. “By asking them to read,” she said, “professors are arbitrarily withholding information from students by forcing them to get it through this more difficult medium.” Holy crap im glad I'm old and...
. “By asking them to read,” she said, “professors are arbitrarily withholding information from students by forcing them to get it through this more difficult medium.”
Holy crap im glad I'm old and probably won't get to see the shambles the world will turn to
someone on the short form social media once told me “literacy is not an unequivocal good” and that pretty much sealed the deal for me on whether or not we as a species were headed to disaster....
someone on the short form social media once told me “literacy is not an unequivocal good” and that pretty much sealed the deal for me on whether or not we as a species were headed to disaster.
I grew up in the 70s and one of my earlier memories is of scouring book shelves in the library, aged about 7 or 8, looking for new or returned Dr. Who? books that I hadn't read. The first book I...
I grew up in the 70s and one of my earlier memories is of scouring book shelves in the library, aged about 7 or 8, looking for new or returned Dr. Who? books that I hadn't read.
The first book I bought for myself with earned money was a hardback copy of Day Of The Triffids I found in a jumble sale.
Mum really encouraged my reading and it's stuck with me all this time.
We had this collection of Jules Verne books at home and when i got through those I went through all the ones available at the library, then basically read all the sci-fi shelves. I have this vivid...
We had this collection of Jules Verne books at home and when i got through those I went through all the ones available at the library, then basically read all the sci-fi shelves. I have this vivid memory of a teacher yelling at me to close the book and pay attention to her when I was around 15.
I've still not kicked the habit of staying up too late reading :D
I consider myself a pretty serious reader, consuming 30-50 books of serious literature every year. I have a 3500 volume library in my house. Reading for me has been a way to try and understand...
I consider myself a pretty serious reader, consuming 30-50 books of serious literature every year. I have a 3500 volume library in my house. Reading for me has been a way to try and understand myself and the people/world around me. I can't think of any better way to really understand humanity than these deep works of literature. Literature focuses on the human condition, it allows you to view so many different people and different ways of life and does so in a very sympathetic manner so you really get a deep feel for these characters and their situations. My lifetime of reading has added so much value to my life I can't even picture me being who I am today without those great works. I still have so many more books to read, and therefore so much more growing to do as a person.
I've also discovered that I am a rare soul in this quest for understanding humanity through literature. Even among other readers I run into almost all are consuming genre fiction for 'entertainment' purposes. That's fine, people will pass their time as they see fit, so I'm not surprised that reading in general is vanishing. Why take 10+ hours to consume a book for entertainment instead of watching a movie or consuming shorts, people are just looking to pass the time anyways. I've found a lot of people who are off put about thinking any deeper about life and the people around them, they actively search for ways to block that stuff out by consuming cheap, easy media that is nothing but a distraction from their own thoughts.
People are different. Some will try and seek out the deeper meanings of life and some will not. I hate to say one outlook is better than the other, each has to find their own path in life. I know what has worked for me and I'm glad I was able to find real meaning in my life through this literature. So I always advocate for deep reading of serious literature, but I've never once convinced someone else to do so. :)
I'm particularly tired of think pieces looking at the mess that is education (globally, nobody is utilizing the state of the art in pedagogy at large institutions) failing when beaten by the waves...
I'm particularly tired of think pieces looking at the mess that is education (globally, nobody is utilizing the state of the art in pedagogy at large institutions) failing when beaten by the waves of social media addiction and deciding this is an evolution for humanity. This isn't post-literacy, it's our society failing and us all willfully converting ourselves into dependent hostages a la North Korea.
Well, so the author seems to mostly agree with this, but does do a good job, imo, of pointing out that while we're living through this, it seems like a doom, but it's much like how society seemed...
Well, so the author seems to mostly agree with this, but does do a good job, imo, of pointing out that while we're living through this, it seems like a doom, but it's much like how society seemed doomed when the TV was invented or the printing press, etc. I do tend to agree that things are bad right now and social media is a far different beast than prior inventions, since it's always in our pocket and we can't be intentional about consuming it (it's just always there), but I did find the points she made to be interesting. I do wonder in 50 years how we'll look back on this decade and she did also bring up that there's been some cited pushback with teachers banning phones, starting to assign reading again, etc.
I personally do think that as a whole, our attention spans are waning as we have our lives filled with either mindless content or propaganda, so I generally agree with you, but I don't necessarily agree that the author of this piece was trying to dance around how much of a mess things are. She was labeling the current state as post-literacy to demonstrated that it isn't that people are incapable of reading words, it's that people are becoming unable to understand deeper meaning. I could definitely see the argument that that's illiteracy, but I don't think the author or the piece was trying to sweep under the rug the state of education and society.
To me, post-literacy as a state implies it does something. Preliterate culture existed. I'm rather unconvinced that our culture will survive once the average person's education is as simple as...
