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

The Dumbing cut down of American FictionThe 1976 film Network is an acerbic satire of televisions single-minded obsession with mass ratings.One of the films main characters, Howard Beale, is called the Mad Prophet of the Airways, and his weekly harangues larn a ratings motherlode--yet he constantly admonishes his viewers to Turn the damn supply offDuring one such rant Beale berates his audience as useable illiterates Less than three pct of you stock-still read books he shouts messianically--and because promptly collapses from a sort of apoplexic everywhereload. Almost twenty years later, contemplating the coeval American publishing scene, I feel a Bealean rage approach shot on (and with it a vague longing for one of his fits).While three share of the American population in 1976 would have been a little over six million readers, recent surveys suggest that the logical buyers of books in this landed estate now total no more than half that number, and may unconstipated be a s few as one million.1 Thats total readership your wishful bodice ripper fans who buy romance in six-packs lumped in willy nilly with high brow riddle addicts who idolize PBS-bred Brits ... To say nothing of your popular science commercialize, your science legend market, your fitness market, your self-help market, your gourmet cooking market, your home carpentry market, your computer taxi market, your quilting and preserving and canning and gardening and hiking and hang gliding and bungee jumping market ... that is, all of these markets taken together may have around a million fans. Imagine all possible readers of anything made of words crammed into a bookshop roughly the size 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 million people, at least 200 million of whom can, if they so choose, rea d.Our potential customers total then not even one percent of the reading-capable population, but only half of one percent.If there are nose candy million computers in this country, then there may be hundred times as many computers as there are consistent readers of books. Well, its a post-book world, you respond.Books are, like the horse and buggy, obsolete.Like the typewriter.Like the barbershop quartet.Like the Cold War. And yet we holdouts, we inveterate readers, we who eff our books so well for reasons so