It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history
theatlantic.com43 points by 0in 3 hours ago
43 points by 0in 3 hours ago
The headline absolves me from reading the article. My work here is done.
It's been my impression that classic literature is going the same way as painting and other forms of high art.
It was certainly a great display of human intellectual prowess and artistic capacity in bygone times when the world moved at a much slower pace, but who has the time and the energy to read a long novel today?
Even cinema is dying and nobody seems to care that much.
Many people still read novels. I live in NYC and see numerous people read books and Kindles every day on the train.
> Even cinema is dying and nobody seems to care that much
It's being replaced with an even longer form of visual media; the mini series. Stories that used to be told in an hour and a half are now being told in 8 hour-long segments
which could, for the most part, be boiled down to 2 hour-long segments. so much is stretched out for the sake of padding. the good news is that scrubbing through shows is possible — it is usually painfully clear when to stop & watch at double speed — & time otherwise lost is recovered in this way.
> Even cinema is dying and nobody seems to care that much.
Cinema is dying from mostly self-inflicted wounds though. They keep making movies (or re-making movies) with bad writing, bad stories, and unrealistic character development arcs that not many people want to watch.
Good movies have been rewarded in theatres. Top Gun: Maverick, Obsession, Project Hail Mary, etc. all had great box office sales when other movies around them flopped.
Top Gun: Maverick, Obsession, Project Hail Mary
Cinema traditionally has meant movies like, À bout de souffle and Citizen Kane.
Energy is more difficult to gauge, but the average American has over 5 hours of leisure time daily. When there was more of a time crunch in the past, Americans read more.
> who has the time and the energy to read a long novel today?
Anyone who has the time and energy to spend on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, or for that matter, anyone who has the time and energy to spend watching TV.
This is not a fair comparison:
> Only 38 percent read a novel or short story... The proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023.... Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet.
It takes much less time to place a bet than to read a novel/short story. Likewise, reading for pleasure "on any given day" is a totally different measure than "placed a bet last year".
Your selective quote left off the part that made it a fairer comparison. "Only 38 read a novel or short story" was a follow-up to "fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022." That's a year-long stat.
We were in an age of reading? I gave up about 10 years ago on people as readers. I have recommended so many books and articles to software people over the years and it's honestly depressing how many people have told me they don't like to read.
Like...you're a programmer? And you don't like to read? I assumed that people who enjoy software would be into intellectual stimulation but I've learned that this is wrong. More what seems to be the case is people have enjoyed coding as a kind of video game.
But this generalizes to the general population too. Marshall McLuhan's message remains a very important medium.
Given that I have mental bandwidth available, I enjoy a mentally stimulating read (though, the definition of that surely varies between individuals), but people do indeed come into programming from a variety of different angles.
What initially attracted me to programming was the ability it gives one to create. As a kid the idea that a “regular” person like myself could make computer programs — and not just simple CLI toys but full on lovingly crafted, end user friendly complex GUI applications — blew my mind. Programs weren’t like every nearly every other product which only ever came out of some factory that nobody saw themselves.
As such my interest in programming comes with a slant towards practical usability. I don’t do well with abstract concepts without a rock solid grounding real world use case, even though those are intellectual candy for a few subgroups of programmers.
> "I assumed that people who enjoy software would be into intellectual stimulation but I've learned that this is wrong."
It was truer in the 1980s-1990s, when programming was not a prestigious or high paying job and computers were much cruder and required much more skill to get adequate performance from them. Generally, aspiring hackers were very well read people.
There were, of course, corporate programmers doing business programming back then too but they weren't considered hackers and wouldn't even have wanted themselves to be considered hackers.
I gave up on reading because the authors want to spend a considerable number of pages telling me the color of the buttons on an imaginary character's outfit. They have no such right to waste my time with (or even worse, charge me money for) that.
No one says "I gave up on eating because restaurants kept serving me spicy food". You just order different food. A short story that's a couple pages long isn't going to waste them describing the color of buttons, and not every novelist is Tolkien.
Then maybe you should not read prose. It is about conveying an experience, a story. You might have simply picked a bad author. Personally, I prefer long reads. I understand that some people might not enjoy that style of storytelling, but saying “give up reading” overall is a shame. Try something like Warhammer 40k novels. They are simple, entertaining, and split into shorter parts. What you are describing does not happen there.
> Adult-literacy scores have also dropped: Nearly 30 percent of American adults cannot paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text. In 2017, that number was less than 20 percent.
Shrinking the passages on the SAT from full-page to a few sentences will exacerbate this trend.
I don't think I learned this skill from the sat.
Doing well on the SAT used to require some measure of reading stamina. It no longer does, so some students who would have been prompted to increase their stamina in order to do well on the SAT will no longer feel that pressure.
I think the point is that the design of the SAT influences what is taught in schools.
