Jean Twenge writes today about the decline in reading among high school students. She has no problem assigning blame:
So where is the time once spent reading going? Screens are the inevitable conclusion...There appear to be two stages to the decline of reading: 1976-2002 and 2012-2022.
Sure, except that Twenge offers as evidence chart after chart that looks like this:
First off, the decline in reading has been going on for nearly 50 years. Second, even if you look only at the second decline, it starts in 2009, not 2012.
This is not nitpicking. If smartphones are responsible for the recent decline in reading, the decline can't start before smartphones became widespread in 2012. Not even by three years. Smartphones might be part of the reason, but there has to be something else too.
In any case, the obvious questions prompted by this chart are:
- The reading decline has been steady since at least 1976. Why?
- There was an odd interruption between 2002-2009. Why?
Twenge acknowledges all this, but still insists that smartphones are a major culprit even though the evidence points well away from that. This is one of the reasons I remain so skeptical about the whole smartphone thing. The folks pushing the theory want to blame every last bad thing that's happened to teens on smartphones, and they mostly do this by searching out any trend they can find that began around 2012. Twisting the evidence like a pretzel makes it even worse.
Hey, did you know that teen use of OxyContin plunged starting in 2012? Well, 2009, actually, but who's counting? It must be the beneficial effect of smartphones! What else could it be?
Yeah, the housing market debacle obviously was a result of screens too.
Its Twenge. She spent 15 years bashing millennials and when that didn't work out she picked new youth to hate on.
TV. Network, cable, streaming. More and more stuff to see. See it on your smartphone too. Also gaming.
the decline can't start before smartphones became widespread in 2012.
The iPhone was released in 2007. I assume Kevin has data showing lack of "widespread" use before 2012. But my recollection is smart phones took off very rapidly. I got my first in 2008.
FWIW, a lot of smartphone (and laptop) use probably is "reading for pleasure" —it's just reading blog posts, tweets and online news sources (instead of novels). I read more than ever....but I must confess I don't read actual fiction books as much as I used to.
Yeah, but I read pretty much constantly. Just, you know, online.
Don't interrupt Kevins rants with inconvenient facts. He's a smartphone truther.
He is right that it is ridiculous to blame everything on smartphones even though it’s just conjecture. Could be true but there could be a lot of other factors. Growing up in the 50s and 60s I was an avid reader. I read random books my parents had on their shelves. I even skimmed a medical text about diabetes. I read at least some of the newspaper and always read the news magazine they subscribed to — Time or Newsweek, Look, Life.
One big difference these days is that people don’t have books around the house. Most readers have their books and other reading material on their devices so kids don’t see what they are reading.
I was a big TV watcher and also spent loads of time talking to my friends on the phone yet I still read a lot. In contrast my grandkids are so busy and have so many more school subjects and activities that they have far less leisure time than I had at their ages. In fact in college I stopped reading for pleasure because all the assigned reading burned me out. I started reading again after I graduated and was surprised that I had forgotten the pleasure of reading for enjoyment.
Samsung didn’t have a competing product until 2009.
Based on iPhone sales I’d go with Kevin:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/276306/global-apple-iphone-sales-since-fiscal-year-2007/#:~:text=The%20number%20of%20Apple%20iPhone,reached%20oer%20232%20million%20units.
Note that those are worldwide sales. Also, it was more common for iPhone users to upgrade within a couple of years because the technology was improving quickly.so a lot of sales were t new users.
Samsung didn’t have a competing product until 2009.
Based on iPhone sales I’d go with Kevin:
Seems implausible to me. If the emergence of smartphones are a factor in reduced teen (or any age?) book reading, we'd expect to start seeing some effects from this factor as soon as they hit the market in large numbers—not five years later—no matter how many firms were selling them. Apple sold a million iPhones their first weekend on the market, back in the summer of 2007. (Also, what's so special about 2012? Twenty-oh-seven seems a lot more special for these purposes!).
And that's what the data appear to show: the most recent peak in teen book reading arrived, uh...at almost the exact same time the iPhone was released.
If I really wanted to go out on a limb, I'd speculate that the previous increase in teen book reading coincided with the rise of Amazon: books became a lot easier to buy for everyone, especially people who don't drive (which describes a lot of teens). For a while books might even have become a bit cheaper. Those were the days.
