I’m a music professor and I have to remind my students, over and over, about the difference between hearing and listening. It’s so easy to turn listening—a foreground activity—into hearing—a background activity—that we often don’t notice the change has happened. We’re biologically wired to “think less” with our ears than with other senses.
How often is someone who is “listening” to an audio book really only “hearing” it?
But, to the larger point, I am always saddened by how much we are all encouraged to eschew any/all friction. To me, the whole point of any intellectual activity (and most physical ones for that matter) is the slog. Working through something difficult *is* the point, not the “I finished” part.
To quote an album title from 1987: “Give Me Convenience Or Give Me Death.”
I appreciate this distinction you made, which I didn’t and should have. I treated hearing and listening as the same but you’re correct that they’re distinct. And the thing about audiobooks is the ease with which it can become background noise.
Yes. It’s the ease with which we slip between listening (actively) and hearing (passively) that I am always trying to point out. I catch myself, **constantly**, slipping into semi-ignoring what I am “hearing,” which then means it’s little more than background noise. You can’t really read as a background activity. Reading **must** be the foreground activity, making it a different thing than listening/hearing.
I think I am ok with folks insisting that listening *can* be “useful” and/or “effective,” but it’s silly to insist it’s “the same” as reading.
Honestly, I've had that same experience when reading. My mind wanders while my eyes keep moving along the text, even registering the individual words. Maybe it's just me.
I enjoy non-fiction as audio, but have a much harder time with fiction. I can no longer imagine distinct voices when constantly hearing the voice of the reader. I lose track of the setting easily as well.
Seems like hearing an author read passages from their novel at bookstore would have a similar effect. I've never done that so I wouldn't know. 🤔
Thanks for the reply. I used to read all the time but due to my age and years of screen time that is required by my job, I've found that audiobooks give my eyes time to rest. I usually do not multitask while listening. It's possible that there are circumstances that make either option more or less appropriate for any individual. Maybe I'll pick up some fiction and give it a go.
Thank you for this distinction. It’s very helpful to me.
A few years ago, I made an effort to listen to audiobooks, but had very little success retaining anything. I kept pausing the recording to consider the idea, scene, or description, which annoyed me even though that is what I do when reading a book. It felt like I was wasting my time.
I couldn’t understand how my friends listened to so many books (fiction and nonfiction). Finally, after asking every audiobook fan I knew for their routines and experiences, I finally understood that my friends were satisfied with a more distracted or multitasked experience than I was. (What you have defined as hearing vs listening.) Once I understood that our expectations were different, I stopped trying to force myself to use audiobooks except as an aid to reading.
I've been listening to Postman 😅 and wondering about this. The net effect of quitting audio books would be that I consume far less written information. I don't engage deeply with everything I listen to, but not all of it is worth deep engagement.
Then again, when listening to The Prince, do I really want to embark on a deep dive into Renaissance geopolitics, or is it enough to skim across the surface in an effort to sample a classic while providing fodder for lateral thinking?
I spent the first 20 years of my life with no TV and developed a typographic mind. I also was clueless about how to communicate with my peers, and very narrowly informed. Still figuring out the best mix....
I think listening is fine for “light” stuff (however defined) but for serious fiction I prefer to read. I only read fiction these days except for Substacks like this one or technical docs related to work.
Yes. Reading is different because it's active. You can't drive while you do it, your mind can't wander, you can't play with a Rubik's cube or clean the house. You have to hold the book and collect the words yourself. Reading forces you to spend time down in the mud wrestling with messy ideas and coming up with actual thoughts of your own. Listening doesn't make you do that. Reading is active, listening is passive.
Besides, there's a litmus test I use for just about everything in my life, and it applies to this debate: do wise people do this? All of the wise people I know read all the time. I don't know any wise people who only listen to audiobooks and podcasts. That right there tells me that listening is not good enough.
"Prestige laundering" is great coinage. People will go to great lengths to defend not reading something. It's elitist, ableist, problematic, colonial, etc. It's not elitist to say that some books are better than others, or that reading results in deeper understanding of a text but people will argue that it is until they're blue in the face.
I've long suspected that a lot of people who rail against "canon" are simply trying to give their intellectual laziness the sheen of legitimacy by manufacturing an ethical gripe ("the western canon is mostly written by Dead White Males, therefore me not reading it is a moral stand").