To me, post-literacy as a state implies it does something. Preliterate culture existed. I'm rather unconvinced that our culture will survive once the average person's education is as simple as being hitched onto the hedonic treadmill of algorithmic conditioning.
I did leave another comment after replying to yours with some of my other thoughts. To me, the bigger red flag isn't necessarily that consumption of novels or newspapers is going down, it's that...
I did leave another comment after replying to yours with some of my other thoughts. To me, the bigger red flag isn't necessarily that consumption of novels or newspapers is going down, it's that many people I meet these days seem to dedicate very little time to hobbies in general. I think having a hobby like painting, crocheting, board games, or even working on cars, can lead you down some of the paths you need to learn critical thinking skills. You're solving "puzzles", you're learning how to research, etc.
That said, I say this as a person who did receive a good education and for the people coming through our poorer (as in lower quality) education systems these days, I guess I don't have the context to know if they even know how to start a hobby or if getting into a hobby will actually help them develop these literacy skills or if I'm just assuming it will because that's how I go through life.
I do absolutely 1000% agree that our education system is declining, but I guess what I'm getting at is that we don't necessarily need to assign novels in english class to get people educated and that we have other routes to do that than books, but god damn education is declining for sure right now.
I don't disagree with you, I think I'm just saying I could see a world where "post-literacy" in the context of "post-everyone-reads-books" isn't necessarily a doom, as long as people generally still learn critical thinking skills through other routes, but that definitely isn't happening en masse yet (and I do consider that the forces that fund our education (or cut funding, rather), also would prefer if we don't consume art or be creative in any fashion).
Oh, absolutely. That's why the framing ticks me off. If we legitimately were freeing ourselves from the oppression of written language, it'd be great. If we were training kids to think...
Oh, absolutely. That's why the framing ticks me off. If we legitimately were freeing ourselves from the oppression of written language, it'd be great. If we were training kids to think multidimensionally and immanently, the loss of artistic appreciation for a form I love would be a worthwhile trade. Instead, people are being trained to fear indeterminacy, not to think, and are being left to follow their pleasure centers into the human mill. That's social collapse, not change.
I think hobbies and education are a chicken-egg problem. If you don't have a good education, you lack the fundamentals to get started in a lot of hobbies. And education isn't just the base...
I think hobbies and education are a chicken-egg problem. If you don't have a good education, you lack the fundamentals to get started in a lot of hobbies. And education isn't just the base fundamentals like math, science, and english -- it fans outwards into everything, from how to properly measure, to the science of lifting, to pacing yourself during cardiovascular work, to debugging where your plumbing system has a loose connection.
Books are one of the cheapest ways to extend your existing skillset, but if you don't have a good foundation to start from, you're still screwed. I would struggle to build a deck, for instance, but my dad figured out how to build one 30 years ago from a single book at his local library. How? His parents taught him fundamentals like digging postholes and assembling fences, and he extended his knowledge. Meanwhile he never taught me those fundamentals, so I'll need to cover the fundamentals before I start building new walls in my basement.
There is some hope, though. How-to videos lower the bar dramatically for a lot of mechanical tasks. I figured out basically all of my bicycle repair and maintenance skills from Park Tool's excellent video series (plus Sheldon Brown's website). But I fear as a society we're losing a lot of fundamental skills between generations that will take a lot of effort to reclaim.
I love the points you make here and it does make me realize that I had the privilege of learning life skills while growing up and while many people still do, some may not due to being tablet kids,...
I love the points you make here and it does make me realize that I had the privilege of learning life skills while growing up and while many people still do, some may not due to being tablet kids, a worse education system, or whatever.
For example, I judge people that can't change a wheel on their car (to be fair, it's a jack + 5 lug nuts, it REALLY is not that hard), but I realize that I grew up fixing things, so it was easy for me to learn to work on cars.
I've never built a deck and don't know the first thing about it, but because I grew up being taught how to learn and research and to be comfortable with not knowing things, I'm certain that I could easily find out how to build one if I needed to.
And it's easy for me to say that something like that is easy for me and to not get why others can't research, don't have hobbies, etc., but like you pointed out, I could see how someone born in 2006 might be more helpless at age 20 than I was, due to a higher chance of not learning how to think in the first place. It's not that changing a wheel on a car is difficult, it's that many people haven't been taught how to be curious, how to learn, or how to research, so they might just "shut down" when on the side of the road instead of typing into youtube "how to change car wheel".
I guess I'm also doing a lot of assuming and prescribing based on my own personal experiences. Most of my friends are well educated, know how to problem solve, etc., because as a person like that, I don't really seek out friends who are completely dissimilar to me. It's easy for me to make assumptions on what's causing the problems we're seeing when I don't really directly interact with the kinds of people I'm describing (and I definitely don't want to come off as blaming people for being lazy or dumb when it's mostly systems that failed them and not the other way around).