I usually share Kevin's sense of which numbers seem plausible or not. But here I part company with him. Unlike opioids, which he bizarrely cites, internet usage (especially as it pertains to deliberately addictive social media platforms) is an almost perfect competitor to and substitute for book-reading.
I would suggest anyone who is really interested in this sign up to be a substitute teacher at the local high school.
I am 100% serious.
My grandkids get a lot of ebooks free from our local library. They don’t need to buy many.
No matter how many iPhones were sold the first weekend, scarcely any ended up in the pockets of high school seniors!
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/
Only 35% of ALL ADULTS had smartphones by 2011. It reached 50% sometime in 2012 which is why Kevin uses that year.
All that said, the number of screens was proliferating at that time, too, BUT not in the 1970's... Kinda kills the screen explanation :/
Yup, me too.
That graph needs to go back another twenty or thirty years. When I was growing up in the '60s, the older generation was firmly of the opinion that TV was rotting kids' minds. Is it possible that TV is responsible for the decline in reading? First, television went from a novelty to ubiquitous; then the number of channels began to increase and has continued to increase to the present day, which could reasonably be expected to lead to an increase in TV watching and a decrease in other sedentary time killers, such as reading for pleasure.
It was radio that killed reading from pleasure, and the only book anyone ever needed to read for pleasure is the Bible!
/s
And then video killed the radio star.
Then how do you explain the Harry Potter phenomenon which is still a big thing with younger kids who are discovering the books and movies? I do think a lot newer kids books seem to written as mental health aids not for the entertainment value.
The graph doesn't say that kids have entirely quit reading, just that they're reading less. Harry Potter books can easily be included in "less".
This would be my take. Especially as someone growing up in the 70's-80's and the explosion of TVs impact. You can also add video games to the list of items reducing reading. Especially as many traditional young readers were early big gamers.
The arrival of smart phones exacerbated the trend. They didn't create the trend.
I was born in 1951. I would say that TV and the adjacent electronic distractions made reading books (not just short articles) less popular. I recall when I was around high school age I felt a kind of difference in the kids a few years older than me (pre-TV) and those much younger. Hard to say exactly but there was a difference. The younger kids were somehow more involved with the constant distractions.
It is interesting if you look at content from the fifties compared to the last few decades. Even TV used to have a slower pace. TV shows were sometimes filmed as stage plays with not much camera work or editing. Now if you watch commercials there are jump cuts and flashes of light every few seconds, especially in commercials. Each flash of light affects your attention and concentration.
Reading requires a quieter environment, like a library. It is hard to imagine how quiet life used to be.
It's complicated, and student resistance to reading of almost any length at college level rose markedly, as far as I can recall, around the early 2000s, say maybe 2005 at the latest. So I don't necessarily think it's smartphones per se. But even the old flippy phones were good for texting, which added massively to distraction levels and difficulty focusing in and out of class.
But, though this may be out to lunch, I'll just throw out a curve ball here that isn't about technology. Does this data correlate in any way with the switch to whole language learning? If it does, that might tend to confirm stories that were coming out within the past year to the effect that the students who picked up reading pretty readily came out of it okay, but students who had any difficulties were most often frustrated by the method's demands and it put them off any reading they didn't absolutely have to do.
Around the same time and parallel with the resistance to reading itself, as I remember things, it was notable that college-age students increasingly had trouble understanding figurative language or picking up on irony in written language. Or in a lot of cases dealing with complex sentences, come to that.
So it seems to me the net has to be cast wider, beyond mere monocausality.
Along with whole language reading came a variety of other changes to reading instruction, including a focus on reading for pleasure. One reason the whole langiage crowd liked it was because phonics involved lots of repetition that wasn't about reading for meaning or pleasure. It would be ironic if a movement about reading for pleasure ended reading for pleasure. Many states dropped whole language decades ago (it was a battle in the 90s), so you'd think that would not be a huge factor now.
Another change is the rise of the graphic novel. Many praise the graphic novel as a way to engage reluctant readers, but it's also very true that the density of language in a graphic novel is far lower than in a standard novel. It also uses very different language - almost no flowery descriptive text, lots of dialog - so the vocabulary you are exposed to is very different.
The last couple of decades of the 20th century saw a push to expose older kids to fiction about "real life," which lots of kids find really depressing and off-putting. Common Core pushed more nonfiction, reducing how much fiction is taught.