Except I don't know where these Alan Bloom acolytes are, shoving the western canon down the throats of impressionable students. I've encountered WAY more profs, students, articles, and essays that argue against canon than for it.
I think you’re right in that these people dismissing canon are more socially accepted than those who insist effortful reading of western canonical texts matters
This is going to sound very confrontational, but I don't know how else to write it. Know that I respect your intellect while heavily disagreeing with both the thesis and the underlying assumptions.
I'm not sure I agree with the idea that listening is a universally inferior form of information transmittal. I think that really depends on the brain that is receiving the information. Some people learn better by listening. You seem to think that because you learn better by seeing, that must be a universal truth.
You rightly say that you have the burden of proof, but then go on to provide none. You even cite a study that contradicts your idea. Instead of providing the proof whose burden you bear, you blame skepticism for not believing you unless you can prove it. That skeptical mindset seems to me to be the correct way of treating most claims. It's not about proving it beyond a shadow of a doubt though, it's about providing some kind of evidence that supports your conclusion, which you haven't done. Only claims.
Humans have for hundreds of thousands of years been oral idea transmitters. It is the default way our brains are wired, writing technology is extremely recent on the human timeline. Additionally, oral traditions are the bedrock of indigenous knowledge. Western culture's greatest mistake has always been in assuming the superiority of its way of life. Are you saying indigineous traditions are inferior because they don't learn them by reading? If you're not saying that, and I hope you're not, then why is it important that stories and information be consumed in the western way?
This kind of reminds me of that attitude among unkind members of older generations of "I had to struggle, so you should to." Perhaps we've just invented a better way to do books for some people that requires less struggle. Especially for people who have brains that easily accept heard information and struggle with seen information. People with dyslexia would feel quite attacked by this. You're correct, it does sound ableist. I am someone who until recently struggled with undiagnosed and untreated ADHD. The only things in my life I've ever been able to focus on without distraction is that which I'm fascinated by. I failed English Literature twice in college because I wasn't fascinated by it, and that made it so that I had to spend ~8 hours between classes reading a single chapter of a book. Discovering audiobooks made it so that I could occupy the part of my brain that wanders by doing something with my hands like art or exercising, while the part of my brain that wants to learn could finally avoid distraction.
The assertion that you're "just listening to a podcast" is inaccurate, and reflects a dismissiveness of podcasts themselves, which often contain great debates and conversations between brilliant minds. It's more accurate to say that you're listening to a longform lecture. A podcast is a conversation between multiple people, a lecture is a presentation of information by a single person. Lectures have been a primary tool in academia from its inception, and I reject that it is inferior, it's simply a different tool in the toolbox of learning.
And finally, you're making a very bold psycholigizing claim that people who listen to audiobooks are doing it for intellectual prestige. I am going to say this in the nicest way I can think of: You don't know what other people are thinking, and assuming their actions are a moral failure rather than the result of outside influences is simply the Self-Serving Bias at work. I'm doing it because I like to learn. It's not that I don't read things (I obviously read this article), but that I tend to consume longer form content in audio form because it allows me more time to learn in my busy 21st century life, better ability to navigate the challenges my brain poses me, and a more natural learning technique.
Sir, I think you mostly missed the point of what our author was saying.
Reading is a higher friction activity than just listening or hearing a book. For example, when you’re reading and you come across a word, you don’t know very well, you must try and figure out what the word means and how to pronounce it. When you’re listening to a book this is not true.
And, yes Western culture is absolutely superior to verbal only indigenous cultures. It’s called progress.
Verbal only indigineous cultures were warning us of ecological crisis long before science picked up on it. Their ways of life resulted in personal fulfillment being the norm instead of the exception. Maybe don't be so sure that West is best.
Oh goodness. Spoken like a true leftist. What crisis? And how many indigenous people do you have conversations with to know how personally fulfilled they are? 😂🙄
The point about oral culture adds an interesting piece of complexity. Literacy does seem to have negative impacts on memory and facial recognition. Still, I’m less persuaded that struggle isn’t load bearing. Certainly “desireable difficulty” is broadly pedagogically accepted for creating memory. I’d wonder whether it’s possible audiobooks convey the sense you “did the thing” while denying the thing done was different. Them empowering people to work at the frontier of their ability and the frontier being different and that mattering do not contradict. Perhaps aural consumption even has advantages!