I'm kind of rambling now, but I find this subject extremely deep and fascinating and there's still so much for me to think about and learn.
I didn't grow up particularly well off, but through the efforts of my parents I got a decent education and am living comfortably now, though certainly not in luxury. My main hobby is reading,...
I didn't grow up particularly well off, but through the efforts of my parents I got a decent education and am living comfortably now, though certainly not in luxury.
My main hobby is reading, though I'm also a big fan of 3d printing and laser cutting, though I haven't dedicated the time to be more than a pure amateur at making my own designs.
I see so many people of a similar age to me just... Not do anything with their free time. Hours upon hours of scrolling or seeing the same news over and over x.x
On the other hand, I read on my phone a lot, so I'm sure someone more physically active would say the same about me
It is still possible to be intentional about not consuming it. In the case it is absolutely needed for some reason only accessing it from desktop is also possible. I don't think I would last long...
and social media is a far different beast than prior inventions, since it's always in our pocket and we can't be intentional about consuming it (it's just always there)
It is still possible to be intentional about not consuming it. In the case it is absolutely needed for some reason only accessing it from desktop is also possible.
I don't think I would last long about consuming digital crack intentionaly so I avoid it instead.
You can be, but it's oh so hard these days. I don't use twitter, tiktok, bluesky, instagram, etc., but I still find myself unable to avoid reddit and discord. With discord, I tell myself it's...
You can be, but it's oh so hard these days. I don't use twitter, tiktok, bluesky, instagram, etc., but I still find myself unable to avoid reddit and discord. With discord, I tell myself it's because that's where my friends are (including my IRL friends), but it's also social media and in some cases, I'm choosing to interact with the people in my phone over the world in front of me.
I could get a dumb phone, but it's a trade off, not an upgrade. I'm then losing access to certain functions like maybe maps and the ability to look something up if it's urgent or I'm having an emergency.
I guess what I'm getting at is that I think I'm about as intentional as I reasonably could be (a dumb phone is not possible for me because of my work), and even I feel like I consume too much social media. I can't imagine being on tiktok or insta all day. I also avoid pulling out my phone instinctively when I'm in a queue or in a waiting room, so I'm trying to be intentional there, and I still feel like I'm on social too much.
It's pretty interesting to see this conclusion based on this question. I'll also add that the illiterate peasants were more critical, as they refused to take Luria at his word that "In the Far...
[Neuropsychologist Alexander] Luria met his subjects at teahouses, in field camps, and around evening fires. There, he posed a number of questions designed to elucidate differences in how illiterate and literate peasants thought. Luria told the peasants: “In the Far North, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the Far North.” He then asked them the color of bears in Novaya Zemlya. The literate peasants were able to complete the syllogism. But the illiterate ones refused to try, explaining that they had never been to the north and thus couldn’t answer. Achieving literacy seemed to have conveyed an ability to think logically and abstractly, not simply to read words.
It's pretty interesting to see this conclusion based on this question. I'll also add that the illiterate peasants were more critical, as they refused to take Luria at his word that "In the Far North, all bears are white." I'd have to see more about this study to feel confident in this conclusion, but to me it seems smarter to refuse to try, "explaining that they had never been to the north and thus couldn’t answer." I don't think this takes much away from the article's overall point (though I admit I've run out of time to read it and need to finish later), but it's worth thinking about. There's always value in staying grounded and not getting carried away from that by complex thought.
This seems like a good place to recommend an excellent science fiction novel called Mockingbird, by Walter Tevis, who also wrote The Hustler, The Color of Money, The Man Who Fell to Earth, and The...
This seems like a good place to recommend an excellent science fiction novel called Mockingbird, by Walter Tevis, who also wrote The Hustler, The Color of Money, The Man Who Fell to Earth, and The Queen’s Gambit.
It takes place in a future where reading is forgotten. A college professor who teaches Ancient Cinema stumbles on an archive of silent films and realizes that the interstitial images of shapes on a background are pictures of words and proceeds to learn how to read. When he teaches someone else to read, it turns out that reading isn’t just forgotten, it’s illegal.
Of course, the book is really about the culture of anti-intellectualism that was building up steam in America in the late 1970s when the book was written. Also, robots!
I enjoyed reading through this and did like the different facets of this issue that the author explored. I'm personally of the mind that social media, phones in our pockets, and shortening...
I enjoyed reading through this and did like the different facets of this issue that the author explored. I'm personally of the mind that social media, phones in our pockets, and shortening attention spans is a different beast than prior inventions that changed communication, like the early internet, TV, radio, the printing press, novels, etc. However, I am curious how we'll look back in 50 years and if we'll as a society generally think that novels were silly or niche when you could instead listen to an audiobook or read a synopsis.