Don't forget that budget cuts have removed school librarians and libraries from many, many schools. Less choice and no specialist to help them pick a book often means kids dont find any book they want to read.
It's probably a lot of things, but I'd still put money on screens being the biggest factor. From the expansion of tv channels to cable to video games to texting to smart phones, there is a lot of competition for teen eyeballs.
Reading books for pleasure requires not just literary vocabulary knowledge, but also stamina. Kids have less of both these days.
Good points, thanks, especially about graphic novels and library cutbacks, and the competition for teens' attention. The forces that can monetize attention for their own benefit sure seem to have the advantage here. I'd thought whole language was more current (and would swear I was hearing plenty of AM radio ads for hooked on phonics fairly recently) but stand corrected. The dreariness of realist or ashcan-school fiction is a point well-taken, but my experience was with non-fiction almost exclusively.
"It was notable that college-age students increasingly had trouble understanding figurative language or picking up on irony in written language."
Also the resistance to reading at length.
Interesting. Have any more on that? (I know, Google it...)
Only my own anecdotal experience, sorry, but it could get very frustrating. On length of reading assignments, when I started out 30-some years ago I often had survey-level classes read a couple of 200-page books and several multi-page historical documents, plus a 40-page chapter a week, and didn't think that was unusual (in fact it was a little light compared to some colleagues). In my last few years I could only assign one book-length item for the semester (and that one wouldn't be usable today) and had to take 3 weeks with it. For most other readings, the equivalent of 3-5 pages was stretching it, and a lot would go unread. We almost all ended up devoting a lot of class time to reading, rather than expecting it to be done outside of class.
As far as figurative language goes, one small example-- for us olds, one sign of good speaking and good writing is being able to avoid repeating the same word too often as you go along. Textbook writers and editors have paid particular attention to that in their narratives. But the problem that cropped up was that if, say, a text didn't use exactly the same term repeatedly as it explained and elaborated, many or most of the students wouldn't recognize that it was referring to the same thing. Similar thing happened when I was talking in class.
A caveat might be that these were mostly first-generation college students at a non-elite institution (OTOH that could also make it a little more disturbing in some says), which meant among other things that many needed to work or had family obligations that limited their out-of-class time for prep. Pressure to have "the college experience" as marketed by Admissions did the same for lots of them. Overall we had many fine readers and writers among our students, but I'm sure my former colleagues in required English comp classes would say the same thing about the average ones.
For all I know there may be-- probably is-- scholarship specifically on this, and I know there's discussion about how to approach traditionally non-college students. At the practical level, when we used to talk about doing remedial coursework on entering students, this is an example of how the need for it presented itself.
Sorry to have gone on so long--
Data showing that teens are reading fewer books could mean that teens spending less time reading. Or it could mean that teens prefer reading Kevin’s blog to reading books.
I seldom read books anymore, but it's not because I don't read. are we constantly on the Internet, including articles and papers that I download. I mostly use my smartphone for reading news and social media. I used to get newspapers delivered until smartphones arrived.
Even so, I have hundreds and hundreds of books at home from back when that was the only way you could get information.
My reading dropped substantially when I changed jobs to one I could walk to, and then we went remote.
Prior to that I spent a couple hours a day on a train and got a lot of reading in.
I agree that (a) an internet-enabled phone in every pocket is a set of major changes for humans, and (b) it is unlikely to hand the scolds clean evidence of bad things they dearly want to see.
I think most of the negatives are likely polity-level issues. Surveillance, information control and social contagion, for three.
I worked for a long time at a job an hour subway ride away. I'm three stops from the end of the line so I always got a seat. A stop or two later and I would have been standing. This enabled me to read all of the NYer and NY Magazine.
Not working now and it's harder, mostly due to what I am doing right now. But like others I'm guessing the youts today are spending hours on video games, and that goes back 30 years, well before they became portable by smartphone. The phone added constant watching TikTok videos and texting etc. And interactive games being played with distant other players came along too, and the graphics got way better.
I used to read fiction voraciously, but for most of the last quarter century I found myself mostly hanging out on line, reading political blogs. For a little while after the former guy was elected, I resumed reading a book every day or so, posting capsule reviews on Facebook for my adoring family to ignore.