Every time a new technology replaces an old one, we gain something and lose something in the process. Maybe we're losing something, but gaining other things with audiobooks. It's important to say that I don't think there is no difference. Just that dismissing audiobook readers as prestige launderers is diminutive.
Yeah, I won’t deny it’s insulting, incendiary, and diminutive. I wouldn’t do it myself, yet I love it. Whether it’s fairly or kindly applied, the claim we’re amusing ourselves to death by equating lower friction actions with higher friction actions is one I’m there for though. Humans seem prone to extrapolate “now” into the future in a way that denies us meaning by seeing clearly initial discomfort and failing to see ultimate rewards. And we’ve created interactive spaces that incent this and values that validate it. I favor the execution of socrates more than the next guy, but in this case–maybe speciously, maybe falsely–I appreciate the affront.
I look forward to your writing because you write with clarity and conviction, and you don't shy away from expressing views that will challenge mainstream ideas. This one got me thinking about my own practices, and why I've never been interested in audiobooks.
Consumption of information is overrated because knowing more stuff doesn't translate into increased intelligence in navigating life or character development. I'm more likely to contemplate how to implement something I read that stuck with me than anything I heard through consumption, unless I paused to intentionally do something with it.
Hearing a book and listening to a book are two different things. To know that you understood the author's intended meaning through listening (not hearing) requires a feedback process between yourself and your expression of that understanding (ie journalling/writing) or between you and someone else to help you make sense of it. Hearing a book is like bingeing Netflix. You're getting through it while being entertained and stimulated rather than enriched.
You really get what mean here by asserting that the medium changes the engagement. This argument seems to be over the heads of many, but of course the people who get it are the ones I also respect from their effortful engagement with ideas. @Justin Ross mentioned that he asks himself if wise people do the thing under consideration which I thought was an unusual metric, but I do the same. That said, many people would say “how can you know the person is wise”? to which I have little answer other than you can see it from their life outcomes. This goes back to judgment, by which I mean the outcome of discernment, which you and I have been circling around for a while. An examination of the prohibition on judgment is coming next.
Like many internet users I spend too much time taking in information. It's amazing when you tear yourself away that you suddenly have a deeper understanding of the stuff you've been reading as your mind works on it in silence.
Oh my goodness, yes. I work in a college town and the fact that most students I see on the street have AirPods in is disturbing. I love silence. I can’t imagine wanting “noise” in my ears constantly.
I'll listen to a podcast in the car (it beats talk radio because of the high spot load), but I want to see words on a written page if possible.
Audio forces you to digest (or not digest) things at the pace of the lector. Reading lets you take your time, thinking and savoring, rereading things as needed.
It's not unlike wolfing down a McMeal in the car versus having a nice 2-3 hour dinner.
I can see what you’re trying to do here. Perhaps cultivate a culture of careful thinking? People who pay attention, wrestle with ideas, follow long arguments, and form judgments instead of just inhaling opinions. I admirable the goal. The only thing I’d gently question is the theory of your delivery.
Oral communication has been doing a surprisingly competent job of transmitting ideas for quite some time now. Socrates managed to provoke 2,000 years of philosophy without publishing so much as a pamphlet. And Jesus seems to have launched an entire civilization’s worth of moral debate armed mainly in close proximity to dinner time. Even Alexander Hamilton and the rest of the founding generation sharpened their thinking not just by reading, but through speeches, debates, sermons, and salons.
Reading certainly helped, but it wasn’t the only way intellectual steel was tempered. The more decisive factor seems to be intention. If someone approaches ideas with genuine curiosity ready to examine them, test them, and occasionally discard them, then almost any medium will do. But if a person adopts the posture of passive absorption or validation, then they can read all the books ever written and still emerge with thoughts as dull as a butter knife. The medium matters far less than the willingness to actually think.
