Are we reading as much as our parents did?
Well, are we? It’s a question that keeps librarians and magazine publishers up at night with cold sweats. The off-the-cuff answer is no, we are not, given the nosedive book and newspaper sales have seen in the past decade. We are all far to distracted by social media to really read, right? I mean honestly, when was the last time you saw a kid under 18 reading a newspaper?
But is that a fair assumption? Let’s take a look at some numbers:
58% of the US maintains (ie, has and regularly checks into) a social media profile. Let’s drill that down to Facebook’s stats, shall we, as that’s by far the most popular active social network (and the one I have the most data for).
• The average user has 130 friends and is connected to 80 pages/events
• 55 million status updates are made every day
• 35 million people update their status ever day. Ergo, a little more than half of the people making status updates do so less than once a day.
That means that there are (very) roughly 204 new status updates in a person’s feed every day.
Now there’s no data on the length of the average facebook status update; at least not that my crack research team* could find (if you troll up some hard numbers on that please leave me a comment, I’m very curious) but there is a hard and fast 420 character limit. If we assume that the median of that 420 character limit is roughly the length of an average status update, then we’re looking at 210 characters per update. I realize that I’m making a pretty big guess here and that these numbers are rather suspect. We’re estimating**, that’s the nature of the beast.
Point of info: Facebook formerly limited it’s users to a 160 character update, but I think a reasonable conclusion can be drawn from their increasing the upper limit that many users were needing more room to explain themselves.
So, 204 updates per day at 42 words per update (give or take) comes out to 8568 words in facebook status updates alone. That doesn’t even take into account comments on those updates. That’s roughly 30 pages of a novel or about 3-4 pages of your average newspaper.
Actively using twitter? Using the same kind of math as we crunched above, the average user is reading 3000 words per day, or another 1-2 newspaper pages.
And that's just barely scratching the surface. That's just what numbers are easy to crunch. Don't forget about all those texts we're sending, the blogs we're reading, the bottom-of-the-screen news crawls, the growing omnipresence of textual advertising.
We are surrounded, inundated, subsumed in words. Are we reading more or less than our parents did? It's honestly a nearly impossible question to answer, but from where I stand we're probably breaking even. Is it all Hemmingway or Mailer or Woodward and Bernstein? No, but it never was, and it isn't all trash either.
So fear not librarians, we're still reading, it's just how we're reading that's changed.
~~~
*My research team in this case is myself and the social media engagement specialist at the ad agency I work for googling and trimming abstracts for valuable nuggets of Internet info when we should be doing real, paying work. All this for you, my adoring followers.
**We are not, it should be noted, “ballparking.” Ballparking is for baseball players and stuffed shirts working at mid-90’s dot coms.
kevin allen jr
In addition to opinions on advertising, I possess a chair, a small table, a lamp, and an antler.
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- Kevin Allen Jr.
- Montclair, NJ, United States
- Art director, game designer, photographer, seeker out of wild adventure.
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2 comments:
Hey Kevin --
But couldn't worried librarians and others argue that there's a real and troublesome *qualitative* difference between the sort of snapshot social-media reading that we're doing more and more of, on the one hand, and the more demanding, attention-requiring book and magazine reading that we're doing less and less of? Arguably, the ability to follow a sustained narrative thread or argumentative arc in a text is a skill that, initially threatened by the pervasiveness of broadcasting, is now having the final nail driven into its coffin by digital and social media. There's at least one guy who's making that argumentative, although his book was apparently not well reviewed, as I understand.
Hey Bill,
I see this as a natural evolution. You talk about how sustained attention is dieing skill, and I ask you why is that? Perhaps having a long attention span is akin to being a talented typewriter repair-person. It had a much greater function in the past and now is becoming less demanded by society every day.
Now clearly, there is still a great need for people with long term undivided attentions. Surgeons, scientists, lawyers, chefs, etc. These jobs require very specialized training that sets them apart from the common populace, perhaps part of that training should be attention enhancement.
We may be in a transition period as a people, moving from one way of doing things to another. During times like these the new style can look like an interloper or a violation of a previously correct way of thinking. The "If it aint broke don't fix it" mentality pervades. But keep in mind that until Edison came along with the light bulb most folks thought their candles and kerosene lamps worked just fine.
NOTE- Your's is a good question, and this response and others deserve further thinking. This was just my gut reaction. I know I still like reading a book for a few hours, and wish I had a better attention span for it, so who knows.
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