22
votes
People go to the library twice as often as they go to the movies
Link information
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- Title
- In U.S., Library Visits Outpaced Trips to Movies in 2019
- Authors
- Gallup, Inc.
- Published
- Jan 24 2020
- Word count
- 971 words
The Republican Party is largely a party of rural and outer/sprawling suburban voters. They don’t have access to as many civic amenities as the urban and inner-ring suburban voters who vote Democratic do.
Most of the communitarian aspects of life in Republican communities are centered around churches and school districts instead of libraries and community centers.
I think that's a good point. Libraries are few and far between in rural areas -- which becomes a cause for a set of attitudes, as well as an affect.
There's a whole bunch of correlations I'd love to see regarding this data!
I used to do research on urban economic policy and access to libraries is a huge predictor of social mobility and life expectancy. I never saw the numbers on how it works out in rural areas, but I've had some friends who worked on food security in Native American reservations and the effects are even bigger there. Reservations have a lot of challenges beyond the normal rural problems, though, so it's hard to say how generalizable those findings are.
I actually would hypothesize that there are distinct effects between rural areas in suburban/exurban ones. Rural ones it's actually logistically difficult to get libraries, but people try to make do. They will set up little lending libraries in churches, doctors offices, the local Tractor Supply, or other places where people hang out. Suburban areas is a bit different and I think some part of the culture in some outer suburbs kind of prides itself on not interacting with community in any way, which creates a feedback loop of being not learning how any a kind of communal service might work and being reflexively suspicious of all of them because all they see is junk on TV.
I see a lot of this around the internet regarding opinions of transit. Tons of peoples' only experience of public transit seems to be whatever underfunded local transit system that has no coverage and 2 hour lead times. They can't actually imagine how life works when you can get basically anywhere you need to go by bus.
Sometimes I wonder if this is the real core pillar of conservatism. It's well known that a large part of Republicans primarily work blue-collar jobs like construction work, are old,rural/suburban and usually lack a college degree. This makes them incredibly easy to mislead, since their only source of information will likely be cable news, and if it ends up being fox, they won't really see anything wrong with it. This could also explain why they are isolationists/nationalists, because if free trade continues, cheaper offshore labor and automation will (is) replace (ing) their jobs and so the US needs to import less and accept less immigrants so they can keep working their jobs even if it hurts the economy, an effect compounded by the fact that many of these people are in said rurally areas, and so can't find a job that easily and also why they stress their 'values' so much, because they really don't have anywhere else to go to, meaning their church might be the only thing that separates them from cynicism and apathy.
I think this might be getting the causality backwards. The proportion of people in society who are marginally engaged and easy to mislead (let's call them "easy marks") is probably more-or-less fixed. What the conservative movement is good at is pushing out narrative framings that appeal to these sorts of people. It's not inherent to the ideology, they're just good at marketing it this way.
Leftist movements can do this too. Bernie Sanders' and Tulsi Gabbard's campaigns are also very good at driving engagement from marginally engaged and easily duped people. It's mostly just the centrist Democrats who spend their time wringing their hands about what kinds of supporters they have. I'd say it's that inclination to make sure that your leadership only lead a host of just and virtuous angels that makes Democrats have a hard time attracting the support of the "easy marks" moreso than any feature of their agenda or ideology.
There is a moral question about whether it's good to have a political system that hinges so heavily on how well you can manipulate a bunch of marks, but that's a separate conversation about the design of the media/political system. It's a tough trade-off to navigate. If you put up guard-rails to protect that marks, those guard-rails also get used to create a narrow range of "acceptable" political opinion that excludes outside voices. This was the case in the 50s when "decency standards" went hand-in-hand with the Fairness Doctrine to ensure not just political balance, but also restrictive imagery about what was allowable to show in mass media. But when you take the guard-rails down, suddenly it's open season on marks for grifters and con-men. Some of those might be "grifting for justice" (Sanders), while others are just grifting (Trump), but that's the system we have.
Did you know the library has PS4 games? Like, good ones?
Also movies! And computers! And comics, and games, and sometimes telescopes, and...
Just refreshed my card, and Hoopla has made me a comic book fan again.
I think the income breakdown explained a lot of the excess library visits. In fact, I'd already thought of posting a topic today asking about what people do for "no-money fun"!
I know I'd go to the library all the time when I was too broke to do anything else. I see many young families there on current visits, and it's certainly less costly than the $100 you can easily spend for a family trip to a movie theater these days.
There's an issue I see with the assumption in the poll that library visits belong with forms of entertainment. I go for quiet study or work-dedicated time, and I've seen many others do the same. There are certainly homeless or poorly sheltered people who are there to stay warm during winter. People who may not have their own computers or Internet service spend their time looking for jobs, filling out online forms, and otherwise getting access to what's become a necessity of modern life. There are spaces for community meetings and educational events, children's activities, and volunteer opportunities. It's not just a place to get novels, games, music, and movies.
Libraries are amazing. From services like Zinio (magazines), PressReader (newspapers), Lynda.com, Libby/Overdrive (ebooks and audiobooks), IndieFlix and the other streaming services, 3D printers, etc etc --- the library rules.
I forgot about the library until I wanted to rip Seinfeld with the commentary tracks. While I was getting my card replaced, the girl working the desk started laying out all of the amazing amenities.
The nice thing about Overdrive and a lot of other services is that they give you a DRM-free file. You can check the book out, make your copy, then check it back in right away. Is this how they intended it to work? No. But it's silly that there'd be a queue to read an epub.