Macriss
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