Thanks Neil Gaiman

I was doing some outside reading trying to push some more topics into my head for this blog. It feels scattered and a little messy. I came across this speech from Neil Gaiman from 2013. It's quite dated, and some of the topics he spoke on made me laugh because, yes, he was right, that did end up happening. But the heart of his speech was beautiful to me. He is pleading for people to fight for libraries, for the books in them; he is asking people to read, to teach their children to love reading.

Gaiman talks about how this is a battle of endurance. He compares physical books to sharks. Sharks were around before dinosaurs and they're still around because they're really good at being sharks, nothing has replaced them. Physical copies of books have preceded every other form of text. There are ad blocks, and subscriptions to news pages, and costs associated to a lot of digital material nowadays. But there is never an ad blocking you from a book from the public library (there is a possible 50 cent late fee though). Some digital articles published let you read three paragraphs before they ask you to pay to read the rest. Britannica now limits me to certain material, and teases fact-checked exclusive articles that are only available to premium members. What may have once been a blessing, like free pdfs. or an online cache books and poetry, has now been monetized and there are almost always setbacks.

2013 saw the upsurgence of Facebook, selfies, and Vine. Social media really took off and started to include the younger generations that successfully begged their parents to buy them a phone or computer. While much has changed in the world of social media since then, is it not still mostly the same? People do not visit libraries as much as they use to. Free information, expression of belief and communication that transcends continents and oceans at the fingertip of every person, and they'd rather open TikTok. There had been a gradual decrease in public library attendance, but COVID caused a dramatic drop, and the rebound efforts in 2021-24 have not generated the best results. Attendance is still quite low compared to decades of positive attendance.

So downward trending lines regarding attendance isn't usually a good thing. And it's also not here. This is a chart based off the Institute of Museum and Library services data. Attendance is pitiful to where it once was only 20 years ago.

It seems to me like this is a bigger issue than ever. Gaiman touched on a lot more topics that I enjoyed seeing him expand on, mostly on targeting children to boost reading literacy and participation. It is most important to solidify the foundation before working on any higher levels. If the children growing up today cannot steady our foundation, they will not be able to make enough of a difference to any generation that follows them. Literacy is a big thing, it will dictate societal norms for every generation to come.

There is the article, keep it mind it's dated from 2013:

Niel Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading, and daydreaming

Another article, if you are bored, that interested me today, and if you're bored.

Write Til You Drop

I remember begging my mom to open the public library website and find me a book and make the librarians find the book on the shelves and put it in a bag and write my name on the front and bring the bag to me. I remember opening a browser and looking at books and reading their summaries and reading their titles and reading their authors and thinking 'Oh my." I remember sitting in the car and waiting and waiting and waiting. I remember getting the bag filled with books and taking it home and opening it and reading the books. I remember it well.

^^paratactic COVID throwback