The Dumbing Down of American Fiction :: English Literature Fiction Books Essays

The Dumbing Down of American FictionThe 1976 moving-picture show Network is an acerbic satire of televisions oneness-minded obsession with mass ratings.One of the films chief(prenominal) characters, Howard Beale, is c tout ensembleed the Mad Prophet of the Airways, and his weekly harangues produce a ratings motherlode--yet he forever and a day admonishes his viewers to Turn the damn tube offDuring one much(prenominal) rant Beale berates his audience as functional illiterates Less than three per centum of you even read books he shouts messianically--and wherefore promptly collapses from a correct of apoplexic overload. Almost twenty years later, contemplating the contemporary American publishing scene, I feel a Bealean rage coming on (and with it a feeble longing for one of his fits).While three percent of the American population in 1976 would have been a little over six meg readers, upstart surveys suggest that the consistent buyers of books in this country now total no mo re than fractional that number, and may even be as hardly a(prenominal) as one million.1 Thats total readership your avid bodice ripper fans who buy romance in six-packs lumped in willy nilly with high brow mystery addicts who idolize PBS-bred Brits ... To say cypher of your popular science market, your science fiction market, your fitness market, your self-help market, your gourmet readying market, your home carpentry market, your computer hacker market, your quilting and preserving and canning and gardening and hiking and bent-grass gliding and bungee jumping market ... that is, all of these markets taken in concert may have around a million fans. Imagine all possible readers of anything made of words crammed into a bookstore roughly the coat of 10 football stadiums.Large for a bookstore?Remember, with only one million readers to accommodate, its the only bookstore.Just this one, and most days even it is cavernously empty a single big, echoing bookstore in a nation of 250 mi llion people, at least 200 million of whom can, if they so choose, read.Our potential customers total accordingly not even one percent of the reading-capable population, but only half of one percent.If there are 100 million computers in this country, then there may be 100 times as numerous computers as there are consistent readers of books. Well, its a post-book world, you respond.Books are, like the ply and buggy, obsolete.Like the typewriter.Like the barbershop quartet.Like the Cold War. And yet we holdouts, we inveterate readers, we who love our books so well for reasons so