1. As the title of your post says, the NEA does NOT know why reading is on the rise. Gioia does, though: according to his quote, it’s because of all of those “programs”, including Big Read.

2. Has anyone proved the CAUSATION of this change? We know reading is on the rise, and that there are a lot of programs out there, but are the programs really the cause?

3. The comment “Cultural decline is not inevitable” comes out of left field. First of all, as other people have noted, who said it WAS inevitable? Further, though, HOW is “Cultural decline” defined, and WHO gets to define it?

4. Is “Cultural decline” really the same thing as “media consumption”, specifically print media? I’d suggest, at the very least, that there’s an enormous amount of “culture” that does NOT have to do with print media, whether paper or electronic — symphonies, opera, the plastic arts. Gioia’s view seems very limited, in this context.

If anyone’s interested, there’s a wonderful interview with Clay Shirky on the Columbia Journalism Review site, here: http://www.cjr.org/overload/interview_with_clay_shirky_par.php?page=all

A lot of the topics he addresses are particularly relevant to this post.