Anxiety, Competition, and Audiobooks
[0:00] Hey! How are you? I have just finished a new chapter of that book. It was s-o- good. Oh, by the way, have you read anything last week? Well… not really… I was planning to go over one section or two… but that was all about it… [Intro music] Our reading habit is declining, dramatically.
[0:26]Reporter: Reading had fallen off a cliff in United States over the past 20 years. More than 40 percent-according to a new study on our daily lives from researhers from the University of Florida and University College in London-they looked over a quarter million Americans between 2003 and 2023 and found that the number who read for pleasure fell about 3 percent per year, so as when 2023, just 60 percent of all Americans say they read for pleasure [music fade].
[0:55] The decreasing of time we spent on books is correlated to our ever more competitive lifestyle, reflected by the shrinking of our overall leisure time, which, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is only 3 hours per day in 2024 for an adult with a child under age 6. "If you're working multiple jobs or dealing with transportation barriers in a rural area, a trip to the library may just not be feasible," argues Jill Sonke, director of research initiatives at the University of Florida Center for Arts in Medicine. To make matters even worse, the increase in competitiveness has brought significant mental stress to our society. Reading, on the other hand, has traditionally been used to reduce our level of anxiety, thank to its tranquilizing and meditational effect. But now, with our reading practice going down, such turbulence will only intensify. The National Institute of Mental Health reports that approximately a third of U.S. adults will experience an anxiety disorder at some time in their lives. This phenomenon is especially severe with young adults as, according to The Population Reference Bureau, over 40% of adults aged 18-29 reported symptoms of anxiety more days than not.
[2:20]Jill Sonke in an interview: Reading for pleasure is one of the tools we have in our toolkit for health and well-being. We know that reading for pleasure can reduce Anxiety, and can increase relaxation, it stimulates our imagination and creativity, it just contributes in so many ways to our well-being. And when we are not taking advantage of tools like that for our well-being, we're losing health advantages.
[2:44]Interviewer: Yeah, and it's social aspects out there is huge too. One of my favourite things is to give other people a favourite book and learn a little bit about them as they learn a little bit about me. So...
[2:52]Jill Sonke: Yeah, and talking about reading, reading itself is really important for developing empathy and social connections. [a gentle music gradually come in]
[2:58] Fortunately, people are not running out of solutions. A new form of reading gradually came into people's vision-audiobooks, which are basically recordings of books being read aloud. Usually, audiobooks are recorded by professional narrators and are for sale in audiobookstores or digital websites. But sometimes they can also be narrated by booklovers or even the author themselves, and can be accessible through public libraries or open-source catalogs for free downloads. With the development of social media, audiobooks, are becoming, a whole, new, trend. I'm John, and today, let's talk about anxiety, competition, and audiobooks. [pause]
[3:55] You may have heard many people involving in a debate on whether audiobooks should be counted as reading. But the whole story probably started in 1932 when The American Foundation for the Blind established a program called "the Talking Book" with a turntable and a vinyl record, introduced the world the concept of audiobooks for the first time. So, it really is the case that, when Gabriel Ryan, a blog writer and contributor from School Health, who is himself with visual impairment, argues that a major motivation for audiobooks is and has always been inclusivity and access for people with disabilities. For blind people, audiobooks are indeed much more convenient. But for the massive others at that time, they were just not buying the idea. In an article titled "Is Audio Really the Future of the Book", the author Rebecca Barry points out, although only fewer than one fourth visually impaired reader could read braille at that time, critics insisted that the money would be a better use if the Foundation publish more books in braille, and charge that listening was "a lazy man's way of reading". A even startling opposition came from authors like Willa Cather, who refused to allow her books to be reproduced in audio format, calling it "very distasteful". The rise of this new medium seems stimulated a sense of cultural anxiety, that people feared that books on audiocassettes would contribute to the dumbing down of America.
[5:35] However, for most of the people, they are not really taking it too seriously. According to a 1992 survey from scholar Helen Aron, middle-aged, highly educated people, especially long commuters, still enjoyed listening to books on cassettes, though they also enjoy reading printed books and using audio only as "an adjunct to reading". Also, according to Aron, audiobooks are observed to teach critical listening, improve vocabulary, and increase comprehension and appreciation of the written words for reluctant readers. Although later studies have found that improving reading attitude is not a core functionality of audiobooks, which means, a guy who hate literature to the bone will still hate it after listening to an audiobook chapter or two, it doesn't really undermine audiobook as an effective way to interact with literature, or, in other words, as proper reading. [The music finishes playing here]
[6:28] In 1986, a study by Philip Gough and William Tunmer marked a milestone in human's understanding on our reading process.
