Literary Reading's Steady Decline

So much options, so little time. This is the dilemma of the modernity of abundance. Binging in movies and endless TV series in so easily available wonderful Netflix streaming, hard core gaming in PS4 or Microsoft Xbox One, browsing through Facebook status and interesting feeds, tweets, funny cat and stupendous viral videos in YouTube, cool photos in Instagram, tumbling through Tumbler, pinning never to be read articles and essays and flipping Flipboard like a fantastic ninja. The ever increasing choices to capture the fleeting mind and the decreasing attention span.

Where is the time for reading for the sole purpose of pleasure and broadening one's mind and outlook? Where is the energy and motivation and inspiration opening a melancholic novel written in poetic style illuminating humanity's goodness and its terrible shortcoming? No time and efforts for seeing the world from other person's perspective.

The declining of readership of world's exquisite novels and stories is probably not a surprise in the midst of distractions. The consequences of this painful trend do not bode well for humanity's collective empathy index as this steady downward trend of reading abandonment of world's one of the greatest treasures, books with high quality and transformative and rejuvenating power, may very well nudge humanity to a not so friendly a place, not so kind and gentle ambience where vulnerable segments of any society or a nation are put into heartless treatment.

Seeing the world and this ridiculously short existence from one or many perspectives perhaps helped the humanity's progress from its infancy to its somewhat maturity of the modern world. One by one all the past bigotry, naked hatred, grabbing other man's resources and livelihood were placed under the tightening international and national laws, ensuring the flourishing of democracy, and the uplifting of countless many from the depth of abject poverty and outright cruelty to a livable world. Surely, unstable spots exist where war and violence are still taking heavy tolls on innocent human souls. Certainly, many more are still suffering chained in the sinuous shackles of poverty and its myriad of manifestations. Taking into account of all the miseries and terribleness, humanity is still in a better shape than it was not too long ago in the bygone centuries and millennia.

Unless this tragic downward trend of literary reading can be reversed earnestly, the precious humanitarian achievements that the human world had achieved, may slip away, slip away into the chaos of soulless and robotic impulse where the talk of compassion is mightily overwhelmed by crafty and selfish ploys.

Reference link:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/09/07/the-long-steady-decline-of-literary-reading/

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