I will address the oral tradition argument in a follow up, but basically the counter is that oral traditions required the people transmitting to memorize and the process had standards; not just anyone could pass down oral knowledge, which you had to wrestle with and not merely memorize (thinking about the Indic texts that were oral for millennia). Audiobooks aren’t comparable. Postman also talks about how people who read in the typographic age before TV could follow long complex arguments because they were orally delivered as though they were essays. Basically that the character of oral communication in that age was indistinguishable from written comms. And yes, in the classical age rhetoric was about oral communication not written, but the standards for claiming rhetorical expertise were high. People who merely consume audiobooks haven’t developed or maintained the cognitive muscles that would allow it, particularly because those people also tend to be addicted to visual media and lack an attention span to even follow a long complex argument. If they’re not training that muscle at all, how would they follow a complex idea chain just hearing it?
What you’re describing in those oral traditions was the training and discipline of the speaker, not the inherent properties of the medium itself. The memorization, rhetorical craft, and intellectual rigor were cultivated through years of deliberate practice. That’s what allowed someone to transmit ideas orally with precision. Without that kind of discipline, any medium can quickly degenerate into little more than an empty hot take. The tradition wasn’t doing the work, but the practice behind it was. Those are different categories.
And while it’s certainly true that some audiobook listeners engage with ideas passively, that’s only a subset of users. It’s a fairly large leap to move from “some people behave this way with a medium” to “the medium incentivizes that behavior,” and then again to “everyone who uses the medium must therefore be incapable of anything else.” That’s a lot of ground to cover in a single stride.
The many demands for attention nearly caused me to skip this essay. I'm really glad I didn't. Looking forward to where you're taking the train of thought, Anuradha.
My lady, some writers are always worth the attention. You, Dmitry, Damien Ruel Rucker, Samara of Know Your Rites and Agua Mala. I confess: I know you by the name of your Substack, Radically Pragmatic, and at first, I didn't realize who the email was from. The connection will stick now.
Thank you for justifying the vague unease I get from audiobooks (or e-readers, for that matter). I think it was my instinct saying what you have apprehended and articulated with your intellect.
i’ve been thinking about intellectualism as currency—and how listening collapses into reading. what are we trying to signal or preserve—effort, credibility, identity?
they’re different experiences, not better or worse. the prestige around reading feels a bit elitist, and maybe that’s exactly what encourages the collapse. because perceived intellect holds immense social value—and we’re all, to some extent, performing for it.
Bless you, you’re the few people who understood what I’m saying. And yes, though I didn’t get into the anti intellectualism specifically, I am saying that people want to claim the identity of an intellectual without doing the work. That, truly, is offensive to me because I did the work, AND I didn’t come from a privileged background. I could have made a ton of excuses. I also never said don’t listen to audiobooks, just to not lie about what you actually did for social clout.
what it also brings up for me is how this might be a symptom of something broader culturally: a pressure toward immediacy and flattening. we’re losing the capacity for nuance and holding multiple truths at once, which makes sense in the context of being constantly overloaded with information and content. there’s a kind of urgency to have a confident take quickly, to stay legible and relevant in the social fabric.
Amen. When you listen to a song you are not reading music. To conflate the two is silly and, as you say, is in effort to claim victory for the harder thing while doing the passive one.
I use audiobooks to relax at night (I’m on about my 4th listen of Harry Potter because I love Jim Dale’s voice). Or if I’m on an airplane because I need the noise canceling AirPods in. Generally only for fiction as well.
Anything else I read the book, either Kindle or paper.
I never thought to listen to HP. I’m not against the use of audiobooks, which I think several people are saying despite my adding a sentence saying that.
This will probably irritate people that's why I loved it! Listening can be helpful, yet it rarely forces the same pauses that reading does. The social part you mention is real too, people want the reputation of being well read because it signals discipline and judgment.
I’m a music professor and I have to remind my students, over and over, about the difference between hearing and listening. It’s so easy to turn listening—a foreground activity—into hearing—a background activity—that we often don’t notice the change has happened. We’re biologically wired to “think less” with our ears than with other senses.
How often is someone who is “listening” to an audio book really only “hearing” it?
But, to the larger point, I am always saddened by how much we are all encouraged to eschew any/all friction. To me, the whole point of any intellectual activity (and most physical ones for that matter) is the slog. Working through something difficult *is* the point, not the “I finished” part.
To quote an album title from 1987: “Give Me Convenience Or Give Me Death.”