I personally still enjoy reading, but even I admittedly read far fewer novels nowadays than I used to. I definitely read more words than I used to, considering I code for a living, I read news articles, I'm on discord all the time, etc., but those all seem part of my boring everyday life instead of exploring a world through a piece of fiction and using my imagination (imagination being another topic the author touched on and one facet of why books may be important to us as a species and something that social media lacks).
One thing I thought about while reading this was that reading as a hobby in your own free time seems less important to me than having a hobby to enjoy in your free time. I agree that literacy is becoming a problem, not in that people can't understand words, but that people can't understand the meaning behind them or critically think. That said, one thing I've definitely noticed in society is that many people don't have any creative hobbies at all or they won't talk about them. When I meet new people, it's always "what do you do for a living", not "what do you enjoy doing in your free time?" When we introduce a new hire at work, they talk about their work and their family, but never mention their hobbies, etc.
I don't read as many books as I used to, but I paint, I play board games, I play video games and not just for shallow experiences (though I absolutely still enjoy games like CoD), but I love games with deeper themes, as well. I think one important thing to think about is that if we're seeing a reduction in reading as a society, it wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing as long as people are finding some creative outlet. However, I know many people that just do not do anything creative or ever let their brain run wild. They'll consume TV or movies and not really discuss them after or think about themes. That's the larger problem than specifically reading, I think. Creative outlets that aren't reading can lead people towards those critical thinking patterns that we think we're losing as a society. I get it, it's hard to find the time for a hobby these days when work crushes at least a third of our week and so many other things demand our time. I speak as someone with the privilege of time, since I'm single, have no kids, have a good work life balance, etc., but I do think everybody needs a hobby, especially a non-screen hobby, even if it isn't reading.
That’s pretty normal, historically. There’s a reason there’s a bunch of people named Baker or Smith - it was the norm for your occupation to be your identity in the past. That was your role in...
That said, one thing I've definitely noticed in society is that many people don't have any creative hobbies at all or they won't talk about them.
That’s pretty normal, historically. There’s a reason there’s a bunch of people named Baker or Smith - it was the norm for your occupation to be your identity in the past. That was your role in society, and it consumed all of your time. Only the very wealthy could have things like hobbies.
The fact that leisure time is considered the norm is a modern invention. Perhaps a good one, but it’s not something that we use to have and lost. It’s the other way around.
That's a very good point. In some regards, the wheel will keep turning even if people don't have hobbies, don't read, etc., even if the decline in literacy is seen as a negative (to me, it most...
That's a very good point. In some regards, the wheel will keep turning even if people don't have hobbies, don't read, etc., even if the decline in literacy is seen as a negative (to me, it most certainly is). In some regards, the problems we face are problems humans have always faced. No time for hobbies because we need money to exist and the people that make the rules and run society are greedy and always want more. That's not new to 2026, though it still has aspects that are different than in 1026.
This article and people's comments have given me a lot to think about today, that's for sure.
I always feel bad when I don't finish these articles, but I realized about 25% through that I was not really interested in the rest of the article. Am I part of the problem dot jpeg
I always feel bad when I don't finish these articles, but I realized about 25% through that I was not really interested in the rest of the article. Am I part of the problem dot jpeg
I felt exactly this when I noticed I had glossed over this bit: I chuckled then forced myself to read it.
I felt exactly this when I noticed I had glossed over this bit:
Doctor Zhivago was the best-selling novel of the year, according to Publishers Weekly. Pasternak writes in long, complex sentences: “On that warm gray morning in the mountains, Zhivago felt sorry for the Tsar, was disturbed at the thought that such diffident reserve and shyness could be the essential characteristics of an oppressor, that a man so weak could imprison, hang, or pardon.”
This is why lumping all this in as illiteracy is ridiculous. This is The Atlantic, we all know their conventions, and you probably read up to the start of the quote, contextually realized that you...
This is why lumping all this in as illiteracy is ridiculous. This is The Atlantic, we all know their conventions, and you probably read up to the start of the quote, contextually realized that you didn't need to read it to get the point, and moved on. That is good media literacy, not even necessarily an indicator of low attention span, let alone a sign of poor literacy. But kids are being deprived of being taught how to learn things like that.
Yep. I wonder if it was an intentional "gotcha": the author knew it didn't matter, that it was an overly verbose sentence, and that it would make readers feel bad the way I did (just enough to...
Yep. I wonder if it was an intentional "gotcha": the author knew it didn't matter, that it was an overly verbose sentence, and that it would make readers feel bad the way I did (just enough to think of it as ironic).
Same honestly, though I did come back to re-read the rest. It's not your fault imo. I think it's a fairly weak article that does contains a lot of good points, but also includes these long...
