You may have noticed that newspapers have started carrying audio versions of a selection of articles, perhaps in some cases of all their articles. I first noticed this in La Vanguardia, which offers the audio version only to its subscribers, considering it a premium service. Obviously, the audio versions are not uploaded for the benefit of blind readers, but as part of changing trends brought on by the increasingly popular podcasts and by a general loss of the ability to read. I have taken a random article with an audio version of 4:16 minutes and it seems to me that scrolling through the whole text possibly takes longer for average readers; yet, it is not clear to me who are the target demographic that newspapers are trying to attract. The young who don’t read, perhaps? I wonder.
As for podcasts, of course I see their attractive but I just lack patience to listen. I assume that both podcasts and audiobooks are increasingly popular because they are consumed while listeners multitask, perhaps jogging, on a long commute, or at home doing domestic chores, just as they may listen to music. With age, I have found it increasingly difficult to engage my brain in listening to either music or words while I multitask, to the point that I just don’t. I either read books and articles or watch audiovisual products (from YouTube videos to series), activities that keep me fully occupied. I just don’t have the patience, either, to sit on the sofa and just listen to music or recorded voices. I fret. So, no podcasts or audiobooks for me. By the way: I have been told several times that I should offer audio versions of each post in this blog but the whole point of my work is inviting people to read (besides, I hate the sound of my recorded voice).
Having said that, I have no objection to podcasts and audiobooks being integrated in the Literature class, as long as they don’t push printed texts out. Everything can be a useful resource provided it is well used, and as long as students learn I do not object to any source. A friend told me that her son is not allowed to quote from YouTube videos as a source in his BA dissertation and that seems absurd to me. Of course, most secondary sources in dissertations need to be academic print sources, but why not have audio or video sources? I have myself quoted from interviews available on video, and would quote from podcasts with no problem at all. In fact, one of the beauties of the 21st century is how vast the archive of audio and audiovisual sources is and how well you can get to know living authors and their books. This is so obvious that I am beginning to sound silly. But, as you can see, not all teachers have reached that point perhaps for fear that once you lower the barrier, dissertations will stop using mainly print sources, as they should.
As for audiobooks, I have followed a recent debate on The Guardian about whether you can actually claim to have read a book if you have only listened to it. Yes, a bit byzantine. There was a time we have all forgotten when culture was transmitted orally, until writing was invented and, many centuries later, printing. Some participants in the debate argued that listening is by definition a passive exercise, whereas reading is far more active. I would agree with that but please let’s recall that most 19th century authors expected to be read aloud, with a main reader thus transmitting the text to a household or other types of audiences (in Cuba a worker would read aloud to their peers in cigar factories).
If Dickens were alive, surely he would record himself the audiobooks of his novels. I have no doubt then that by listening to the audiobook you can claim to have ‘read’ it, though perhaps we need a new verb for the experience. If, however, my students tell me that they have listened to the audiobook but not read the text, I would grumble; they are still learning English and need to work with the print text. Perhaps the best experience is reading with the audiobook on. I learned that lesson from a dyslexic student who explained to me that was how she had managed to do very well in my Victorian Literature course. In fact, I am going to recommend to my students that they follow her method, which has all the advantages and, as far as I can see, no disadvantages.
To recap, I have argued so far that audio versions of articles, podcasts, audiobooks and videos can be great aids to personal enjoyment and education, and should be used as sources in teaching and in research. I have, however, expressed some doubts about their possible impact on literacy, which is the downside of their popularity.
As happens, my brother told me recently that, although he is not at all a reader, he considers himself well informed about current issues and sufficiently educated. He questioned the need for print textuality, if only on the side of the consumer. By this I mean that people tend to forget that for audiovisual products to exist, there needs to be a script, which is almost always a written text, unless one is improvising. Needless to say, audiobooks are versions of texts; all TV and cinema depend on scripts (and so do most radio shows), and I suppose that many podcasts and YouTube videos also have a certain written basis.
In any case, my brother’s views set me thinking about whether reading skills might eventually be lost. In the debate on audiobooks, it was quite clear that many younger users (18-35) lack the ability to read for a minimally long stretch (say 1 hour) but are fine listening for that amount of time or more. I blame this on the stupid decision made at primary education level to delay the age in which children start reading. My mother was taught to read by her own (working-class) father at age four before going to school and she has always been a great reader. I was taught to read at the same age by my school teachers, like all my generation, and I can see that this has worked reasonably well. By age seven most of us could read children’s fiction like Alice in Wonderland or longer with no problem. Now children start reading around age six or seven, with ‘experts’ claiming that an earlier start is no guarantee of better literacy (please!). With podcasts being now extended to that early age (https://www.usnews.com/education/k12/articles/podcasts-for-kids), it might well be that, little by little, teachers find it just impossible to consolidate any budding reading skills.
Literacy, of course, refers both to reading and writing, so I need to refer to the main debate these days: whether bots like Chatbot GTP will destroy our current model of university and secondary education. This chatbot, as you probably know by now, can compose acceptable essays of the type we require as home assignments. Students have started cheating by submitting as their own texts ‘written’ (composed?) by Chatbot GTP, which has led to anxious reactions from educational establishments and authorities in diverse nations. We might have to use again in-class exams (which I abhor) to make sure that the texts we mark are 100% produced by the student we are assessing.
I’ll go deeper into this topic in future posts. Here I just need to argue that, although students have always cheated on teachers (it seems that the first market for students’ papers authored by someone else opened at Harvard as soon as typewriters were commercialized and personal handwriting no longer identified student authors), the less skilled students are at reading, the more they will use bots to supply deficiencies in research and writing skills. I myself use Word’s bot to translate the posts in this blog into Spanish, but this is quite different from feeding Chatbot GTP a few keywords and ask it to write a post I could pass as my own production. As I will warn students on the first day of class the second semester, by using bots you’re not cheating on the educational system but depriving yourself of learning the skills you’re paying us to teach you.
If, to sum up, reading skills are undermined by rising audio textuality and writing skills are undermined by the misuse of bots, then there is a possibility that, as my brother argued, print textuality becomes residual soon enough. This is, of course, potentially catastrophic if, for whatever reason, apocalypse happens and, in the worst case scenario, electricity is lost. Without going so far, however, writing and reading are still the best possible ways to transmit information, though I would agree that print narrative is not necessarily more enjoyable than audiovisual narrative. To keep the world going, I am 100% sure about it, we need to improve everyone’s literacy. This may include audio and audiovisual literacy (I marvel at how good young persons are at editing video), but we just cannot afford the luxury of losing hard-won reading and writing skills that have emancipated so many from oppression. Look at what the Taliban are doing to Afghan women, if you want an example of the tragic consequences of being deprived of your basic human right to an education. Read and write texts, just don’t throw away the best tools to educate yourself and understand the world, hopefully to make it a better place. As a Literature teacher, this is what I need so say.