Around that time Facebook became useless, no longer showing me the latest updates, so that was the end of that. Plus, I found I had taken the edge off my hunger for the latest in science fiction, and so returned to a diet of liberal despair and vituperation.
For the millionth time, this blog needs thumbs up/down. Thumbs up.
I'm pretty sure the decline in reading and reading skills has been going on for a very long time. We have the books and magazine articles decrying it and proposing solutions since the 60s, at least.
That said, smartphones have destroyed the classroom from middle school up. Students, and often their parents, believe it is their absolute right to use that thing whenever they feel like it. We teachers spend way too much time and energy being phone police. And it puts us teachers in an adversarial position with respect to the student and that is not a good thing.
Whenever someone like Kevin says smartphones can't be the problem or that big of a problem, I extend an invitation for them to visit my class or any other class in my school. Not as a special guest star, but as a substitute teacher. See how many students are on their phones the whole time. Stop talking about things you don't know anything about.
As someone who runs a movie theater that employs a lot of younger people I concur that this is totally true. We used to have a “no phones while working” policy but I gave up enforcing that, as it’s impossible. Hell I struggle myself to keep it away at times. Even if what I’m doing is “work related” I don’t really need to respond to emails or update our social media while also tending a service counter, but at every break the urge is there. Not to mention texts from people who seem to think something is wrong if you don’t reply right away. Those of us who knew a time when the only screen was the TV might be slightly better at regulating it but we are all pretty much addicted to one degree or another. I don’t see how anyone can deny the profound effect and think it hasn’t completely changed how kids engage with the world.
Recall the first Android and iPhone came out in late 2008. Early adopters were younger, not older. Concurrently, this is roughly when the streaming wars started, with Netflix moving away from DVD and the creation of Hulu. At the same time, the cost of (content) consumption was rapidly dropping during this period. We had the birth of ad-driven free content, particularly through YouTube, and the rise of fan-driven content producers, which eventually led to live-stream interactions.
Rather than just one thing, it's probably the result of the confluence of multiple tech advancements and cultural changes.
Hardly anyone buys CDs or DVDs/BluRay discs, or purchases individual movies or songs. Culture has changed and we're constantly consuming content at every waking hour.
Glad to see someone else is skeptical of the cell phone nonsense. Twenge and Haidt are just pitching a line.
the uptick is lagged Harry Potter effect
Excellent catch! And not even all that lagged, since the first one was released in the US in late 1998 and new ones came out through 2007. Probably it took a while to catch on.
Exactly what I came here to say. No need to look for external causes when there was a massive, unprecedented youth and teen oriented book sensation going on.
Agree with HP effect. I would love to see a study of the percent of kids who read those books. My kids were of prime HP age, and I didn't know any kids who didn't read them.
I think you are on to something. Oxycontin obviously promotes reading for pleasure.
People around here are too young to remember that the advent of the iPhone did not mean that everyone suddenly had one in his pocket. It took a few years before the general public took the leap, and then another couple before the hand-me-downs made their way to kids.
On the other hand, the 90’s saw the explosion of the internet with the introduction of Mosaic, culminating in the dot-com boom and bust. Granted, you had to go home to surf. Then again, home is where most people read books. The one, definitive answer to the question? Hardly, but a culprit. I guess attention spans are too short to think beyond a single cause.
It took a few years before the general public took the leap,
This seems overstated. Apple sold a million iPhones their very first weekend on the market, and the main issue in the early days was waiting lists. It's (obviously) true that market penetration requires time. But in the case of the iPhone, the "general public" was enthusiastic, and was buying them in very, very large numbers from beginning.
Based on the briefest look at the data, it looks like the smartphone market is roughly 100x larger than in the iPhone’s first year. I stand by what I wrote.
Also, I think you forgot the initial reaction and the number of naysayers. Check out Blackberry revenue for a decent proxy of the lag between when the iPhone arrived and the general public recognising the future. Spitballing, I’d give it five years. AI is the same: grapes in front of the steamroller.
it looks like the smartphone market is roughly 100x larger than in the iPhone’s first year. I stand by what I wrote.
