The Brunch Table

This has already been covered in Boingboing, but I think it’s worth drawing attention to–a speech by journalist Tom Stites about the importance of literacy for democracy. He doesn’t just speak in abstractions (obviously, he’s going to be strongly in favor of both, right?).

He argues that the ’80s shift to big-box retailers, who don’t typically advertise a great deal, has done the most to strip newspapers of advertising revenue. Papers began courting luxury goods to fill the gap, resulting in an overall repackaging to appeal to upper-class readers. It’s not a nostalgia piece about the overall quality of journalism–in fact, he argues that journalism back in the day was actually worse. It is, he claims, fundamentally a marketing problem, and a very serious one: if citizens of a democracy don’t read news, they can’t stay informed enough to use their votes wisely.

“There are 130 million Americans over 18 whose incomes are down the scale from the publishers’ favored top two quintiles…my mother was a single parent who worked retail and I know how we struggled financially. Nonetheless, my mother subscribed to The Kansas City Star and read it every day. But that was back in the old days, the way-long-ago days when I was a kid, when newspapers still wanted everybody to read them…

So my plea to all of us, myself included, is that we keep America’s discarded readers in mind as we work to strengthen journalism and shore up our withering democracy. We need to remember that they’re citizens, too, and to take care to make sure they have easy access to quality journalism that squarely addresses the issues that affect their lives. Unless we do, there’s a good chance that our democracy is doomed. Or, at the very best, our democracy will be disfigured by a class divide that’s the 21st century equivalent of our nation’s earliest days…”

On a side note, I’ve just started reading Richard Dawkin’s newest book, The Ancestor’s Tale. At one point, he’s explaining the process of domesticating animals, and wraps up by wondering to what extent we’re self-domesticating. When we alter our own environment (for instance, with the invention of agriculture), we place new biological demands on ourselves. He cites lactose intolerance as an example of a trait that wouldn’t affect a hunter-gatherer, but becomes a life-threatening liability in a developing agricultural society that grows heavily reliant on dairy foods.

His final example, though, is considerably more provocative. You can measure relatively little difference, he says, between the brain of a person speaking French and a person speaking Chinese. However, you can measure an enormous difference in the brain of a person reading either language, compared to a person speaking. This, Dawkins suggests, means that literacy is becoming a critical part of our self-domesticating process.

Taking Dawkins and Stites together, I think you get one heck of a more compelling argument than Levar Burton, despite his many good points, ever made.

Happy 4th!