Martha Nussbaum

In: Dissent: a quarterly of politics and culture, Volume 57, Issue 1, p. 32-33

Abstract

What relationship American intellectuals should have toward mass culture—television, films, mass-market books,
popular music, and the Internet—will vary as much as the people themselves. I think that it's good if there are some intellectuals who get deeply involved with these media, because this will help
intellectuals keep contact with a wider public. It's much harder to do that now than it was formerly, given the decline of
print journalism. But I hope not too many will become starry-eyed about these media and forget about the habit of
slow reading, which is such a large part of good thinking. Sometimes the new media can help reading: for example, I
now listen to novels on my iPod while I am running, and I "read" a lot more Trollope and Eliot than I used to. Often,
though, the new media discourage people from reading books.