I'm currently reading three books:
The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois
The Letters of Emily Dickinson edited by Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell
A romance novel
I will admit that once upon a time, I was an ardent non-fiction hater. I loved sci-fi, fantasy, and generally all kinds of fiction, but put a biography or essay collection in front of my face and I'd immediately turn away in disgust. This was in sharp contrast to my brother, who frequently read encyclopedias for fun as a kid. For much of my life, the only real non-fiction book I had read — excluding school assignments — was Becoming by Michelle Obama. Even that had been a struggle, mostly because I found reading non-fiction exceedingly boring. Now, however, I have found an entirely new perspective on non-fiction and fiction as well.
That difference in perspective can best be described as the difference between Ready Player One and The Left Hand of Darkness or The Martian and The Martian Chronicles. All of these books are sci-fi; two of them take place on the same world; each deals with technology and the future. Yet, all of these books say very different things. The Martian is an epic, the tale of one man's arduous survival on a barren world. The Martian Chronicles, however, is about the people who may have already lived there. Bradbury draws parallels to Columbus-era colonialism, details racist sentiments in relation to the space race, and crafts prose that makes Weir look like a fifth grader. That being said, I love both of these books. Yet, it's undeniable that they serve different purposes.
The same can be said about Ready Player One and The Left Hand of Darkness. I couldn't tell you a single passage of RPO that stuck with me, but I could readily provide you with various moments in The Left Hand of Darkness that left me thinking or felt pertinent even today.
(I must admit here that I have never actually finished The Left Hand of Darkness, despite multiple attempts. I love the book, but the damn library loans keep expiring.)
What, then, is the distinction between these books if they are all still sci-fi?
As I was reading The Martian Chronicles for the first time, I was struck by how much closer it felt to reading non-fiction than fiction. Despite my aforementioned prejudice, I didn't feel that it was a bad thing. Instead, I enjoyed the book even more. It used a medium I was familiar with (sci-fi) and added a new element — thought. Or rather, the book had something to say. The Martian is good, but what does it really have to say? How can I relate it to my own life? I can't. The Martian is escapism, entertainment. The Martian Chronicles is not entertainment, it's education.
As detailed in my first essay, Bradbury introduced me to Sara Teasdale, my now favorite poet, through The Martian Chronicles.
Bradbury taught me something about colonialism and the underlying theories of 'space exploration', but he also taught me about Teasdale. From that introduction, I quickly became enthralled, jumping headfirst into Teasdale's works. I began with Rivers to the Sea, moved to Love Songs, then — my favorite — Flame and Shadow, and finally, Dark of the Moon. In between the latter two, I read a biography about her written by Carol Schoen, and my interest in the poet only strengthened. For the first time in my life, I read a pure non-fiction book and loved it. This was education.
With the advent of short-form content, the meteoric rise of "video essays" as a format, and elevated tuition prices across the country, education is only becoming more and more commodified. This is a categorically bad thing. On multiple occasions, I've seen a post on bluesky to the effect of:
If libraries were invented today, they'd be struck down in court
and I don't think these people are wrong. Libraries are the antithesis to the economic gatekeeping of education. In theory, this is an incredible equalizer — if poor kids have the same access to the tomes of knowledge, then surely they'll have the same outcomes as rich kids, right? That has obviously never been the case, but I think libraries as an institution are even less effective today. We now have the internet — another equalizer? —, chatGPT — a corrupter —, and TikTok — a distracter. While in theory the internet can only amplify and expand the impact of libraries, I think it diminishes it. Less kids go to libraries to read, they go to the internet instead, where the veracity of information remains far more suspect if you don't have the tools to identify fabricated content. Further, sites on the internet are optimized to do just one thing: hold your attention. Libraries don't rely on advertisement revenue.
This has led to the transformation of information into content. One can argue that books have always been a form of content, but again, books don't care if you put them down — especially not encyclopedias. In fact, there are many types of books that are designed specifically to be picked up and put down time and time again. The index book has since been replaced by Google Chrome, and know the TikTok explore page.