That was seventeen years ago! I stand by what I wrote. I don't believe anybody is suggesting that the full societal effects of smart phones were observable in year one. I'm suggesting we likely began to feel these effects when smart phones first arrived. Which again, is consistent with the book reading graph. Let me put it this way, I personally find it intuitive we'd begin to see a decrease in book reading when the market introduced a device that make it vastly easy to always have the internet with you. They seem like very direct competitors for people's time. YMMV.
After ten minutes of not quite finding what I wanted on my iPhone, it suddenly occurred to me: I’m 24 hours into a long weekend in a city I’ve been trying to visit for thirty years. We’ll have to cross swords some other time. I’m sure Kevin will provide an occasion before too long.
Not smartphones per se, but I’d think screens in general over the decades. Long before the internet homes had a single TV usually in the living room. Watching a show meant everyone watching the same thing. If you didn’t like what was on, usually whatever your dad wanted, your escape was a book. Later houses had multiple TVs and “lucky” kids even had one in their room. Books were no longer your only alternative. Then came video games and a bit later personal computers so kids had even more ways to do their own thing. Smart phones kicked it up another notch.
And for a personal anecdote, I have two daughters, both recent college grads, who were voracious readers. We had to fight with on as a young teen to not fill her suitcase with only books when we took a family vacation. Now days they watch a lot of videos, Netflix and one creates pretty elaborate SIMS structures. But rarely do I see them read a book. Occasionally one or two nonfiction, usually about how capitalism is destroying the world, but I don’t know of a single novel they’ve read in the last couple years.
I have two teenagers and the amount of entertainment that they can access without opening a book overwhelms any desire to open a book. When I was their age, I read every book in our house, the newspaper, any magazines and would bring stuff home from the library every chance I got. Our TV had four channels and most of the programming was awful (have you seen a rerun of the 'Love Boat'?...total crap). IDK if I loved reading, but I was bored without it.
Anyway what's responsible?---Smartphones (yes!), youtube (yes!), online content (yes! except jabberwocking, sorry kevin, teens don't like graphs), snapchat (yes!), facebook (no!, that's for Grandma), tiktok (yes!) and the list goes on...Interestingly, they both read in middle school all of the popular tween books (Potter series, Percy Jackson, etc.) but have shown no interest in reading more adult books. So I guess the answer is to make teens bored and they will read more.
I would guess the upward bounce was caused by Harry Potter magic.
I notice that this chart does not measure *reading* it measures *book reading*. Not all reading is reading books. I rarely read books but am a voracious reader of articles. "Time spent reading for pleasure" would be a better measure.
These days almost every book I read is done via phone or tablet. My eyes, you know. Still haven't found the right reader for textbooks though.
Twenge blames "screens", but Kevin and many commenters seem to think that "screens" means "smartphones". But all kinds of electronic things with screens including TVs, computers, gaming consoles and finally smartphones have obviously taken the place of reading books. The kinds of entertainment available on all these things has increased.
Another confounder is the limited storage capacity of both the books themselves and shelfspace. I don't think I'm at all unique in this regard and in this blogspace: Raise your hand if you have at least two decades of post-college work history. Raise your hand if you're an avid reader. Raise your hand if you have/had a serious jones for books, books that couldn't be gotten fast enough or at all through interlibrary loans. Finally, raise your hand if you have at least four bookcases (say, um 60 feet or thereabouts?) and that's a fraction of what you have in storage.
Yeah, thought so: I'm very much afraid that books-on-paper are a relic of the past and you can't give them away. Your own children would sell any book that would sell and tip the rest into the wast bin.
It's not just books though, and what was written above is based on some profound miscategoriizations: You also can berely give traditonal Ethan-Allen style furniture away, let alone sell it. I'm told it's because they take up too much room. The same for the tea and silver coffee sets, nice china, a plate or bowl for every occasion, anythin that takes up more space than it should ... like this post forinstance. Sorry for going on, I'm currently updating my will and I have a lot to chew on.
To be continued ...
In short, not only did smart phones, laptops, etc. have a profound effect on office/workspace, they've also had (what is to me) a profound effect on life style and the modern aesthetic. I doubt I'll live to see the completion of the current lifecycle of thrngs, but I've become aware that -- surprise! -- Things Have Changed since my youth. And also of course the reason I've barely noticed is -- again, surprise -- other old people.
What I'm trying to say is, we don't really have the stats to argue about and our age blinds us to confounders.
OK, Thumbs Up to everyone!
