An Immutable Fact

It is an immutable fact that if you enter a store with the sole intention of browsing - perhaps because you just wanted to get out of the rain - you will be descended upon by assistants in the manner of vultures falling on carrion, whereas if you actually want someone to come and help you, they all disappear like snowflakes in June. And so it was in my least favourite store on Sunday. I may have mentioned before (probably more than once) that I really do not like Currys PC World in general and their branch in Romford in particular, however since there are now so few other, similar stores, we inevitably end up there from time to time, not necessarily to buy, but to look at things we may later purchase elsewhere or on-line. We walked in and hovered around the Fitbit display. Since no assistants were in the vicinity, I asked at the Customer Service desk - which is immediately next to the display - if someone could help us. "No, this is Customer Service," was the answer to my request.  I refrained from pointing out that I was a customer and wanted some service as I am certain that such a rejoinder would have gone over the assistant's head, and went off in search of someone more willing to help. In fairness, the chap who  eventually did come to talk to us was helpful and pleasant, which while they  may be fairly basic qualities in a shop assistant, are not guaranteed at this particular store in my experience.

But this is not about Currys PC World, it is however about some of the things they stock and the continual (and unstoppable, or so it seems) flow of more and more connectable devices that we are being told we simply must have. It is widely held that advertising creates artificial needs - one might go as far as to say that doing so is advertising's raison d'être- and smart running shoes, Amazon's Echo, Fitbits, Apple watches, and all manner of other wearables and devices that fall under the category of the internet of things are just some of the products that advertisers are currently bombarding us with and brainwashing us into believing that we simply must have. Not that we need much encouragement, and the fact is that today every home has a plethora of internet enabled devices; research shows that many households have eight or more devices connected to the internet. Alarmingly, the same research suggests that one in ten people in this country do not own a book. According to a study by the insurance company Aviva, about 6.5m people in Britain (one-in-10) to do not own any printed books, and in the 18-24 age range, the number increases to one-in-five people.

While shocking at first sight, these numbers do beg a couple of questions. How do the figures for book ownership compare with twenty years ago, when the internet was in its infancy? How many of these devices are e-readers, like the Kindle? And since figures from Nielsen Book Research show that in the first half of 2016, Britons bought 4m more books than they did during the same period in 2015, and the demise of the bookshop - widely predicted when e-readers first hit the market - does not seem to have come about, this research needs a bit more context before we hit the panic button.  Of some concern, however should be the fact that according to a report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), about 16% of adults in England are "functionally illiterate" (they would not pass an English GCSE and have literacy levels below that of an 11-year-old) while young people in England are the most illiterate in the developed world. Again, a bit of context might be helpful here; how many of the people who make up that 16% do not have English as their first language, for instance? How does this figure compare with historical data on the subject? The answers to those questions would give us a better idea as to how concerned we ought to be.

Reading a book, whether it is a physical book or an e-book, remains one of life's great pleasures. The ability to become absorbed in a world created for us by a writer and our own imagination is something that we should treasure, and nurture in our children. The problem with reading a book - and I use 'problem' advisedly  - is that it requires greater concentration and staying power than idly flicking through some social media app on a tablet or smartphone, or watching a YouTube video, and the era of the smartphone has had a quantifiably detrimental effect on attention span. A study carried out in Canada a couple of years ago discovered that average human attention span had fallen from twelve seconds in 2000 to eight seconds and the link between a shorter attention span and a decrease in the number of people - and especially children - reading has been established following a survey by the publishers Pearson.

The upside of a reduced attention span - according to the Canadian research conducted by Microsoft - is an improvement in the ability to multi-task, although multi-tasking is seen by some people as a myth, and even if it is real, can be a mask for inefficiencies; in other words, creating the likelihood of performing two tasks poorly, rather than one task well. And anyway, the Microsoft study dubbed multi-taskers as people who " consume more media, are multi-screeners, social media enthusiasts." Flicking from a book on your tablet to your Facebook page, to a news channel, can scarcely be called multi-tasking and suggests a lack of concentration and short attention span rather than a positive attribute. It is the reason why, when I decided to buy a Kindle some years ago, I opted for the straight-forward version rather than the Kindle Fire: if I am reading a book and decide I want to visit a website, I have to put the Kindle down and pick up a tablet, or go into another room to use a computer.

Perhaps one reason we are reading less - if, indeed we actually are - is that we are writing more: whether anyone is reading what we are writing remains to be seen. In Nod, by Adrian Barnes, the narrator says of poets, "sensitive souls who submitted their work to literary journals outnumbered those who read those same publications by a margin of ten to one." It is so easy to publish now, be it a blog or through Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing, that perhaps, everyone is busy tapping away on keyboards producing words no one will ever read.  But to write, one has to read, even if it is simply to research for one's writing, and therefore the art of reading will, we must hope, never die.

Despite the gloomy prognosis on literacy levels and reading in general, every now and then a book, or series of books - take J K Rowling's Harry Potter novels for instance - stimulates the imagination of the reading public of all ages, and for as long as people write, people will read. The time to start worrying is when the writers give up.