If the SAT stops testing the ability to deal with multi-paragraph text, then schools will spend less time teaching those skills.
The implication is not that people learned this skill from the SAT, but rather that not requiring it to score well on the SAT further lowers the baseline.
I was somewhat surprised to find out that illiteracy does not mean that someone needs to be a total (or near) analphabet - but rather that it is a broad and wide spectrum. I always imagined that “teenagers can’t read” meant that they couldn’t read at all, but then I never met such a person.
Reading is definitely a skill that needs to be learned and maintained. Going from reading a couple of hundred words, to even a longer 30 - 60 min article can be tough if you’re out of shape. Same with writing.
It makes me wonder if literate people can regress to illiterate, for no other reason than lack of reading maintenance.
> It makes me wonder if literate people can regress to illiterate,
Under normal circumstances for a healthy human, I'd say no, at least directly. Not a scientific analysis of course, but I don't feel reading ability in a language that you use regularly is going to degrade that significantly. A very similar problem might come about through a drop in attention span which is definitely an issue for many these days, but I wouldn't count this as a literacy problem: the written letters/words/sentences/… are not the issue and other things are going to be equally impacted.
For a second+ language, especially if you never got to a particularly fluent state, this is probably quite different - for anecdata I did pretty well at Spanish GCSE then never spoke a word the 32 years before starting to relearn last year. But again I would not really call this a general literacy problem.
One place where you do see literacy fall precipitously is due to mental degradation due to common complications of old age, if you have relatives with dementia you will have seen this first hand. While literacy is only part of a massive problem here, reading and writing abilities are things that fall away relatively quickly for many (presumably due to them being relatively complex operations, and needing conscious concentration rather than being autonomic life-preserving functions).
The UNESCO/World Bank literacy rate is basically defined how you thought. But high income countries don't usually report this because literacy by this measure is nearly universal. So they often report at higher thresholds (e.g. how many people can read at a grade 9 level), and news headlines often don't make it clear that this is not the same as the UNESCO definition.
I think that literate people can recover from a period of not reading (books) at all.
I recently had more than a year of not reading any books that was interrupted when I found about The Culture series. I read Use of Weapons and had to read all novels from that universe. After that I tried to find some books similar to them, tried to read some recommended ones (didn't finish any of them) and stopped reading.
In my case reading books is a kind of fever that I get every year or so.
Unfortunately there really aren't any other books like the culture series. You might enjoy Banks' "The Algebraist" and the completely unrelated though similarly named "The Alchemist".
> Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book
I feel like if it took me 20hr to place a bet I'm probably not doing much of that either.
Anecdotal, but my 7y/o loves reading. She's flying through series' and it's getting pricey. I guess she falls in the 16% of people who enjoy it.
Same with my girls (parents of boys seem to mostly have a different experience). Hopefully your kid gets access to digital libraries like Epic or Sora at school. There are also public libraries with ebook lending that can make the habit cheaper.
Whether or not people are reading long or complex works for pleasure - what does this trend do to hiring for jobs which require serious comprehension of long, complex documents?
Will we see in-person-only "interviews", where candidates drop their smart phones & glasses into a box, spend hours reading documents, then have to answer questions about 'em?
For me, reading used to be a way to enjoy part of my free time.
Nowadays is still that but it’s also a way to relax. Even though I don’t have accounts in the main social media networks (instagram, fb, twitter, youtube, etc) I still consume them indirectly on a weekly basis (e.g., i like to watch videoclips in YT, a friend sends me a twitter link, etc). It makes me anxious. I’ve realised that consuming in tiny bits (short videos, ads, stories, tweets, private messages, even going to those stores where everything is under $5) doesn’t suit me well, therefore reading regular books for at least 1-2h per day (plus other activities like working out alone, or going for a walk to a park) is becoming essential for my wellbeing.
I'm afraid I am addicted to short-form video and wish I could go back to spending more of my free-time reading books.
I suggest blocking all platforms that provide short-form video and firmly deciding not to consume such content for a set period of time (e.g., 2 weeks). For me, this is the only way to stop once I fall back into the habit.
Doing this enabled me to spend more time developing and pursuing my own ideas, which is invigorating.
Or even just setting up a timer, I've set up a 20 min timer for myself recently, once it's done I do stick to it, I did get to do some things I've been pushing away, I still get some value out of these but... I get a lot more by not spending an hour on them.
The Brick has been helping me with phone overuse. getbrick.com (I have no association with the company)
On your laptop, route those sites to localhost.
Have you also run into the attention deficit effect of all these short forms of media? Overriding my brain's desire to put a book down after a couple pages is certainly not my favorite pastime.
Part of that might be your book choice.
I found that when trying to rekindle my reading habit, book choice had a big effect. Some books are like vegetables you know you should eat but really don't want to and other books are junk food. Empty calories that you love.
