Tuesday, March 12, 2013

The Big Read at Buster Brown in Fredonia


Community involvement and public dialogue, the fine tuning of skills in collaborative efforts are natural complements to any major in the humanities. Even if they are mostly “honored only in the breach,” the capacity of the arts to promote empathy, critical analysis and appreciation of beauty are limited if we do not extend these teachings into the public realm. Such practice is being curtailed as the humanities lose out to “practical” fields of studies in the realms of science and technology. The Big Read is the acknowledgment of the danger this poses. According to the National Endowment of the Arts’ website, The Big Read was, “designed to revitalize the role of literature in American culture and to encourage citizens to read for pleasure and enlightenment.” Specifically it is mentioned that the target demographic for this program is young boys between 11 and 15. Through participation of the event, what conclusions might be drawn about the efficacy of The Big Read program in achieving its goals?
At our event, aside from the presenters, there were but 10 people who came. Of them, all had read The Call of the Wild for the event; for some it was the second time with the book. Among all of those who participated in our discussion group, we talked about many different topics relating to the novel, both in depth and broad, both critical and anecdotal. For example, a critical topic that was covered was that of survival of the fittest in the book and, in a similar vein, whether those in the group thought that Buck evolved or devolved throughout the book. And a anecdotal offering, for instance, was provided by one community member who mentioned that, every time something bad or hurtful happened to Buck, she would take a brief pause from reading and cuddle with her own dog. The audience was uniformly adult, with two college age individuals, and two professors from the SUNY Fredonia English Department. The rest were elderly. In this respect, the program cannot be reasonably declared a success, though the conversation was lively and critical.
Problems may be located with how the program was pitched to the demographic in question. While advertisement was centralized mainly to public areas trafficked by people who already consider themselves avid readers (book stores, libraries, etc.) there is little evidence to show that any special efforts were made in the way of outreach towards young people, much less young boys. Literature is at odds with many of the current trends in media production.
First, it requires active participation. The youth of today have been conditioned to accept almost exclusively passive forms of entertainment in the way of television, movies and the internet. Even those media which might push their audience to participate, like video games, still rely, at least initially, on raw visual stimulation to keep the audience interested.
Second, literature is forced to compete with the omnipresence of electronic media and the “140 characters or less” format. This is a reference to the shortened attention spans, and even immunities to excessive external stimuli that has resulted from the overload of information that saturates young people’s consciousness almost constantly.
Organizers of the Big Read recognize the detrimental effects that a decrease in literacy can have in society. These factors are only going to proliferate as technology advances and unless literature is sold and promoted in a way that accommodates these trends its presence will slowly dwindle among future generations. Jack London and Ray Bradbury will find themselves increasingly relegated to academia, or at best to overworked Hollywood adaptations. The Big Read strives to renew the public interest in literature and brings it to an intimate community setting.
In promoting future Big Reads, these factors need to be taken into account— so long as 11-15 year old males are the target demographic. Online marketing techniques may be employed, or different age groups, or sexes should be targeted.
This does not mean that a small turnout for The Big Read is an unsuccessful one.
On the contrary, The Big Read events bring people of selected communities together, though not necessarily due to the initially intended goal of promoting literacy.
Take those who planned, organized and constructed the events for The Big Read, for example. There are dozens or people, if not more, who all collaborated in order to produce an organized series of events. In conditions without The Big Read, these people may never have came together and, even if they did happen to interact at some point, it would certainly not have been in the capacity that The Big Read orchestrated. The English students who worked with school officials, community members and each other, especially, benefited from developing their communication skills in such an applicable manner to their futures in the field.
Even those who did not directly get to work side by side in organizing The Big Read events for our town were able to, eventually, work with members of the community through the actual planned discussion events. These people in the community, too, would not have ever come in contact with many of the college students that planned and participated in these events.
But, because of The Big Read, there was a dialogue between all of these different people. And this is the case for each and every community that participated in The Big Read, a total of 78 towns and cities. While The Big Read didn’t necessarily produce the outcomes that they had originally planned for this literacy promoting campaign, The Big Read did bring people together. And that’s a start.

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