I appreciate this distinction you made, which I didn’t and should have. I treated hearing and listening as the same but you’re correct that they’re distinct. And the thing about audiobooks is the ease with which it can become background noise.
Yes. It’s the ease with which we slip between listening (actively) and hearing (passively) that I am always trying to point out. I catch myself, **constantly**, slipping into semi-ignoring what I am “hearing,” which then means it’s little more than background noise. You can’t really read as a background activity. Reading **must** be the foreground activity, making it a different thing than listening/hearing.
I think I am ok with folks insisting that listening *can* be “useful” and/or “effective,” but it’s silly to insist it’s “the same” as reading.
Honestly, I've had that same experience when reading. My mind wanders while my eyes keep moving along the text, even registering the individual words. Maybe it's just me.
I enjoy non-fiction as audio, but have a much harder time with fiction. I can no longer imagine distinct voices when constantly hearing the voice of the reader. I lose track of the setting easily as well.
Seems like hearing an author read passages from their novel at bookstore would have a similar effect. I've never done that so I wouldn't know. 🤔
You might try sticking with reading; sounds like you haven’t built the habit.
Thanks for the reply. I used to read all the time but due to my age and years of screen time that is required by my job, I've found that audiobooks give my eyes time to rest. I usually do not multitask while listening. It's possible that there are circumstances that make either option more or less appropriate for any individual. Maybe I'll pick up some fiction and give it a go.
Thank you for this distinction. It’s very helpful to me.
A few years ago, I made an effort to listen to audiobooks, but had very little success retaining anything. I kept pausing the recording to consider the idea, scene, or description, which annoyed me even though that is what I do when reading a book. It felt like I was wasting my time.
I couldn’t understand how my friends listened to so many books (fiction and nonfiction). Finally, after asking every audiobook fan I knew for their routines and experiences, I finally understood that my friends were satisfied with a more distracted or multitasked experience than I was. (What you have defined as hearing vs listening.) Once I understood that our expectations were different, I stopped trying to force myself to use audiobooks except as an aid to reading.
And this means they are really just hearing, not even listening. And it boggles the mind that they’re ok with this and call it “learning”
I've been listening to Postman 😅 and wondering about this. The net effect of quitting audio books would be that I consume far less written information. I don't engage deeply with everything I listen to, but not all of it is worth deep engagement.
Then again, when listening to The Prince, do I really want to embark on a deep dive into Renaissance geopolitics, or is it enough to skim across the surface in an effort to sample a classic while providing fodder for lateral thinking?
I spent the first 20 years of my life with no TV and developed a typographic mind. I also was clueless about how to communicate with my peers, and very narrowly informed. Still figuring out the best mix....
I think listening is fine for “light” stuff (however defined) but for serious fiction I prefer to read. I only read fiction these days except for Substacks like this one or technical docs related to work.
I tend to filter out most light reading and always prefer a physical copy when I can find one
Yes. Reading is different because it's active. You can't drive while you do it, your mind can't wander, you can't play with a Rubik's cube or clean the house. You have to hold the book and collect the words yourself. Reading forces you to spend time down in the mud wrestling with messy ideas and coming up with actual thoughts of your own. Listening doesn't make you do that. Reading is active, listening is passive.
Besides, there's a litmus test I use for just about everything in my life, and it applies to this debate: do wise people do this? All of the wise people I know read all the time. I don't know any wise people who only listen to audiobooks and podcasts. That right there tells me that listening is not good enough.
"Prestige laundering" is great coinage. People will go to great lengths to defend not reading something. It's elitist, ableist, problematic, colonial, etc. It's not elitist to say that some books are better than others, or that reading results in deeper understanding of a text but people will argue that it is until they're blue in the face.
I've long suspected that a lot of people who rail against "canon" are simply trying to give their intellectual laziness the sheen of legitimacy by manufacturing an ethical gripe ("the western canon is mostly written by Dead White Males, therefore me not reading it is a moral stand").
Except I don't know where these Alan Bloom acolytes are, shoving the western canon down the throats of impressionable students. I've encountered WAY more profs, students, articles, and essays that argue against canon than for it.
I think you’re right in that these people dismissing canon are more socially accepted than those who insist effortful reading of western canonical texts matters
This is going to sound very confrontational, but I don't know how else to write it. Know that I respect your intellect while heavily disagreeing with both the thesis and the underlying assumptions.
