Is reading fiction more enjoyable than watching films?
Reading works of fiction and watching films are both enjoyable pursuits. Which you prefer is often a matter of taste, as is the case with many things. However, there are some factors, such as your age, which can affect your preference to some extent. Older people tend to read more.
We now live in a very visual age. Over the decades of the twentieth century, television became more and more important in people’s lives and increasingly more sophisticated. Now many of us have television sets with multi-channels and can spend a good deal of time watching the programmes on them. So important is the visual aspect of things nowadays that how someone performs on television can have an effect on whether they become the president or prime minister of a country or not.
Television did not become readily available in countries such as the United Kingdom until the early 1950s and, even then, only reasonably well-off people could afford to have a set. For this reason, people who are over 60 now did not acquire the television habit when they were young, as people do nowadays. The visual influence did not affect them until they were much older, but they were likely to be influenced by print and reading from an early age.
It is not surprising, then, that statistics show that that generation in general tends to be more likely to read a book than later generations are. When the over 60s were young, there were quite a lot of cinemas around and cinema-going was quite popular. However, film techniques were not nearly so advanced and sophisticated then as they are now, and films did not bring about the revolution that television was to bring later.
People who are young today, however, are more likely to enjoy watching a film, although this could well be on television, DVD or video, rather than at a cinema. There is a wide range of films to be viewed on the many television channels available today, and DVDs and videos are widely available for hire. Today’s young people have known nothing other than the visual revolution. When they are not watching films or TV, many of them play computer games, which are also part of the visual revolution.
The home background can also affect whether or not a young person, or indeed a middle-aged person, finds reading enjoyable. Children whose parents read to them when they are very young tend to acquire the habit of reading books for pleasure. Nowadays, many parents are either not readers themselves or so do not appreciate the joy of the bedtime story, or else they are too busy with their hectic lives to read to their children. Instead, they sit them down in front of the television.
Thus, at the older end of the age scale, we have people who are likely to enjoy reading, although they may well also enjoy watching films, while at the younger end of the age scale, we have people who are more likely to enjoy watching films or TV.
In between these two extremes will be people who enjoy either reading or film-watching or both. To some extent, it depends on the mood someone is in. If you are in a private mood, it is good to read a book. If you are feeling sociable, it is good to go to the cinema with a friend. Otherwise, it is a matter of taste and there is no accounting for that!
