The National Endowment for the Arts has announced a reversal in the decades-long downward trend of American reading habits. The last time they published a major study on reading the hue and cry was great and unabating. Naturally I'd like to attribute this to the grand textual revitalization that the Internet (broadly speaking) has brought about. The dominance of television ended sometime in the late 1990s, a fact we can be sure about because it experienced its golden age just as the empire was crumbling.
Now we've got billions of screens--yes, of course, video hasn't gone away, but we're also doing much, much more reading and even some writing. The blog explosion minted millions of new authors, and whether they stuck with it or not, they all got to experience the thrill of publication in some way. The enduring power of the keyboard in mobile devices and email in all sorts of places is a testament to the fact that we are once again word people. I have no evidence to connect this with the fact that more people are reading fiction (assuming that it's even true, that this isn't a statistical blip). But I'd like to think our enhanced communication landscape is retraining us to appreciate the pleasures of literature.
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