11 ms·

The Erosion of Deep Literacy

122 points by longdefeat 6y ago

bzg 6y ago
Long and nice read. Ten years ago, there was still heated debates about whether Nicolas Carr was right. Now we kind of know he somehow was right, so parts of the debate are over, while others, still relevant parts, leave us speachless. Or maybe that's just me.
- galangalalgol 6y ago
  I haven't read Carr, but the article makes it sound as if only reading attention span is addressed. I am astounded at my inability to watch films I enjoyed as a young adult because the scenes are too long and the story unfolds too slowly.
  - 1996 6y ago
    Likewise, I am astounded at my inability to watch most modern media, because the scenes are too short and the story unfold too quickly. I feel that the most in the Simpsons: same characters, but it feels so different than the early seasons!! My absolute favorite sci-fi show is Star Trek TOS. It's not from my generation, but I relate far more to the way the story is told - without 3 different plotline unfolding at once in the same show, and without 1 of them requiring me to remember perfectly what happened in the last 3 episodes. I want self contained episodes and slow action.
    - spacemansam 6y ago
      Hear hear, I wondered if I was alone in this. There's shows I'd watch and even (as far as I can tell) enjoy, but after a few episodes, I'd skip to Wikipedia for a summary so i didn't have to spend a couple weeks just watching. And it's only over the last 5 years or so. No idea what happened to my attention span.
galaxyLogic 6y ago
What has changed is that most everyone now has the ability to contribute to civil discussion on social media. That means even very ignorant people. This must have some kind of effect on the public discourse I would think
- tbrownaw 6y ago
  Not sure how it bears on the article, but yes I'd think that "very ignorant people" being able to more easily engage in discussion with those different from themselves and learn new facts and perspectives ought to very much raise the level of public discourse.
  - TheButlerian 6y ago
    I think you are: A: Blind B: An idiot
  - analognoise 6y ago
    That's the THEORY. The water level will rise and we'll all be smarter. What actually happens is Trump, anti-vaxxers, anti-science people find each other and they actually grow in numbers. It becomes harder to distinguish reality from bullshit. That fundamental tenet of liberalism is wrong. Seriously wrong, and needs to be reworked in light of new information. People don't critically examine new information and become smarter as a whole. They band together, form tribes, and actively seek out information that confirms their feelings and biases while blocking out other voices, and social media has made it worse as has the rapidity of modern communications.
    - galaxyLogic 6y ago
      > actively seek out information that confirms their feelings and biases while blocking out other voice That sounds about right from what I've seen on social media. Apart from that it also seems that that is what the social media companies WANT to happen. They want to rile-up people to get them more engaged. The more engaged they are the more time they will spend on social media which causes other people to spend more time on social media and more adds they will consume.
ultramundane8 6y ago
This is a really interesting piece. I've been wanting to rage against illiteracy lately but I'm not too active in public discourse (even this). That said, I don't think it's some secret key to improving humanity. I think this because literacy is ultimately a luxury, even in modernity. The literate may be able to form more nuanced opinions, but that matters less if they can't increase literacy consistently across populations. There's an irony here that assumes deep literacy is productive and essential but doesn't use it to explain the proposed lack of deep literacy itself.
- samoa42 6y ago
  "those who dont know history are bound to repeat it" literacy is the only way to improve humanity.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - ezequiel-garzon 6y ago
    I'm quite sure Germany's population was as literate in the 1930's as any other. It's subtler than that.
  - EL_Loco 6y ago
    I would say the ability to think critically, coupled with a good literacy foundation, is more important than just literacy. I know many will say literacy is the building block to critical thinking, or something along those lines, but I don't know, I've now known many, many examples that don't support the idea.
  - hrktb 6y ago
    I can’t imagine people trying to bring back a “golden age” of white supremacy are ignorant of the past. I think there is a solid point made by the GP about what literacy is needed for. To me the end game is not to have a randomly erudite population, but well adjusted people. Literacy is only a small part of that.
  - 6y ago
tbrownaw 6y ago
