Earlier this week, I linked to an essay in which Steven Johnson criticizes a recent report by the National Endowment for the Arts on the decline of reading. He calls it a “heavily distorted view of the Google generation.”
Sunil Iyengar, the NEA’s director of research, e-mailed today to say that Johnson needs to read more carefully. OK, that’s not exactly what he said. This is what he said:
Steven Johnson, writing in The Guardian last week, said the NEA report neglected to consider online reading. This is a false statement. The majority of studies we included had asked Americans how often or how much they read anything at all for pleasure—in any genre and in any format. Contrary to his assertion, online reading was not “excluded” from the study methodology.
