I disagree. And sure, the new thing comes along and isn't really all that new or bad until it actually is. Sometimes a new thing really is bad. Sounds like a fallacy to think that since every past advance was a good thing that every future advance must also be a good thing. You don't think digital media has caused a huge and rapid shift in the way humans entertain themselves and communicate?

I'm not sure if it's for better or for worse but this is vastly different than anything humans have dealt with for all of history.

I have to admit, I read books a lot less than I used to, but many of the books I read weren't really much more substantial than a TV show in the end. For every high quality book that makes you think i've read, i've read a dozen or more fluff fantasy or sci-fi stories.

Whereas my web browsing habits have probably changed for the better. I spend far less tine reading random nonsense now and most of my time spent on the web is spent either reading things at least I find productive or talking to people.

Consider that at the start of the 20th century, there was no other mass media besides print. Western literacy rates were poking into the 90% range (with some demographic variation) by sometime around the dawn of America.

There's always been more to culture than print (as with any media), of course, and reading culture has never meant universal critical engagement with deeply thoughtful texts. But the place of print between the enlightenment and the rise of broadcast & networked media was huge -- it soaked up the space occupied by all media now.

Maybe the new things aren't worse than the old thing, maybe they are. But any picture that doesn't reckon with the fact that things are in fact different now isn't going to be a very accurate one.

Some parts of the world certainly did. Read Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death". He talks about how Midwestern farmboys would read while they ploughed fields, with one hand holding reins and the other holding an open book.

They were for the most part not reading fine literature, they were reading low quality trash fiction adventure stories while their wives read trash fiction romance novels. It was the Netflix/Youtube of it's day. Of course some people read "good" things or consume "high culture" but most people consume whatever the mass market media of their day is (hence why it's called "mass market").

The difference is they were free to read any book by any independent author if they chose to. Netflix and Hollywood are much more centrally controlled and homogeneous than literature. YouTube is censored short form and many content producers make content that is more shallow than the most shallow adventure story because it gets more views and it is advertiser friendly.

The other difference is that Plato's Republic sits not too far away from 'The Crocodile Whisperer' in the book shop and library. YouTube and Netflix feeds on the other hand are tailored to what the user already watches and what they will most likely get them to click next, stuck in a loop never broken by serendipity.

The immediate availability of entertainment in the form of TV and movies on Netflix makes the idea of finding, picking up and reading a book less appetising and harder. The more someone reads (even if it is trash) the faster they can read and the wider their vocabulary becomes. This makes it easier for them to pick up more substantive books later on. Instead we see a generation of young people glued to their phones reading text written by their peers, watching the same trash they would read but without any of the benefits of reading.

The need for entertainment drove many young people to read in the past and that is a good thing!

Postman describes it otherwise.

> Some parts of the world certainly did.

i believe that's all they had. if they had other choices...

i do agree with OP. it just seems like whatever the era provided to you to occupy your mind.

> it never had one.

How can you say that? Literacy was once a very strong proxy to wealth, and still retains a connection today. Books have been fundamental to many aspects of human history.

If Russia never had a culture of reading, then how does the Communist Manifesto drive an entire society, millions of people, to overthrow its familial leaders before the era of television?

> If Russia never had a culture of reading, then how does the Communist Manifesto drive an entire society, millions of people, to overthrow its familial leaders before the era of television?

It didn't. The central (though far from only) divergence of Leninism from classical Marxism to allow it to work in early 20th Century Russia, which wasn't the kind of advanced (even by mid-late 19th Century standards) liberal industrial capitalist regime to which the Communist Manifesto was directed, was the adoption of vanguardism, in which broad class consciousness and awareness of class theory by the proletariat was abandoned as a requirement for Communist revolution in favor of authoritarian leadership of the masses by a narrow intellectual elite.

A major justification for Leninism was the belief by Russian Communists of the time that what you describe could not happen in Russia.

(I don't assert that the reason for that is or is not anything to do with culture of reading, but the Communist Revolution certainly does not support your thesis in the way you suggest.)

In most democracies (or allusions thereof) political parties each release a manifesto before elections. Most people don't read them.

> If Russia never had a culture of reading, then how does the Communist Manifesto drive an entire society, millions of people, to overthrow its familial leaders before the era of television?

Firstly, the leaders whom the Bolsheviks overthrew in October 1917 were not familiar to most Russians. The Provisional Government instituted after the February Revolution was a messy affair.

Committed Bolsheviks were a minority at the time of the Russian Revolution. However, there were just enough of them in the railroads, ports, army and other key infrastructure that they could carry out a coup against the Provisional Government.

As with many radical movements, most of the ordinary Bolshevik sympathizers had never actually read the foundational texts of Communism (Marx' writings are often a challenge even for intellectuals). They only knew some simple agitprop distillations thereof.

That the Communist regime spent the whole 1920s and early 1930s carrying out literacy campaigns and establishing written standards for most of Russia's languages also underscores how little of a culture of reading existed in the country pre-1917 outside the elite cities like Moscow and Saint-Petersburg.

> how does the Communist Manifesto drive an entire society, millions of people, to overthrow its familial leaders before the era of television?

It didn't and couldn't. That was the conceit and power behind Lenin's "vanguard" concept. Only a small minority needed to be ideologically driven; everybody else could and did join sides based on more practical, individualized motivations. See, generally, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguardism

That said, I'm not trying to opine on whether, when, and how popular book reading was or still is.

I agree with your statement, but I feel like it's rather splitting hairs in terms of the entire conversation. Both the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks came out of Iskra (and it's impossible to describe Lenin without it), and reading culture very much fueled the rise of the vanguard and Lenin's immense popularity. The narrative passing from Lenin to Stalin was also driven by essays in newspapers by political figures. Reading culture was inseparable from political culture at the time!

> If Russia never had a culture of reading, then how does the Communist Manifesto drive an entire society, millions of people, to overthrow its familial leaders before the era of television?

not disagreeing with your premise, but -

assuming this to be accurate (leaving out alot of factors),

nothing says small number of people couldn't read it and then go around verbally agitating everyone else.

that said literacy was fairly high in those times and i agree reading was very common

Literacy in Russia was low during the Russian Revolution. The Russian Empire was one of the last to abolish serfdom in Europe, and the parts where serfdom was abolished earliest, industrialization the greatest, and literacy the highest (e.g. Poland) were parts that had separated by the time of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Also, the monarchy was toppled by an ideologically diverse group. The Bolsheviks would have to fight a civil war before they could institute the Soviet Union. It's really not plausible that any significant number of Russians were spurred into action by reading the Communist Manifesto. Now, undoubtedly some elite group of radicals did just that, but that doesn't require widespread literacy, let alone widespread consumption of sophisticated literature.

It didn't. The fact is Russian Empire was very illiterate populationюThe thing is dew to the fact that the big part of highest society was well educated with French and German culture the lowest society was ready to follow everyone who will level up their standard of living. The same practically was in the Germany with nazi and the same was in USA. The low level reading always lead to misunderstanding between the government and people. Understand me in a right way, When it was USSR the population was very educated but there were also such people as we call it intelligentsia who were disappointed with the situation in the country and it grew into the protests and to the GuLAG but this is another story :)I am sure people need to travel to grow their mind, their scope... get aquatinted with other cultures.