I'm not sure I agree with the idea that listening is a universally inferior form of information transmittal. I think that really depends on the brain that is receiving the information. Some people learn better by listening. You seem to think that because you learn better by seeing, that must be a universal truth.
You rightly say that you have the burden of proof, but then go on to provide none. You even cite a study that contradicts your idea. Instead of providing the proof whose burden you bear, you blame skepticism for not believing you unless you can prove it. That skeptical mindset seems to me to be the correct way of treating most claims. It's not about proving it beyond a shadow of a doubt though, it's about providing some kind of evidence that supports your conclusion, which you haven't done. Only claims.
Humans have for hundreds of thousands of years been oral idea transmitters. It is the default way our brains are wired, writing technology is extremely recent on the human timeline. Additionally, oral traditions are the bedrock of indigenous knowledge. Western culture's greatest mistake has always been in assuming the superiority of its way of life. Are you saying indigineous traditions are inferior because they don't learn them by reading? If you're not saying that, and I hope you're not, then why is it important that stories and information be consumed in the western way?
This kind of reminds me of that attitude among unkind members of older generations of "I had to struggle, so you should to." Perhaps we've just invented a better way to do books for some people that requires less struggle. Especially for people who have brains that easily accept heard information and struggle with seen information. People with dyslexia would feel quite attacked by this. You're correct, it does sound ableist. I am someone who until recently struggled with undiagnosed and untreated ADHD. The only things in my life I've ever been able to focus on without distraction is that which I'm fascinated by. I failed English Literature twice in college because I wasn't fascinated by it, and that made it so that I had to spend ~8 hours between classes reading a single chapter of a book. Discovering audiobooks made it so that I could occupy the part of my brain that wanders by doing something with my hands like art or exercising, while the part of my brain that wants to learn could finally avoid distraction.
The assertion that you're "just listening to a podcast" is inaccurate, and reflects a dismissiveness of podcasts themselves, which often contain great debates and conversations between brilliant minds. It's more accurate to say that you're listening to a longform lecture. A podcast is a conversation between multiple people, a lecture is a presentation of information by a single person. Lectures have been a primary tool in academia from its inception, and I reject that it is inferior, it's simply a different tool in the toolbox of learning.
And finally, you're making a very bold psycholigizing claim that people who listen to audiobooks are doing it for intellectual prestige. I am going to say this in the nicest way I can think of: You don't know what other people are thinking, and assuming their actions are a moral failure rather than the result of outside influences is simply the Self-Serving Bias at work. I'm doing it because I like to learn. It's not that I don't read things (I obviously read this article), but that I tend to consume longer form content in audio form because it allows me more time to learn in my busy 21st century life, better ability to navigate the challenges my brain poses me, and a more natural learning technique.
Sir, I think you mostly missed the point of what our author was saying.
Reading is a higher friction activity than just listening or hearing a book. For example, when you’re reading and you come across a word, you don’t know very well, you must try and figure out what the word means and how to pronounce it. When you’re listening to a book this is not true.
And, yes Western culture is absolutely superior to verbal only indigenous cultures. It’s called progress.
Verbal only indigineous cultures were warning us of ecological crisis long before science picked up on it. Their ways of life resulted in personal fulfillment being the norm instead of the exception. Maybe don't be so sure that West is best.
Oh goodness. Spoken like a true leftist. What crisis? And how many indigenous people do you have conversations with to know how personally fulfilled they are? 😂🙄
I think I understood that part, but I don't see why you wouldn't pause an audiobook to look up a word. I do it.
Perhaps the removal of the "friction" of reading is progress too :)
you’ve just proven my point. I suggest reading brave new world.
What point did I prove, exactly?
The point about oral culture adds an interesting piece of complexity. Literacy does seem to have negative impacts on memory and facial recognition. Still, I’m less persuaded that struggle isn’t load bearing. Certainly “desireable difficulty” is broadly pedagogically accepted for creating memory. I’d wonder whether it’s possible audiobooks convey the sense you “did the thing” while denying the thing done was different. Them empowering people to work at the frontier of their ability and the frontier being different and that mattering do not contradict. Perhaps aural consumption even has advantages!
I could agree to everything you've said here.
