Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history.
Posted by TrixoftheTrade
Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history.
Posted by TrixoftheTrade
7 Comments
**Submission Statement:** The article makes the case for America becoming a *post-literate*, not an *illiterate* society. The volume of text consumed has only increased, but the stamina and intellectual rigor required for long, complex reading and understanding is waning. It’s seen as part of a transition from an oral to a written to a digital form of literacy, where the excerpt (typically in the form a short-form video or headline article) is the primary medium of information exchange. Books and longform writing still have a place, but there are increasingly seen as a niche subculture than a critical part of public life. And with AI, this process is going to accelerate, as the synthesis of ideas in to text form is delegated from the physical mind to the artificial.
Anyone have a tldr for the article?
Ironically since leaving University I read more physical books than ever, but it’s because the screens are so destructive I know I have to force myself away from them, with nothing to do I’ll scroll endlessly.
I started reading this one during an ADD moment at work this morning, got halfway through, and then felt shame about wanting to tap out halfway through the article about how Americans can’t read anymore. Had to go back to it over lunch lol
> This run of scholarship would not last. By 400 C.E., the library had disappeared. Many scholars regard its destruction as the greatest loss of knowledge in history and the beginning of the Dark Ages. Historians have spent centuries parsing fragments of papyrus in an effort to understand what went wrong.
I am fairly sure no real historian thinks that these days about alexandria library
Yeah, podcasts, youtube and other sources made it hard to justify. If I have access to real-world academics commenting on current affairs using lens of their field, why would I read a book?
[https://www.youtube.com/@Gametheory101/videos](https://www.youtube.com/@Gametheory101/videos)
One example
“Reading has come to seem extraneous [even to some of the best-educated members of society](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/). Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, told me she’d spoken with a student who was struggling to read a book written in Old English. The culprit: Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel [*A Clockwork Orange*](https://bookshop.org/a/12476/9780393341768).” (The student used ChatGPT to “translate” the book into easier language.)
I like the idea that every book written in the 1900s will soon have a ‘No Fear Shakespeare’ style study manual