Same honestly, though I did come back to re-read the rest. It's not your fault imo. I think it's a fairly weak article that does contains a lot of good points, but also includes these long litanies of context-less statistics and trite, excessively teleological historical analysis, all without any real propulsive narrative to carry you through it. Like, the author ends the essay with her personal history of growing up loving literature, and then slowly losing the habit of reading to her phone. That's good stuff, I feel the sorrow there, I just wish more of the article had been that, instead of boring, affectless cultural commentary stringing together points I've heard before fifty different times.
I also really rolled my eyes when the author attempted to (dismissively) contrast 20th century classic Doctor Zhigavo with alleged modern YA trash Sunrise on the Reaping -- which I haven't read myself, but which my extremely smart (adult) brother loved for being sharp, political, and beautifully written in its own right -- and maybe the author realized this midway through the paragraph, because when she pulls a quote to demonstrate how bad modern lit is, she suddenly pivots to quoting romantasy instead. The article in my opinion needed at least one more pass to refine its arguments, there's a lot of that kind of rhetorical clumsiness there.
I was fascinated to hear that the author eschews text messages in favor of voice messages for communication with her friends. As someone who hates listening to audio from my phone (unless I've...
I was fascinated to hear that the author eschews text messages in favor of voice messages for communication with her friends. As someone who hates listening to audio from my phone (unless I've already put headphones in to intentionally listen to a podcast or music), yeeesh. I'd never be able to communicate like that! Hell, I get annoyed when people use voice-to-text because it always produces rambly and partially incoherent messages.
My little sister uses the voice messages too, I think it's a younger Zoomer thing maybe? I asked her about it once and she says it's easier then writing a long message when she just wants to...
My little sister uses the voice messages too, I think it's a younger Zoomer thing maybe? I asked her about it once and she says it's easier then writing a long message when she just wants to ramble or work through something emotional which, sure, I guess. I love hearing her voice but it is a bit annoying to have to put in earbuds to continue the conversation. But maybe she finds my multiple-paragraph-long screeds annoying, too.
In education, the solutions are relatively simple. Assign reading to kids, follow them up with reading quizzes that can't be reliably spoofed from SparkNotes (ex: who said this? this excerpt...
In education, the solutions are relatively simple. Assign reading to kids, follow them up with reading quizzes that can't be reliably spoofed from SparkNotes (ex: who said this? this excerpt happened after which of the following plot points? etc). Then fail the kids who can't pass. For some reason we can't converge on the notion that education should educate, and we see the inevitable fruit.
. “By asking them to read,” she said, “professors are arbitrarily withholding information from students by forcing them to get it through this more difficult medium.”
Holy crap im glad I'm old and probably won't get to see the shambles the world will turn to
The natural evolution of “telling people to read is ableist”
someone on the short form social media once told me “literacy is not an unequivocal good” and that pretty much sealed the deal for me on whether or not we as a species were headed to disaster.
edit: fucked by dvorak, again (typo)
Do you mean literacy?
yes, thank you 😔
I grew up in the 70s and one of my earlier memories is of scouring book shelves in the library, aged about 7 or 8, looking for new or returned Dr. Who? books that I hadn't read.
The first book I bought for myself with earned money was a hardback copy of Day Of The Triffids I found in a jumble sale.
Mum really encouraged my reading and it's stuck with me all this time.
We had this collection of Jules Verne books at home and when i got through those I went through all the ones available at the library, then basically read all the sci-fi shelves. I have this vivid memory of a teacher yelling at me to close the book and pay attention to her when I was around 15.
I've still not kicked the habit of staying up too late reading :D
I consider myself a pretty serious reader, consuming 30-50 books of serious literature every year. I have a 3500 volume library in my house. Reading for me has been a way to try and understand myself and the people/world around me. I can't think of any better way to really understand humanity than these deep works of literature. Literature focuses on the human condition, it allows you to view so many different people and different ways of life and does so in a very sympathetic manner so you really get a deep feel for these characters and their situations. My lifetime of reading has added so much value to my life I can't even picture me being who I am today without those great works. I still have so many more books to read, and therefore so much more growing to do as a person.
I've also discovered that I am a rare soul in this quest for understanding humanity through literature. Even among other readers I run into almost all are consuming genre fiction for 'entertainment' purposes. That's fine, people will pass their time as they see fit, so I'm not surprised that reading in general is vanishing. Why take 10+ hours to consume a book for entertainment instead of watching a movie or consuming shorts, people are just looking to pass the time anyways. I've found a lot of people who are off put about thinking any deeper about life and the people around them, they actively search for ways to block that stuff out by consuming cheap, easy media that is nothing but a distraction from their own thoughts.
