We Can No Longer Read Books

-- By ReynaldoWilson - 13 Dec 2024

Introduction

The Atlantic reports: The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books. Students at Columbia University in the City of New York, and similarly situated elite, selective universities lack the ability to read. Well, that is what a cursory glance at one of the latest headlines from The Atlantic would have you believe. Yes, college students can read. The claim is a bit more specific, however. It is that college students cannot read books cover to cover. The author of the article interviews college professors at elite universities who complain that students have demanded to do less and less reading that they find it difficult to assign more than two or three books over an entire semester. It it hard to tell how much so-called baby boomers are attempting the proverbial and trite “back in my day”…ism or does the lack or reading books cover to cover reveal an issue with the way modern technology has affected the way people consume information?

The Culture Industry

The critical theorists of the Frankfurt School contemplated many issues of social and political domination. In view of this essay, a piece within a larger work titled Dialectics of the Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote about what they called The Culture Industry. The two authors published the piece in New York after fleeing Nazi occupied Germany. In giving more credence to the ideological superstructure of capitalism, Frankfurt scholars’ writings largely focused on an attempt to understand why the proletarian revolution had not come about. While the many different Frankfurt theorists cover various areas of social life, many of their answers revolve around what they see as capitalism’s re-entrenchment through culture and mass media.

In The Culture Industry, Adorno and Horkheimer point to Walt Disney as the most dangerous man in the United States. To summarize an incredibly dense work, the theorists posit standardized and unoriginal mass media products that Disney and similarly situated media giants put out are designed to pacify otherwise angry, alienated, and overworked proletarians by creating a false sense of satisfaction and stifling critical thinking/class consciousness. It follows, then, that the more one engages with ‘false’ mass produced art, the more pacified an individual will become. If scholars writing back in the mid 20th century had such power observations about The Culture Industry, capitalism, and ideological control, it should stand to reason that these forces have changed in contemporary times.

The Age of Survalience Capitalism

Shashona Zuboff’s in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism is, similar to theorists at the Frankfurt school in that Zuboff is trying to explain a further re-engineering of the capitalism Marx wrote about and adapt the theory to contemporary times. For Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism refers to the status quo of domination by the hands of giant tech firms like Google and Facebook. Specifically, she argues that our interface with these ‘free’ technologies produces behavioral surplus (information on our behavior) which is refined and commodified to be sold in behavioral futures markets. In other words, Tech giants are amassing wealth by converting human experience into data and using that data to predict and control users at a massive scale. It should stand to reason that companies benefit from improving their advanced algorithms for each individual user. If the user is constantly presented with personalized videos, advertisements, media ect. They will use the platform more and create more data to be commodified by tech giants and sold to advertising firms.

So Why Can't Students Read Full Books

It seems that the answer for the question brought to the forefront of educational discourse by the article in The Atlantic draws on both of these aforementioned theories about capitalism, technology, and mass media. From the culture industry, mass media products have been serving to collectively and systematically neuter our attention spans and propensity for creative/critical thinking. If anything, people’s attention to mass produced media seems to have steadily gotten worse as the audience for non-A lister-created music, indie film projects, and genuine artistic expression pails in comparison to the audiences for Disney movie remakes and repetitive pop songs.

In the times of Adorno and Horkheimer, the proletarian had to travel…leave their house to go to a cinema and watch a motion picture made by Walt Disney. If you wanted to hear music, one would have to purchase a record deliberately and play it on a record player. Those days are no longer. As a cause and result of the forces Zuboff points out, an individual’s ability to produce behavioral data is important to the new super capitalists at Google and Meta. To produce the behavioral data Google needs to be successful, their software and other software like it stimulate, predict, and profit from continual input. People browsing on TikTok? and Instagram reels are not, to Adorno and Horkheimer’s dismay, browsing opera, learning methods of classical artistic expression, and completing their positions in relation to capital with grand philosophical works. Instead, kids finally making it to the hallowed halls of the Ivy League have grown up ingesting brain rot tik-toks and mass cultural effects. It should come as no surprise why kids are not readling full books. An entire network spearheaded by surveillance capitalists has pacified young adults of our time which has resulted in tremendous profits for them at the cost of a more free society.

Works Cited Horkheimer, Max, Theodor W. Adorno, and Gunzelin Noeri. Dialectic of enlightenment. Stanford University Press, 2002.

Zuboff, Shoshana. "The age of surveillance capitalism." Social theory re-wired. Routledge, 2023. 203-213.

Horowitch, Rose. “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” The Atlantic. 2024.

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