The End of Reading

I was surprised to read Andrew Sullivan’s post on the decline in literacy in the West. No, not literally – everyone still goes to school and learns to read and write. It is the amount and quality of reading they read that has fallen, and the attendant consequences are becoming increasingly visible.

 

It started with the Internet. As bandwidth speeds increased, sites began to have more pictures and then more videos.

“Visuals carry more visceral punch than sentences and paragraphs, and require less reason and effort.”

Ominously:

“The Internet, in other words, held the power to return us to the pre-literate culture from which a majority of humans had emerged only a few hundred years ago: images, symbols, memes.”

 

Today:

“Deep reading is in free-fall everywhere in the developing world, as the smartphone has hijacked our brains. Professors at even elite colleges are finding their students have lost the ability to read at length and in depth; talking has replaced reading; images have replaced ideas; engagement has supplanted reflection; and the various cognitive skills that reading once conferred to the masses since the printing press are fast atrophying.”

 

AI, esp. the likes of ChatGPT, have added fuel to this trend:

“College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point,” one student said. “Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate,” a professor echoed.”

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James Marriott writes of the impact of the printing (reading) revolution:

“Print changed how people thought. The world of print is orderly, logical and rational. In books, knowledge is classified, comprehended, connected and put in its place. Books make arguments, propose theses, develop ideas.”

 

As Walter Ong said, certain kinds of complex and logical thinking simply cannot be achieved without reading and writing.

“It is virtually impossible to develop a detailed and logical argument in spontaneous speech — you would get lost, lose your thread, contradict yourself, and confuse your audience trying to re-phrase ineptly expressed points.”

Conversely:

“To properly understand the book, you have to be able to have it in front of you so you can re-read bits you don’t understand, check logical connections and meditate on important passages until you really take them in. This kind of advanced thinking is inseparable from reading and writing.”

 

What are we at risk of losing when people becomes incapable of reading?

“The entire intellectual infrastructure of modern civilisation depends on the kinds of complex thinking inseparable from reading and writing: serious historical writing, scientific theorems, detailed policy proposals and the kinds of rigorous and dispassionate political debate conducted in books and magazines. These forms of advanced thought provide the intellectual underpinnings of modernity.”

 

In America, you can see all this playing out at warp speed.

“If the literate world was characterised by complexity and innovation, the post literate world is characterised by simplicity, ignorance and stagnation.”

Social media algorithms ensure you see more and more of what you already believe in, no contradictory views ever reach you. The Other Guy is always evil/stupid, none of the flaws and excesses of Your Guy ever reach your feed.

“Dumb rage and partisan thinking keep us glued to our phones.”

And so:

“The screen revolution will shape our politics as profoundly as the reading revolution of the eighteenth century.”

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These lines by Neil Postman sum all of it perfectly:

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book because there would be no one who wanted to read one.”