Media habits continue to evolve

A new report by the National Endowment of the Arts called "Reading at Risk" shows that 43.4 percent of Americans didn't read any kind of book in the previous year (up from 39% ten years earlier). They also found that fewer people are reading (and enjoying) literature. They asked people what they would rather do than read literature. Here are the answers:

"Of the adults surveyed, 95.7 percent preferred watching television, 60 percent preferred attending a movie and 55 percent preferred lifting weights or doing other exercise to reading literature. Even 47 percent chose working in the garden." Fewer People Make Time for Literature, NEA Study Shows

What implications does this shift have for the media of the future? Are our habits of learning becoming more visual, less textual? Or is it just that "books" are evolving into new forms that the people who write surveys haven't accounted for?

An opinion piece in Saturday's (7/10/04) New York Times, The Closing of the American Mind takes a pessimistic view of the results of the survey. The author writes:

The Nazis were right in believing that one of the most powerful weapons in a war of ideas is books. And for better or worse, the United States is now in such a war. Without books, we cannot succeed in our current struggle against absolutism and terrorism. The retreat from civic to virtual life is a retreat from engaged democracy, from the principles that we say we want to share with the rest of the world. You are what you read. If you read nothing, then your mind withers, and your ideals lose their vitality and sway.

What do you think? Are you what you read? Or are there other ways to keep your mind vital and engaged?