A vision of the virtual end of reading

 The essayist E.B. White told of a college president who had predicted that in 50 years only 5 percent of the people would be reading.

White’s piece was collected in a book, The Second Tree from the Corner, published in 1954, the year before I was born. The college president’s prediction obviously was off the mark.

It was the dawn of the audio-visual age. Educators were worried that reading would be undone by television, movies, filmstrips and slide shows. No one had thought of PowerPoint, much less the Internet.

White shared the president’s concerns about substitutes or shortcuts for reading. Everyone wants to be informed and educated. Fewer people want to put in the work, what White called the “discipline of the mind.”

I marked two sentences in White's essay:

• “Reading is the work of the alert mind, is demanding, and under ideal conditions finally produces a sort of ecstasy.” He’s talking about the communication between a writer and a reader. A reader has to work to absorb and digest what the writer has to say. As the writer Eric Hoffer used to say, the grass becomes cow, not the other way around. The reader eventually owns the idea.

• “Readers and writers are scarce, as are publishers and reporters.” White was skeptical of reporters who didn’t bother to go to the scene of the accident themselves, who reported on others’ reports. Good readers and good writers, good publishers and good reporters have always been scarce. Things of real value are always scarce.