Every time a new technology replaces an old one, we gain something and lose something in the process. Maybe we're losing something, but gaining other things with audiobooks. It's important to say that I don't think there is no difference. Just that dismissing audiobook readers as prestige launderers is diminutive.
Yeah, I won’t deny it’s insulting, incendiary, and diminutive. I wouldn’t do it myself, yet I love it. Whether it’s fairly or kindly applied, the claim we’re amusing ourselves to death by equating lower friction actions with higher friction actions is one I’m there for though. Humans seem prone to extrapolate “now” into the future in a way that denies us meaning by seeing clearly initial discomfort and failing to see ultimate rewards. And we’ve created interactive spaces that incent this and values that validate it. I favor the execution of socrates more than the next guy, but in this case–maybe speciously, maybe falsely–I appreciate the affront.
Exactly. It’s a well written rant, actually.
I look forward to your writing because you write with clarity and conviction, and you don't shy away from expressing views that will challenge mainstream ideas. This one got me thinking about my own practices, and why I've never been interested in audiobooks.
Consumption of information is overrated because knowing more stuff doesn't translate into increased intelligence in navigating life or character development. I'm more likely to contemplate how to implement something I read that stuck with me than anything I heard through consumption, unless I paused to intentionally do something with it.
Hearing a book and listening to a book are two different things. To know that you understood the author's intended meaning through listening (not hearing) requires a feedback process between yourself and your expression of that understanding (ie journalling/writing) or between you and someone else to help you make sense of it. Hearing a book is like bingeing Netflix. You're getting through it while being entertained and stimulated rather than enriched.
You really get what mean here by asserting that the medium changes the engagement. This argument seems to be over the heads of many, but of course the people who get it are the ones I also respect from their effortful engagement with ideas. @Justin Ross mentioned that he asks himself if wise people do the thing under consideration which I thought was an unusual metric, but I do the same. That said, many people would say “how can you know the person is wise”? to which I have little answer other than you can see it from their life outcomes. This goes back to judgment, by which I mean the outcome of discernment, which you and I have been circling around for a while. An examination of the prohibition on judgment is coming next.
Like many internet users I spend too much time taking in information. It's amazing when you tear yourself away that you suddenly have a deeper understanding of the stuff you've been reading as your mind works on it in silence.
The proliferation of audiobooks is also related to the decline of silence
Oh my goodness, yes. I work in a college town and the fact that most students I see on the street have AirPods in is disturbing. I love silence. I can’t imagine wanting “noise” in my ears constantly.
It actually makes me shudder to think that there are people who literally never are alone with their thoughts. Or without a phone.
Oh please read Mary Harrington's essays on the lost skill of memorisation (the real deal) as it ties directly into this thesis of "deep thought"
I'll listen to a podcast in the car (it beats talk radio because of the high spot load), but I want to see words on a written page if possible.
Audio forces you to digest (or not digest) things at the pace of the lector. Reading lets you take your time, thinking and savoring, rereading things as needed.
It's not unlike wolfing down a McMeal in the car versus having a nice 2-3 hour dinner.
I can see what you’re trying to do here. Perhaps cultivate a culture of careful thinking? People who pay attention, wrestle with ideas, follow long arguments, and form judgments instead of just inhaling opinions. I admirable the goal. The only thing I’d gently question is the theory of your delivery.
Oral communication has been doing a surprisingly competent job of transmitting ideas for quite some time now. Socrates managed to provoke 2,000 years of philosophy without publishing so much as a pamphlet. And Jesus seems to have launched an entire civilization’s worth of moral debate armed mainly in close proximity to dinner time. Even Alexander Hamilton and the rest of the founding generation sharpened their thinking not just by reading, but through speeches, debates, sermons, and salons.
Reading certainly helped, but it wasn’t the only way intellectual steel was tempered. The more decisive factor seems to be intention. If someone approaches ideas with genuine curiosity ready to examine them, test them, and occasionally discard them, then almost any medium will do. But if a person adopts the posture of passive absorption or validation, then they can read all the books ever written and still emerge with thoughts as dull as a butter knife. The medium matters far less than the willingness to actually think.
