Dear MC,
I would also like to apologize for our accidental 2 year hiatus. I'm also quite fond of the fact that this blog's tagline is still "letters from a dorm room," as it brings back memories of fro-yo adventures at the dining hall and filming music videos in the hallway at midnight.
You know, normal college things.
Anyway. I'm glad you brought up this question surrounding audiobooks, because while I don't listen to audiobooks per se, a lot of the texts I've read recently have been auditory and visual. So naturally, I have some thoughts on the subject.
The first thing I'd like to address is the notion of guilt. You mention that you feel guilty for listening to audiobooks, but I don't think this guild-ridden feeling is specific to the mode of text. I think that readers in general are prone to guilt that they're reading the wrong thing in the wrong way. For instance, I've frequently felt guilty for failing to read texts such as Ivanhoe or Tale of Two Cities (actually, I did read the latter, but don't ask me if I remember a damn thing about it). While perceptions are changing, capital-L Literature is still highly esteemed, and intelligent people can feel wrong or foolish for venturing outside of that canon.
Just the other night, I went to an event at the university, and was reading a book called "Fuck Feelings." As more people sat around me, I hid the book in my backpack, pretending I was looking for a copy of The Iliad or something equally intellectual.
But I digress.
I really like your point that listening to texts invites modern understandings of reading while simultaneously nodding at the oral tradition. To go aggressively classic, Shakespearean plays were always meant to be performed by the artist, and watched by the audience (as most plays are. Duh). There's a certain je ne sais quoi to performative texts that alphabetic texts just can't muster. In fact, alphabetic texts have been used to manipulate, exploit, or abuse colonized communities. Not that spoken words can have the same effect, but thinking in the context of legal documents, a lot of laws have been developed through western modes of writing, ultimately hurting minority cultures and communities. Forcing Native American students to learn and write in English is along that same vein.
Although then by enacting oral traditions of storytelling, there's always that risk of accidental appropriation of other cultures. But that's for another post.
Unlike hundreds of years ago, we are in the age of multitasking, which makes things like audiobooks and podcasts well suited for the "modern era." I almost find listening to a podcast more excusable while I'm doing my makeup, and I deem myself more productive and involved in the world than if I were to simply listen to music (although music is its own form of text, as we have discussed before). However, despite audiobooks and podcasts being more akin to "background noise," I'm not entirely sure it's more passive than traditional forms of reading.
I've been reading a book called "Soldiers of Peace" by Paul Chappell, and while most of the book is a not-so-cleverly disguised sales pitch, the author makes some interesting points about active listening. To actually listen well (as opposed to hearing), we have to maintain qualities of empathy, compassion, and being present. That can be exceptionally difficult to accomplish, and even more so when we aren't annotating, highlighting, or making marginal comments on a physical page. Because of all this, at least in my case, I find myself needing to be even more actively engaged when listening, as opposed to reading (but I'm the most actively engaged when writing a response to something I've read, so I don't quite know what to do with that).
So again, I find that engagement with reading is less about modality, and more about intent. A lot of people don't know how to (or want to) get past the summary--or that "what"--part of a text. The whys and the hows are a lot more interesting, but analyzing those can be accomplished through any kind of text, be it visual, auditory, or alphabetic.
To me, any text that forces me to challenge my preconceived notions of myself or the world is worth interacting with. Lately I've been listening to a podcast called "The Guilty Feminist," and while feminist thought isn't hugely outside of my sphere of influence, hearing other people's stories forces me to interrogate my own brand of sparkly, cisgender white-person feminism. This is, in its purest state, a form of active listening.
I also appreciate how expansive notions of a text rejects ableism (somehow my posts seem to always come back to ableism). I've been following a blind YouTuber named Molly Burke, and she rejects a lot of stereotypes about blind people. More interesting still, she's very into makeup and fashion, as she discusses returning to hobbies that she enjoyed before losing her sight.
Another tangent. My apologies.
Burke also discusses many topics that are blind-specific, one of which is the idea of reading. While she knows how to read braile, most of the books that she reads are audiobooks. And while sighted people may change up the very "reading" and "listening" to identify what form the book took, Burke doesn't make that distinction. When listening to a book, she is reading it. I find that fascinating.
Even the verb "to read" can be used with so many non-alphabetic things. Reading people. Reading minds. Performing analysis on any given context can be a very difficult, very engaging form of reading. And I would argue that just as reading books is a necessary skill, so is reading people.
And, as you already know, a lot of my reading takes place on YouTube because I'm an obsessed person who can't live outside the Internet.
While my understandings of reading and texts are pretty expansive, I find myself having trouble maintaining that same mode of thinking with writing. A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a delightful video called "The Death of the YouTuber." Most of the argument structure was similar to a traditionally-written essay, and it was clearly at least loosely scripted. But I found myself questioning the YouTuber's choice to call her post a "video essay."
I get that this is an emerging genre, and it would be interesting to introduce this kind of project to my composition students, but not at the expense of the fundamentals of writing. But, at this point, with so many kinds of texts being at the forefront of society, I find myself wondering, what even are the fundamentals of writing in this day and age? Obviously learning critical thinking and audience analysis are going to be priorities, but how much are things like grammar and book reports really going to serve future generations? With these constant shifts in how communication manifests itself, it's difficult to keep up in an educational context.
So, I ask you, what are the fundamentals or writing? Should we be learning new genres like the video essay? And what is the end goal in learning these foundational parts of writing?
Kira
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