One addition: some years ago (but after I was a kid) a half hour of SSR (Sustained Silent Reading) became a thing in middle schools I worked in. Partly it was a way to get kids calmed down after lunch or recess. Can kids today cope with that?
When I'm in the local Brooklyn public library I often see little kids - some small enough to be with a parent - checking out tons of kid's books. They obviously love reading books even with all the other distractions. My neighborhood, particularly with people of parent/kid age, is mostly Asian though.
"There was an odd interruption between 2002-2009. Why?"
The Harry Potter series came out between 1997-2007.
(Honestly, I'd be surprised if that was it, but it was the first thing that popped in my head.)
Kevin's chronology doesn't match my recollection. the iPhone was released in 2007. before that, phones supported web apps since the 3G release. 3GPP had all ip architecture mapped in 1999 already.
Maybe the Harry Potter series was responsible for the pause. The first book was released in 1997 and it seemed like everyone under the age of 20 was reading them.
Has anyone pointed out how remarkable it is that 60% of high school seniors have read even ONE book for pleasure!!
Why are we obsessed with allocating causation among smartphones, the internet, or whatever other development we might want to blame when the effect is so much more important than the cause? Reading and writing are the basis of thinking; perhaps watching and creating require thinking, too--well, at least creating does, although probably not at a level that will keep us ahead of the machines using the vast corpus of our existing writing.
Here is Claude 3 Opus Pro's take on the dangers of the decline in human reading (Claude is obviously a pretty good reader):
"Based on the most recent data available as of August 2023, there is strong evidence that individuals with lower literacy and reading proficiency tend to have poorer life outcomes compared to stronger readers. Some key statistics include:
- The PIAAC 2022 results show that adults scoring at the lowest levels of literacy proficiency are more likely to be unemployed. The employment rate for U.S. adults at Level 1 or below in literacy is only 64%, compared to 85% for those at Level 4/5.
- A 2021 Gallup study found that adult readers with low literacy were 3 times more likely to have low incomes compared to proficient readers. 43% of low literacy readers had annual household incomes under $30,000, vs. just 14% of strong readers.
- 2022 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that median weekly earnings rise with each level of educational attainment, which correlates with literacy. Those with less than a high school diploma earned a median of $619 per week, compared to $1,547 for those with an advanced degree.
- An analysis of 2022 NAEP reading scores revealed that 12th grade students who didn't meet the NAEP Proficient reading benchmark were 6 times more likely to drop out of high school than Proficient readers.
- The National Institutes of Health reported in 2022 that low literacy is associated with poorer health outcomes, including higher rates of hospitalization and less frequent use of preventive services. Low literacy adults had 43% higher healthcare costs.
- A 2023 study by the Prison Policy Initiative found that 68% of state prison inmates had literacy levels too low to complete a job application, and prisoners who receive literacy training have 16% lower recidivism rates.
So in summary, recent data continues to show significant gaps in employment, income, education, health and other key life outcomes between strong and struggling readers. Literacy remains a powerful predictor of life success and difficulties. Let me know if you need me to expand on or clarify any of these statistics!"
(To make sure Claude wasn't hallucinating, I ran its data past GPT4, which found no mistakes.)
Also from Claude (I had it rewrite a paragraph I drafted on this topic):
"As artificial intelligence advances, it is crucial that we harness smartphone technology to help users acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to lead meaningful and purposeful lives. Reports suggest that Claude, an AI system, scored 100 on an IQ test, potentially surpassing the intelligence of half the human population. Moreover, large language models can process and absorb information far more rapidly than any human can. Consequently, given our limited time and attention span, it is more critical than ever that we carefully curate the content we consume, whether through reading, watching, or listening. By making intentional choices about the information we engage with, we can maximize our potential for personal growth and development in an era where artificial intelligence is poised to overtake natural intelligence."
The point about 2009 vs 2012 is BS. Between 2002 and 2012 the trend was basically flat, with some minor ups and downs that are more likely the result of sampling error than anything else (the fake precision of the chart, with no error bars, is really misleading). Only in 2012 does the trend turn sharply upward, to a degree outside of any sampling issues.
I’ll add that as a parent of two teens, the conclusion jives with my personal experience. Books are “boring” in a way that youtube isn’t.
Two words about that last sentence: Marshall McLuhan.