Re:The myth of the golden age of reading
by gnicholas on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @12:03PM
(#21126954)
> If you asked people in Britain or in the US a generation ago what book they had in their house, the most common answers would have been a Bible and a telephone book. So when we blame the absence of printed books for the distraction and the impatience and superficiality of the digital world, it’s unfair. We’re comparing an ideal scenario of print reading with a more realistic assessment of digital reading.
Sure, those might have been the most common answer to the question of "what books do you have in your home?", but that does not mean that people didn't also have/read other books. It just means that the n-dimensional venn diagram of book ownership centered around the Bible and the phone book. It's obvious that most of the books that I own are not the same as most of the books that my neighbors own, so those (more traditional) "books" wouldn't be the most common answers to this particular question.
Sure, those might have been the most common answer to the question of "what books do you have in your home?", but that does not mean that people didn't also have/read other books. It just means that the n-dimensional venn diagram of book ownership centered around the Bible and the phone book. It's obvious that most of the books that I own are not the same as most of the books that my neighbors own, so those (more traditional) "books" wouldn't be the most common answers to this particular question.