People are different. Some will try and seek out the deeper meanings of life and some will not. I hate to say one outlook is better than the other, each has to find their own path in life. I know what has worked for me and I'm glad I was able to find real meaning in my life through this literature. So I always advocate for deep reading of serious literature, but I've never once convinced someone else to do so. :)
I'm particularly tired of think pieces looking at the mess that is education (globally, nobody is utilizing the state of the art in pedagogy at large institutions) failing when beaten by the waves of social media addiction and deciding this is an evolution for humanity. This isn't post-literacy, it's our society failing and us all willfully converting ourselves into dependent hostages a la North Korea.
Well, so the author seems to mostly agree with this, but does do a good job, imo, of pointing out that while we're living through this, it seems like a doom, but it's much like how society seemed doomed when the TV was invented or the printing press, etc. I do tend to agree that things are bad right now and social media is a far different beast than prior inventions, since it's always in our pocket and we can't be intentional about consuming it (it's just always there), but I did find the points she made to be interesting. I do wonder in 50 years how we'll look back on this decade and she did also bring up that there's been some cited pushback with teachers banning phones, starting to assign reading again, etc.
I personally do think that as a whole, our attention spans are waning as we have our lives filled with either mindless content or propaganda, so I generally agree with you, but I don't necessarily agree that the author of this piece was trying to dance around how much of a mess things are. She was labeling the current state as post-literacy to demonstrated that it isn't that people are incapable of reading words, it's that people are becoming unable to understand deeper meaning. I could definitely see the argument that that's illiteracy, but I don't think the author or the piece was trying to sweep under the rug the state of education and society.
To me, post-literacy as a state implies it does something. Preliterate culture existed. I'm rather unconvinced that our culture will survive once the average person's education is as simple as being hitched onto the hedonic treadmill of algorithmic conditioning.
I did leave another comment after replying to yours with some of my other thoughts. To me, the bigger red flag isn't necessarily that consumption of novels or newspapers is going down, it's that many people I meet these days seem to dedicate very little time to hobbies in general. I think having a hobby like painting, crocheting, board games, or even working on cars, can lead you down some of the paths you need to learn critical thinking skills. You're solving "puzzles", you're learning how to research, etc.
That said, I say this as a person who did receive a good education and for the people coming through our poorer (as in lower quality) education systems these days, I guess I don't have the context to know if they even know how to start a hobby or if getting into a hobby will actually help them develop these literacy skills or if I'm just assuming it will because that's how I go through life.
I do absolutely 1000% agree that our education system is declining, but I guess what I'm getting at is that we don't necessarily need to assign novels in english class to get people educated and that we have other routes to do that than books, but god damn education is declining for sure right now.
I don't disagree with you, I think I'm just saying I could see a world where "post-literacy" in the context of "post-everyone-reads-books" isn't necessarily a doom, as long as people generally still learn critical thinking skills through other routes, but that definitely isn't happening en masse yet (and I do consider that the forces that fund our education (or cut funding, rather), also would prefer if we don't consume art or be creative in any fashion).
Oh, absolutely. That's why the framing ticks me off. If we legitimately were freeing ourselves from the oppression of written language, it'd be great. If we were training kids to think multidimensionally and immanently, the loss of artistic appreciation for a form I love would be a worthwhile trade. Instead, people are being trained to fear indeterminacy, not to think, and are being left to follow their pleasure centers into the human mill. That's social collapse, not change.
I think hobbies and education are a chicken-egg problem. If you don't have a good education, you lack the fundamentals to get started in a lot of hobbies. And education isn't just the base fundamentals like math, science, and english -- it fans outwards into everything, from how to properly measure, to the science of lifting, to pacing yourself during cardiovascular work, to debugging where your plumbing system has a loose connection.
Books are one of the cheapest ways to extend your existing skillset, but if you don't have a good foundation to start from, you're still screwed. I would struggle to build a deck, for instance, but my dad figured out how to build one 30 years ago from a single book at his local library. How? His parents taught him fundamentals like digging postholes and assembling fences, and he extended his knowledge. Meanwhile he never taught me those fundamentals, so I'll need to cover the fundamentals before I start building new walls in my basement.
There is some hope, though. How-to videos lower the bar dramatically for a lot of mechanical tasks. I figured out basically all of my bicycle repair and maintenance skills from Park Tool's excellent video series (plus Sheldon Brown's website). But I fear as a society we're losing a lot of fundamental skills between generations that will take a lot of effort to reclaim.
I love the points you make here and it does make me realize that I had the privilege of learning life skills while growing up and while many people still do, some may not due to being tablet kids, a worse education system, or whatever.
For example, I judge people that can't change a wheel on their car (to be fair, it's a jack + 5 lug nuts, it REALLY is not that hard), but I realize that I grew up fixing things, so it was easy for me to learn to work on cars.
I've never built a deck and don't know the first thing about it, but because I grew up being taught how to learn and research and to be comfortable with not knowing things, I'm certain that I could easily find out how to build one if I needed to.
