Apocalypse Now? Not Even Close | Peer to Peer Review

Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN -- Library Journal, 11/12/2009

"Let’s face it: the library, as a place, is dead,” Suzanne Thorin, dean of libraries at Syracuse University reportedly announced last week at the annual Educause conference, adding, in case her audience didn't get it, "Kaput. Finito." To be sure, she was deliberately taking an extreme position for the sake of debate, but it's a commonly voiced sentiment. Nobody reads anymore. The book is dead. Libraries are deserted tombs full of the dust of vanished civilizations.

Yet all the evidence suggests otherwise. The number of books published has been trending upwards in the past few years and the circulation of items per capita at public libraries is at a historic high. In my library, as in many academic libraries, students fill the study areas in the evenings and never stop agitating for longer hours. They use our databases, ask difficult reference questions, and even—gasp!—check out books. We conducted more workshops for classes in the library last year than ever. Yet according to popular culture, reading, books, and libraries are doomed. Doomed!

Anxiety as a lever for action
Anxiety is a terrific rhetorical tool. It gets people's attention and demands action. For that reason, fear is often used in narrative appeals in order to enlist the audience in a cause. For example, in an essay in Green Culture: Environmental Rhetoric in Contemporary America, M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer describe the ways that apocalyptic narratives, a staple of dystopian science fiction, were used by environmentalists in the 1960s to call attention to ecological threats.

This millennial rhetoric "aims to transform the consciousness that a problem exists into acceptance of action toward a solution by prefacing the solution with a future scenario of what could happen if action is not taken, if the problem goes untreated." When Rachel Carson wanted to warn us about the dangers of pesticides, she didn't talk about pesticides. She talked about a world without birds, a time when spring would be silent. Her little story caught people's imaginations and she changed the way we think about the world.

Literacy and the future of pleasure reading may seem less urgent than environmental catastrophe—unless it is framed as a crisis. Reports on Americans' reading habits from the National Endowment for the Arts used crisis rhetoric to rally the public around the cause of encouraging people to read more literature in their spare time. According to Reading at Risk (2004) the reading of fiction is not only in decline, it's in free fall. This problem is not just about books; the decline in reading "parallels a larger retreat from participation in civic and cultural life." In fact, our very freedom is at stake: "As more Americans lose this capability [for sustained voluntary reading] our nation becomes less informed, active, and independent-minded."

A second report focused on young readers (after all, children are the gold standard for inducing anxiety) and framed the decline in reading as "a question of national consequence." The results of the study, according to the introduction, are incontrovertible, disturbing, and alarming. "Poor reading skills correlate heavily with lack of employment, lower wages, and fewer opportunities for advancement. Significantly worse reading skills are found among prisoners than in the general adult population. And deficient readers are less likely to become active in civic and cultural life, most notably in volunteerism and voting."

Though the report acknowledges these conclusions are based on correlations, not causality—failure to read literature can't be proven to actually cause criminal behavior—it is a call to action. "If, at the current pace, America continues to lose the habit of regular reading, the nation will suffer substantial economic, social, and civic setbacks."

Curiously, a third report—one that found the reading of fiction was on the rise—got less press coverage than the first two. (Perhaps the news wasn't good enough; a table in the report that reveals the less-than-cheery fact that while fiction was growing in popularity, the percent of adults who read books of all kinds was actually down by over two percent.) In any case, bad news is good news; if it bleeds, it leads. If people read, it doesn't.

That's why the first report continues to be cited and the third report is rarely mentioned. The NEA did succeed in providing solid support for the perception that reading is imperiled, though perhaps not at persuading people it's a crisis that needs solving. When I see references to the report, it's generally in support of a claim that people don't read, not in support of a particular course of action to encourage the reading of literature.

All of this is interesting viewed in conjunction with another fiction problem—the one that librarians raised the alarm about a hundred years ago, back when reading fiction was the problem. An annual report cited in Library Journal in 1896 attributed a drop in circulation to a healthy decrease in the fiction collection, which only appealed to the "most idle class in the community. It is certainly not the function of the public library to foster the mind-weakening habit of novel-reading among the very classes—the uneducated, busy or idle—whom it is the duty of the public library to lift to a higher plane of thinking. It has been thought expedient, therefore, to reduce the quantity of fiction to the minimum…." 

Among the chosen
Some of the threnodies for the death of books and libraries come from people who love them both. They worry that our brains are being rewired. The easy availability of information has made us stupid. Publishing is hopelessly broken. Reading is a rare enough event to make the headlines.

There's an interesting undercurrent, though. Threaded through most of these premature obituaries, there's a hint that the mourner is one of the select few who have the wit and the taste to appreciate books. They are the connoisseurs, the rare individuals with taste and learning. Any news that reading is actually quite popular, that book discussion groups are thriving, that young people actually prefer printed books to electronic ones, threatens their claim to exclusiveness. We come to praise books, but to do so we must bury them.

We have to destroy the library in order to save it
Not everyone suffers from nostalgia, and some do want to take action. Much of the rhetoric about the end of print, of books, of libraries as a home for books, is actually an exhortation that libraries must change or die.

Dying is a given unless our priorities and processes shift away from "the care and cleaning of books" (in the words of Daniel Greenstein) or "air conditioning the books" (in the words of Adrian Sannier, technology officer at Arizona State University, who also said, "I suggest you burn down the library" under the misapprehension that Google had digitized and made freely available every book). Quite often, change agents characterize the library as a moribund institution that has no relevance to today's students, a place where it never occurred to the librarians to offer group study facilities, promote new formats of information, or write new job descriptions for librarians. I don't know of any library like that, actually, but only the most radical of measures will make the library meaningful today. It's a problem that must be solved. Change is a must!

Embarrassingly enough, our patrons—even college students, who use libraries more than any other demographic—stubbornly continue to identify libraries with books. The OCLC study that found we have a brand problem also found that people actually like books and libraries. But their fondness for books must be a problem because research shows young people don't read.

In the end I suppose it's all about which story is more compelling. Whether you love books and mourn their passing, or think libraries will perish if they don't change with the times, there's nothing like an impending apocalypse to make it exciting. Just so long as it's coming soon. Very soon. Just not right now.

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