Is
we are what we read as good a truism as we are what we eat the question of
the moment. We have a tendency to read or watch stuff that is familiar and
leaves us in our comfort zone. From reading we naturally take to writing stuff
that reflects our views – how could we expect any less?
Twenge
et al in this past weeks issue of the
Public Library of Science have analyzed American book published in the past 50
years to see if we have become more self centered (1). They used the crowd out
there in the form of Amazon Mechanical Turk with Google Books Ngram phrase
service to measure the changes in words and phrases over their half century.
The
big question was what words and phrases needed measuring? These were determined
by consensus as words that represent individualism or communal concepts. A
similar task was done with the identification of the most popular
individualistic phrases.
Millions
of books and a great deal of data mining later, the results are in. On
tenterhooks? Well, not to beat about the bush and hang this out unnecessarily,
the books have it, the books in American English show an increasing use of
words and phrases indicating self interest over the past fifty years.
This
hasn’t been a huge change, but the stats indicate a significant one. We should
note right off that 87% of the books were works of non-fiction. One could
expect self-help books to have a lot of “self” in them and a lot of
autobiographies to have a lot of “I.”
Another
factor that the authors explore is the possibility of the phraseology of
current speech being different, but of course, if we are more about “me” today
we would say me and I more.
I
am still not sure if we are what we read? The question of which came first –
the reader or the book – is a big chicken and egg problem.
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0040181