And it's easy for me to say that something like that is easy for me and to not get why others can't research, don't have hobbies, etc., but like you pointed out, I could see how someone born in 2006 might be more helpless at age 20 than I was, due to a higher chance of not learning how to think in the first place. It's not that changing a wheel on a car is difficult, it's that many people haven't been taught how to be curious, how to learn, or how to research, so they might just "shut down" when on the side of the road instead of typing into youtube "how to change car wheel".
I guess I'm also doing a lot of assuming and prescribing based on my own personal experiences. Most of my friends are well educated, know how to problem solve, etc., because as a person like that, I don't really seek out friends who are completely dissimilar to me. It's easy for me to make assumptions on what's causing the problems we're seeing when I don't really directly interact with the kinds of people I'm describing (and I definitely don't want to come off as blaming people for being lazy or dumb when it's mostly systems that failed them and not the other way around).
I'm kind of rambling now, but I find this subject extremely deep and fascinating and there's still so much for me to think about and learn.
I didn't grow up particularly well off, but through the efforts of my parents I got a decent education and am living comfortably now, though certainly not in luxury.
My main hobby is reading, though I'm also a big fan of 3d printing and laser cutting, though I haven't dedicated the time to be more than a pure amateur at making my own designs.
I see so many people of a similar age to me just... Not do anything with their free time. Hours upon hours of scrolling or seeing the same news over and over x.x
On the other hand, I read on my phone a lot, so I'm sure someone more physically active would say the same about me
It is still possible to be intentional about not consuming it. In the case it is absolutely needed for some reason only accessing it from desktop is also possible.
I don't think I would last long about consuming digital crack intentionaly so I avoid it instead.
You can be, but it's oh so hard these days. I don't use twitter, tiktok, bluesky, instagram, etc., but I still find myself unable to avoid reddit and discord. With discord, I tell myself it's because that's where my friends are (including my IRL friends), but it's also social media and in some cases, I'm choosing to interact with the people in my phone over the world in front of me.
I could get a dumb phone, but it's a trade off, not an upgrade. I'm then losing access to certain functions like maybe maps and the ability to look something up if it's urgent or I'm having an emergency.
I guess what I'm getting at is that I think I'm about as intentional as I reasonably could be (a dumb phone is not possible for me because of my work), and even I feel like I consume too much social media. I can't imagine being on tiktok or insta all day. I also avoid pulling out my phone instinctively when I'm in a queue or in a waiting room, so I'm trying to be intentional there, and I still feel like I'm on social too much.
It's pretty interesting to see this conclusion based on this question. I'll also add that the illiterate peasants were more critical, as they refused to take Luria at his word that "In the Far North, all bears are white." I'd have to see more about this study to feel confident in this conclusion, but to me it seems smarter to refuse to try, "explaining that they had never been to the north and thus couldn’t answer." I don't think this takes much away from the article's overall point (though I admit I've run out of time to read it and need to finish later), but it's worth thinking about. There's always value in staying grounded and not getting carried away from that by complex thought.
One of the people who got me into neuropsychology! I'm pretty sure this study is reported in his book Cognitive Development but can't swear to it.
This seems like a good place to recommend an excellent science fiction novel called Mockingbird, by Walter Tevis, who also wrote The Hustler, The Color of Money, The Man Who Fell to Earth, and The Queen’s Gambit.
It takes place in a future where reading is forgotten. A college professor who teaches Ancient Cinema stumbles on an archive of silent films and realizes that the interstitial images of shapes on a background are pictures of words and proceeds to learn how to read. When he teaches someone else to read, it turns out that reading isn’t just forgotten, it’s illegal.
Of course, the book is really about the culture of anti-intellectualism that was building up steam in America in the late 1970s when the book was written. Also, robots!
I enjoyed reading through this and did like the different facets of this issue that the author explored. I'm personally of the mind that social media, phones in our pockets, and shortening attention spans is a different beast than prior inventions that changed communication, like the early internet, TV, radio, the printing press, novels, etc. However, I am curious how we'll look back in 50 years and if we'll as a society generally think that novels were silly or niche when you could instead listen to an audiobook or read a synopsis.
I personally still enjoy reading, but even I admittedly read far fewer novels nowadays than I used to. I definitely read more words than I used to, considering I code for a living, I read news articles, I'm on discord all the time, etc., but those all seem part of my boring everyday life instead of exploring a world through a piece of fiction and using my imagination (imagination being another topic the author touched on and one facet of why books may be important to us as a species and something that social media lacks).
One thing I thought about while reading this was that reading as a hobby in your own free time seems less important to me than having a hobby to enjoy in your free time. I agree that literacy is becoming a problem, not in that people can't understand words, but that people can't understand the meaning behind them or critically think. That said, one thing I've definitely noticed in society is that many people don't have any creative hobbies at all or they won't talk about them. When I meet new people, it's always "what do you do for a living", not "what do you enjoy doing in your free time?" When we introduce a new hire at work, they talk about their work and their family, but never mention their hobbies, etc.