"I'll have to look that up on TikTok"
The quality of information, both on and off the internet, has also deteriorated. On the internet, people are far less likely to cite sources, algorithms can decide what to platform and what not to platform, and some information is honestly just boring, so people don't make content about it.
In person, books are worse now than they were before, too.
I’ve recently taken to checking out older copies of books from the library on campus and I’ve come to the conclusion that the reason we are drawn to ebooks is because the physical copies we make today are just plain bad. Eg. I ordered a copy of a *public domain* book and it arrived misprinted…
Whole poems missing, etc. I bought it because I wanted to annotate it, but the quality is so low it feels like I’m writing on a coloring book. Meanwhile I’m reading a first edition copy of The Left Hand of Darkness (that hasn’t been checked out since 2004) and its covers and pages are still perfect
Even the thickness of pages, the readability of the font, and the durability of the book itself are worse now than before. I am convinced that a 50 year old first edition novel will probably last longer than a soft-cover made today. Why? Because there's no incentive to make good quality books anymore, it's just extra cost.
This, as said above, disincentivizes reading physical books, and thus going to libraries by extension. Why walk or drive to my local library when I can download the book right now for $6.99? Why would I read a 300-page novel when I can listen to it on 2x speed in 6 hours through my Audible subscription? And why, for that matter, would I go to all that trouble when I can watch a video essay recap of it on YouTube that's 45 minutes long? These are not farfetched patterns of thought, and they're even ones I've head in the past. Because time is condensed, information becomes condensed (and lost in the process) too.
This isn't to say that YouTube 'educational' content is bad, but at a certain point, a line must be drawn between educational content and entertainment. Crash Course is educational content, Lindsay Ellis is entertainment. Where does Philosophy Tube fall on that spectrum? I love Philosophy Tube, but I think there's a very compelling argument to classify it as entertainment. Even the show's creator is reflecting on this.
I don't think it's immoral to consume this type of content, but I don't think we should be fooling ourselves — TikTok is not an effective form of education, and nor is watching lots of video essays. Do I know more about cold fusion because I watched three 1-hour long video essays? Yes. Did I do a single search regarding Cold Fusion as part of this "education"? No. Did I purposefully look for videos on Cold Fusion? Also no; it was pushed onto my feed by the algorithm.
Our approach to education has thus become one of consumerism. Even rhetoric around class attendance sounds more like financial advice than conversations about the value of education. It's not "you should go to class because learning and engaging with ideas will help you be an informed member of society and teach you skills that you can use for the rest of your life", it's "you should go to class because you're spending a lot of money to be here". That isn't a bad point — especially given the price of college tuition today — but it also isn't The Point. The point is that we educate ourselves because without education we are stuck senseless in a cacophonous void; the point is that we learn because it is what gives us meaning; the point is that if we don't read and understand history, as they say, we are doomed to repeat it.
"Anti-intellectualism" is a term that has surfaced to describe this phenomenon, and I don't think it's a bad one, but I believe that "education as consumerism" is maybe a better descriptor. The "intellectual" is only still somewhat aspirational not because it is the ideal but because it signifies a high-level of consumption. We envy consumption in all aspects of life — from Ashton Hall tiktoks to the pilates aesthetic — so why would the consumption of education be any different? As Ashton Hall is enviable for his consumption of Saratoga water, the intellectual is enviable for her consumption of education.
I'm not saying that it used to be that much better (it's undeniable that belief in education was inseparable from elitist mentality for much of recent history), but it's still a concerning trend.
How do you counter this?
I'm not sure there's a great answer, except to be more conscious of the content you're consuming. I still love a good video essay, but these days, I view it more as entertainment than education. There's space for both of these things.
I read romance novels and I also read W.E.B. De Bois and Emily Dickinson.
I read fiction and I also read nonfiction.
I learn and I consume.
What I don't do is view information as something to "consume" — rather as a way to challenge what I already know. Even now, it's hard to separate the language of consumerism from the way I talk about knowledge. We "acquire" it. We "exchange" it. We even pay for it. Learning, however, is not valuable because we can sell it or exploit it, but because learning, in itself, has intrinsic value. I may not have the perfect way of articulating it now, but maybe that just means I need to keep learning.