Pick from the latter pile at first and rebuild the muscle.
“A Clockwork Orange” as “Old English” is an amusing anecdote, but it might be worth noting that the novel is written in deliberately nonstandard English mixing in Russian words, so it might be nontrivial to read for people lacking interpolation skills.
In the first paragraph, e.g., there is:
> There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim. Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.
>Americans also get much less of their news through reading than they once did. In 1975, about half of 20-somethings said they read the newspaper every day. Today less than 10 percent do.
Most of the news are not worth reading. I listen to news when eating, and I am very glad I don't have to waste my reading span on this crap.
I refuse to believe that the decline of our education system is some inevitable, intractable problem.
Even as the author points out people are reading more, he continues to conflate books with reading - and not just that but reading specifically physical books (referring to his stats around book ownership).
The reality is that before, you needed to read huge swaths of information to find/know the relevant information. Now you don’t.
The density of useful information I gather from places like Wikipedia, even long form articles is substantially higher than I got reading non-fiction.
I still read books sometimes. It’s a different experience. But it’s only a dumbing down of society, if the things you’re reading are dumb.
I wonder if someone educated in this could provide the neurological benefits of reading, outside of communication. They are numerous, are they not? Memory, neuroplasticity, focus, stress relief—I'm sure there are many other benefits too.
Books have their advantages, but I don't think you necessarily need to read books—in fact, I think books can sometimes be worse. One strength of books is that their structure, starting with the table of contents, trains you in logical composition.
But books also have drawbacks:
1.If there's incorrect information at the time of writing, it becomes fixed at that point.
2.The author's worldview can become overly authoritative, and the messiness of reality is smoothed over for the sake of a neat narrative.
3.Counterexamples and recent debates are often missing.
There are also bad papers that manipulate data to get results, and books are no different. I think books are not bad for introductory maps and mental training.
If you look at programming books from about 10 years ago, they're like historical relics—hard to apply today.
In a rapidly changing world, if you only read books, you'll easily fall behind. Information is pouring in, and books are static media, slow to adapt. Training yourself to read text is important, but it doesn't have to be through books.
Books help build a mental structure of tables of contents and conceptual sequences, but I question whether that structure can only be formed through books.
And realistically, there's a lot of bad content in books too. Self-help books are full of nonsense and scams that exploit people's desire for success. But they're venerated simply because they come in the form of a 'book.'
What we should venerate is not the 'form of a book,' but the 'way of reading that builds a mental framework.'
So I question whether reading only books is really the right approach. I think of this as 'form over substance.' The core is training logical thinking—that doesn't have to come in the form of a book.
I sometimes think it's worth recalling what Socrates said in Plato's Phaedrus: 'Writing is not a remedy for memory, but a means of making it external, leading to forgetfulness.
Once you write something down, you no longer try to remember it within yourself. You come to trust the external symbols.
Writing doesn't give people true wisdom—it only gives them the appearance of wisdom. What matters is not what's written in a book, but what knowledge you internalize. I don't understand the obsession with the form itself.
> Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history.
What dreadful hyperbole. If reading is in decline, it’s just that we are in a crisis of widespread ignorance and broken education system, but good luck navigating through life without knowing how to read.
The anomaly might in fact be that we are regressing in human general intelligence compared to the rest of history.
> good luck navigating through life without knowing how to read
Literacy isn't usually evaluated as a binary thing.
Here's how one organization ranks reading levels:
https://nces.ed.gov/naal/perf_levels.asp
I think the optimists in the article once believed proficiency was inevitable but maybe basic is the best they should hope for now.
I read more than ever, but Substack is taking a sizable share of the pie whereas lit and non-fiction is now my late evening. I don't do the audiobook thing, though I understand that has become increasingly popular yet not really given much credence.
Desire might be theoretically limitless, but time and attention is not. Time I spend reading is time I'm not consuming endless short-form videos. People have gotten hooked on phones and the medium dictates what they consume.
There could be boom and bust cycles for this. Trends lose lustre and people are always looking for ways to signal status/competence. It's probably why "booktok" is a thing.
Oh well we had a good run of 5000 years! See you on the next planet.
i got xelink ereader few months ago and i've been reading a ton more. i have all sorts of kindle but i stopped reading but xelink attached to my phone got me back.
I would love a phone where this is a standard feature. dont care about fancy cameras and stuff.
I’ve flagged the article and I would suggest others do the same. The Atlantic never posts things that satisfy the hacker spirit in any way. It is almost always puffery and melodrama meant to attract clicks and views, but the subject matter itself is trite and not worth discussing on a hacker forum.
Interesting phenomens are often discussed here so I personally do not perceive it as offtopic. Yet as you said, I have the same feeling from this article. Click bait grievance posting.