I don't read as many books as I used to, but I paint, I play board games, I play video games and not just for shallow experiences (though I absolutely still enjoy games like CoD), but I love games with deeper themes, as well. I think one important thing to think about is that if we're seeing a reduction in reading as a society, it wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing as long as people are finding some creative outlet. However, I know many people that just do not do anything creative or ever let their brain run wild. They'll consume TV or movies and not really discuss them after or think about themes. That's the larger problem than specifically reading, I think. Creative outlets that aren't reading can lead people towards those critical thinking patterns that we think we're losing as a society. I get it, it's hard to find the time for a hobby these days when work crushes at least a third of our week and so many other things demand our time. I speak as someone with the privilege of time, since I'm single, have no kids, have a good work life balance, etc., but I do think everybody needs a hobby, especially a non-screen hobby, even if it isn't reading.
That’s pretty normal, historically. There’s a reason there’s a bunch of people named Baker or Smith - it was the norm for your occupation to be your identity in the past. That was your role in society, and it consumed all of your time. Only the very wealthy could have things like hobbies.
The fact that leisure time is considered the norm is a modern invention. Perhaps a good one, but it’s not something that we use to have and lost. It’s the other way around.
That's a very good point. In some regards, the wheel will keep turning even if people don't have hobbies, don't read, etc., even if the decline in literacy is seen as a negative (to me, it most certainly is). In some regards, the problems we face are problems humans have always faced. No time for hobbies because we need money to exist and the people that make the rules and run society are greedy and always want more. That's not new to 2026, though it still has aspects that are different than in 1026.
This article and people's comments have given me a lot to think about today, that's for sure.
I always feel bad when I don't finish these articles, but I realized about 25% through that I was not really interested in the rest of the article. Am I part of the problem dot jpeg
I felt exactly this when I noticed I had glossed over this bit:
I chuckled then forced myself to read it.
This is why lumping all this in as illiteracy is ridiculous. This is The Atlantic, we all know their conventions, and you probably read up to the start of the quote, contextually realized that you didn't need to read it to get the point, and moved on. That is good media literacy, not even necessarily an indicator of low attention span, let alone a sign of poor literacy. But kids are being deprived of being taught how to learn things like that.
Yep. I wonder if it was an intentional "gotcha": the author knew it didn't matter, that it was an overly verbose sentence, and that it would make readers feel bad the way I did (just enough to think of it as ironic).
Same honestly, though I did come back to re-read the rest. It's not your fault imo. I think it's a fairly weak article that does contains a lot of good points, but also includes these long litanies of context-less statistics and trite, excessively teleological historical analysis, all without any real propulsive narrative to carry you through it. Like, the author ends the essay with her personal history of growing up loving literature, and then slowly losing the habit of reading to her phone. That's good stuff, I feel the sorrow there, I just wish more of the article had been that, instead of boring, affectless cultural commentary stringing together points I've heard before fifty different times.
I also really rolled my eyes when the author attempted to (dismissively) contrast 20th century classic Doctor Zhigavo with alleged modern YA trash Sunrise on the Reaping -- which I haven't read myself, but which my extremely smart (adult) brother loved for being sharp, political, and beautifully written in its own right -- and maybe the author realized this midway through the paragraph, because when she pulls a quote to demonstrate how bad modern lit is, she suddenly pivots to quoting romantasy instead. The article in my opinion needed at least one more pass to refine its arguments, there's a lot of that kind of rhetorical clumsiness there.
I was fascinated to hear that the author eschews text messages in favor of voice messages for communication with her friends. As someone who hates listening to audio from my phone (unless I've already put headphones in to intentionally listen to a podcast or music), yeeesh. I'd never be able to communicate like that! Hell, I get annoyed when people use voice-to-text because it always produces rambly and partially incoherent messages.
My little sister uses the voice messages too, I think it's a younger Zoomer thing maybe? I asked her about it once and she says it's easier then writing a long message when she just wants to ramble or work through something emotional which, sure, I guess. I love hearing her voice but it is a bit annoying to have to put in earbuds to continue the conversation. But maybe she finds my multiple-paragraph-long screeds annoying, too.
In education, the solutions are relatively simple. Assign reading to kids, follow them up with reading quizzes that can't be reliably spoofed from SparkNotes (ex: who said this? this excerpt happened after which of the following plot points? etc). Then fail the kids who can't pass. For some reason we can't converge on the notion that education should educate, and we see the inevitable fruit.
Berkshire in absolute shambles.
(sorry, couldn't resist the jocular response, especially on a post about Reading).