[6:38]Guest in an interview: This research, that is, the most important research in my opinion that ever been done on reading. Because it clearifies very clearly what good readers do well, and those who don't read so well struggle with. In the Simple View of Reading, this research, that was first done in 1990, it was proposed in 1986, and it's been replicated hundreds of times. People have tried to disprove it, and they have tried to prove it. They can only prove it. They cannot disprove the Simple View of Reading. And what it says simply, is that reading is made of two components: decoding, and language comprehension. In order to be strong at reading comprehension, you gotta be strong at decoding, and you gotta have background knowledge and understand the words that you are reading.
[7:40] According to the study, "decoding" is the ability to sound out and recognize words correctly, and "comprehension" is the ability to understand the meaning of that language in the given context. This means, even when we are reading silently, we go over a mental process that pronounces the written text out aloud and comprehend them as if someone's talking to us. "Writing is only less than 6000 years old, insufficient time for the evolution of specialized mental processes devoted to reading. We use the mental mechanism that evolved to understand oral language to support the comprehension of written language." Argues Daniel Willingham, psychologist at the University of Virginia, when he was writing to the New York Times.
[8:32] Therefore, it is not hard for us to conclude that, the same mental process is involved when we are listening to an audiobook or reading a paper book, only with the former allowing listeners to get the meaning while skirting the work of decoding. As Willingham suggests, decoding is only a serious work for beginning readers, so, it is not surprising if a school-aged kid struggles between paper books and audiobooks. But once you reach high school, it becomes automatic, and it's no more effortful or error prone than listening. Indeed, the experience of listening to an audiobook can be no worse than reading, as when James Tate Hill was diagnosed Optic Neuropathy, a disease leading to vision loss, the transition from traditional reading to audiobook listening went smoothly. "Over the years, people have asked if I noticed a difference between books on tape and reading print, and the answer is I don't know. Sporadic reader that I had been, it was hard to say if the words read with my ears reached my brain differently from everything I had read with my eyes. … What I know for sure is this: Sooner or later, the voice in my ears ceases to be a voice. It becomes the words, the words become sentences, and the sentences become the story. At some point, the voice in my ears merges with my own voice the way the words on a page once became my own inner voice when I [was] still reading print." Hill explains.
Now, everything should be settled… are they? it seems, the discussion continued. In an article called "why are we still debating if audiobooks 'count' as reading?"", the author points out, that every couple months, like clockwork, the question of "do you count audiobooks the same as reading" starts trending in bookish social media communities. It is clear that, scientifically, audiobook reading and paper book reading has already been proved to have the same process involved, and therefore, there's not really anything unresolved here. So, what are we really looking for? Well, remember we said previously that people start to see everything as a competition? Definitely, reading is included, as this, is actually the answer. [Another gentle music starts to play]
[10:51] Several days before, I was surfing online, and one Reddit post grabbed my attention. In response to the question "why do some people see audiobooks as cheating", a comment argues: "because they take it as a competition". Yes, when there is competition, there are "rules", and there comes the concept of "cheating". But why are people making the competition? Well, this relates back to the broader context, that with the society itself becomes more and more competitive in general, its members suffer from increasing sense of insecure. Their self-esteem is swept away, they eagerly need a method to regain their dignity. So they created such competitions, and they feel a temporary boost in self-worth. Then, why are they making reading to be the competition? Because when we are working all the day, as Sonke suggests, reading become a luxury. So those who still read are seen by the society as refined, liberated people, so it is not surprising, that people who need self-esteem want others to see them as one. Therefore, when another person says "oh, so you're not reading much", we can nearly blurt out the objection: "because you are cheating with audiobooks". Social media, in addition, also plays a role here, but a very complicated one. Just like a reader complains in an article titled "Competitive Reading Needs to Calm Down": "On the one hand, it's great to see so many people on social media with such an intense passion for books… because, well, join the club; On the other hand, it seems like a lot of this intensity translates into some less than admirable traits- judginess, cutthroat competitiveness and quite simply people taking themselves way too seriously".
Indeed, we should calm down. But that's not our fault. We definitely need a way to find personhood and self-esteem, when we are alienated by this fast-growing society, and reading is in fact a perfect practice, if we do it right. The purpose of reading a book is not to reach its end. Like Camu's Sisyphus, if one is too obsessed with reaching the top, the mental stress and frustration only adds up. [The music finishes playing here] Reading is about meditating, about reserving a sense of peace for yourself in this world of noise, about finding a place to interact with the world in a slow pace when our everyday life is always in a hurry. Like when editor Nathan Bransford tried to illustrates his feeling of reading, he explains: "When you read a book, you place yourself in a very unique mental state where you're fusing your consciousness to the authors' to co-create every single element of the book in your own head. Including the inflection of the characters' voices." [An encouraging music gradually begins]Now, I suggest that reading is like you feel your journey of bouldering the rock to the top, and when you reach the top, you just let the rock roll down again, that's when you start over on a new book. It can be with paper print, or audio recordings, or whatever.
[14:14]Audiobook clip from The Myth of Sisyphus: "This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy." [music fades out]