I will address the oral tradition argument in a follow up, but basically the counter is that oral traditions required the people transmitting to memorize and the process had standards; not just anyone could pass down oral knowledge, which you had to wrestle with and not merely memorize (thinking about the Indic texts that were oral for millennia). Audiobooks aren’t comparable. Postman also talks about how people who read in the typographic age before TV could follow long complex arguments because they were orally delivered as though they were essays. Basically that the character of oral communication in that age was indistinguishable from written comms. And yes, in the classical age rhetoric was about oral communication not written, but the standards for claiming rhetorical expertise were high. People who merely consume audiobooks haven’t developed or maintained the cognitive muscles that would allow it, particularly because those people also tend to be addicted to visual media and lack an attention span to even follow a long complex argument. If they’re not training that muscle at all, how would they follow a complex idea chain just hearing it?
What you’re describing in those oral traditions was the training and discipline of the speaker, not the inherent properties of the medium itself. The memorization, rhetorical craft, and intellectual rigor were cultivated through years of deliberate practice. That’s what allowed someone to transmit ideas orally with precision. Without that kind of discipline, any medium can quickly degenerate into little more than an empty hot take. The tradition wasn’t doing the work, but the practice behind it was. Those are different categories.
And while it’s certainly true that some audiobook listeners engage with ideas passively, that’s only a subset of users. It’s a fairly large leap to move from “some people behave this way with a medium” to “the medium incentivizes that behavior,” and then again to “everyone who uses the medium must therefore be incapable of anything else.” That’s a lot of ground to cover in a single stride.
The many demands for attention nearly caused me to skip this essay. I'm really glad I didn't. Looking forward to where you're taking the train of thought, Anuradha.
Ha the irony I love it. Thank you for giving me your scarce attention in a saturated economy.
My lady, some writers are always worth the attention. You, Dmitry, Damien Ruel Rucker, Samara of Know Your Rites and Agua Mala. I confess: I know you by the name of your Substack, Radically Pragmatic, and at first, I didn't realize who the email was from. The connection will stick now.
Thank you for justifying the vague unease I get from audiobooks (or e-readers, for that matter). I think it was my instinct saying what you have apprehended and articulated with your intellect.
Anuradha, I have to listen to your podcasts more than once. I miss so much the first time because I'm so busy digesting the last bit.
That is a compliment. Some podcasts aren't worth listening to even once.
i’ve been thinking about intellectualism as currency—and how listening collapses into reading. what are we trying to signal or preserve—effort, credibility, identity?
they’re different experiences, not better or worse. the prestige around reading feels a bit elitist, and maybe that’s exactly what encourages the collapse. because perceived intellect holds immense social value—and we’re all, to some extent, performing for it.
Bless you, you’re the few people who understood what I’m saying. And yes, though I didn’t get into the anti intellectualism specifically, I am saying that people want to claim the identity of an intellectual without doing the work. That, truly, is offensive to me because I did the work, AND I didn’t come from a privileged background. I could have made a ton of excuses. I also never said don’t listen to audiobooks, just to not lie about what you actually did for social clout.
what it also brings up for me is how this might be a symptom of something broader culturally: a pressure toward immediacy and flattening. we’re losing the capacity for nuance and holding multiple truths at once, which makes sense in the context of being constantly overloaded with information and content. there’s a kind of urgency to have a confident take quickly, to stay legible and relevant in the social fabric.
so curious you’re thoughts on this piece on “knowledge influencers https://mufarodawn.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-the-expert-influencer?r=31oeq4&utm_medium=ios
Amen. When you listen to a song you are not reading music. To conflate the two is silly and, as you say, is in effort to claim victory for the harder thing while doing the passive one.
I use audiobooks to relax at night (I’m on about my 4th listen of Harry Potter because I love Jim Dale’s voice). Or if I’m on an airplane because I need the noise canceling AirPods in. Generally only for fiction as well.
Anything else I read the book, either Kindle or paper.
I never thought to listen to HP. I’m not against the use of audiobooks, which I think several people are saying despite my adding a sentence saying that.
Yes, I agree. You never said you were against audiobooks. People hear what they want.
This will probably irritate people that's why I loved it! Listening can be helpful, yet it rarely forces the same pauses that reading does. The social part you mention is real too, people want the reputation of being well read because it signals discipline and judgment.
Judgment is coming next - it’s never been more necessary, less individually valued or more socially valuable