The Death of Reading - How the BBC Operated in Bad Faith

(You may listen to the BBC Sounds episode below. I listened to it when it was uploaded to my stream of content from the BBC Radio 4 'In Our Time' podcast).

Upon listening to a recent episode of a BBC Podcast, I feel the need to comment on what I have just heard. Titled 'The Death of Reading', this podcast episode was presented to us by James Marriott, a man who seems smart enough to know what would happen if reading were, as we say, die. So, you might be asking why I have a bit of a problem with this interview/podcast/radio show - whatever you would like to call it. Well, it seems to me that here, the BBC have operated somewhat in bad faith. If you have read my previous articles in terrified awe of the Gen-Z cultural shift and sympathising with its victims, then you will know exactly what I am about to talk about - and you probably would have also guessed where the BBC seems to lie the blame.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the multi-billion dollar corporation will protect even its adversaries of the same, or similar fields over the requirement to stand on the side of innocent people. Which is why the BBC episode The Death of Reading puts its blame on the people rather than on the mega-corporation which destroyed the attention spans of children everywhere by throwing money at the issue. In 2017, even Netflix stated that its biggest competitor was sleep - not Prime, not Disney+, but sleep itself. These corporations will spend every dollar in their power to make sure they get two back in return for each. It is no wonder as to: why they are winning the culture war through playing both sides, why social media is knowingly worse for everyone involved and yet, everyone seems to be addicted to it all the same, unable to pull themselves away - almost like a gambling addiction.

The BBC Episode in question seemed to highlight key issues: the addiction to social media, the lack of depth in understanding and the way in which children who were now turning into adults and off to university could not finish an average novel - even those on literature courses. It is all well and good to highlight these issues (even though they have been highlighted over and over again with no solutions offered) but to not acknowledge that the root cause is the monetisation of attention over the course of a decade or so, is why I state that this has been done in bad faith.

The tone the episode takes is one of surprise and blame - this is of course, not something we should at this point, be surprised about. But besides this, there are no solutions offered apart from 'get yourself away from social media'. Again, it is bad faith to assume that these people don't have an addiction, it is not being weaponised against them and you can fix it by saying 'don't do this'. You would not tell someone who has a drug addiction to simply 'not do cocaine' - and so with the same chemical receptors in the brain being hit almost more than if one were to do cocaine, how do you expect this to pan out exactly? I thought so.

It is true that the majority of the listeners of the BBC Radio 4 podcast are of the older generation and I might be an exception (would you consider a millennial old? I am not sure. I consider myself middle-aged). And so, to operate in bad faith like this is yet another play of the culture war: to convince the older generation that the fault lies with the younger generation. It is a tale as old as time. 'Children are not doing (X) anymore and so, that is why they are less than our generation in every way.' With each turn of the clock, each turn of the century, there is something new. The Boomer Generation perhaps don't know how to saddle a horse and carriage, but why would they need to? Everyone has something that has made life easier to some degree.

The difference now is not that life is being made easier, it is that simple hobbies are being erased and replaced with what constitutes to addictive behaviours. Without reading, life actually becomes harder. The tortoise moves more slowly, eventually it is the hare that wins and the story of society gets thus, turned on its head. A society of addicts is easier to control.

I am ashamed of the BBC for platforming such a decisive conversation without looking at both sides. We should be looking after our young - not turning our backs on them.

You may wonder what the actual solution to this problem is. If I have said it before, I have said it a thousand times. We need to remove shame from the conversation. Don't shame a young adult for not being verbose enough to communicate their opinions and arguments - instead train them. Small amounts of training, as we know, can amount to greater things in the future. If a young person is 18 now, and they train themselves to read, small amounts each day for three or four years - they will be able to finish a novel. Or, they could simply just be three or four years older without being able to finish a novel. I know which one would be better for the brain.

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For example: if you were to read just one page of War and Peace a day, you'd have it finished in roughly four years. Or you could be four years older without War and Peace in your life. You make the choice.

And with that, could we imagine what these children could do with reading one page a day of shorter, more manageable texts? Where they could be once they enter college/university/work?

Sometimes it is not about fighting the beast that is social media, sometimes it is about rebuilding the skill from scratch. We must be okay with this if we want to see reading flourish again.