Educational attainment has been increasing steadily since at least 1940 (as far back as the chart on Wikipedia shows): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Educational_Attainment_in_the_United_States_2009.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_... I am skeptical that this "deep literacy" is in fact eroding, since it's what lets you learn a topic well enough to get a degree. It's also hard work; I'll put in the effort on topics that matter -- as in topics that usefully inform my future actions, rather than topics that have abstract moral weight or whatever -- or sometimes for entertainment, but it's not a casual "all the time" thing and there seems to be a limit to how much I can do in a given day. I learned growing up that TV rots your brain. Modern social media works the same way, except that sometimes you can actually engage with it and maybe it rots your brain a bit less in that case. This is called "mindless entertainment", and various forms of it have always been fairly popular. When I use shallow reading for mindless entertainment, it displaces whatever else I'd be doing for mindless entertainment. Which is different from displacing serious reading, or even from displacing learning things for entertainment / mental exercise.
- pmichaud 6y ago
  I haven't read the article yet, but I want to say that I do not find your educational attainment stat to be a compelling counter argument. I don't think earning a degree represents deep literacy anymore if it ever really did--certainly not undergrad, and mostly not graduate level either. I think the incentives are wrong and the results are not "deep literacy" in any meaningful sense. Your point about mindless entertainment replacing other mindless entertainment is pretty interesting. I guess my misgiving about that is the relative addictiveness or follow on effects of your chosen entertainment? Like if your mindless entertainment is heroin, that has effects on your mind that go beyond the time spent. If our new mindless entertainment also saturates not only our time but our attention--not just at the moment, but our ability to attend to things in general, given the feedback cycle our brain is habituated to--that is potentially worth worrying about.
- scottlocklin 6y ago
  >Educational attainment has been increasing steadily since at least 1940 Absolute hogwash. In my parents day (in the 60s) high school included mastery of at least one foreign language and one dead language. Mom and dad read Beowulf in high school, in Anglo Saxon; something modern English majors don't do. And my parents were working class people at working class schools in a factory town. Moving the goalposts to allow morons to get a high school diploma isn't improving educational attainment. Hell, I could point out a dozen examples of decline in Bachelors degrees in my lifetime. This was a meme a few years ago: a 1800s era Harvard entrance exam, and Harvard was the easy school: https://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvardexam.pdf https://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvard...
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
One thing that is interesting that the medium matters. For me, I am much more likely to read a programming physical book cover to cover in a short time, than an ebook. Sometimes, I have had an ebook for months, reading just snippets of it, but when I get the same book in physical form, I finish it in a few days. Anybody else have that experience?
- jmfldn 6y ago
  Yeah all the time! It doesn't help that for certain technical books, they work much better on a tablet, phone or laptop. I wish e readers worked better for certain kinds of material.
- bamboozled 6y ago
  I "think" I do, if I care about reading a book, I always buy a physical copy for this particular reason.
DubiousPusher 6y ago
This article makes far reaching societal claims with essentially no evidence. The evidence presented is in the form of "feelings" of various writers concerned of their own decline in literaryfocus. An unvoiced assumption that people were historically more literate pervades the entire article. As a former lit. major I used to buy into this kind of thing. But I now think this belief is the product of profound selection bias. Literature and history libraries are full of the very best diaries and letters of the very best diary and letter writers because those are enjoyable to read and being more detailed are more useful. History is not written by the victors but by the literate. People of letters that write this kind of article are obviously inclined towards letters and therefore inclined to sample history through literate means and therefore greatly overestimate the literacy of the past. But let us pair anecdote to anecdote. There is a podcast network called "The New Books Network". It examines weekly the release of new academic works. It began as "New Books in History" covering one new history book each week. Now it features dozens of podcasts each covering a new book every week. Engage these podcasts for six months and at the end, tell where your biases lie. You will probably suddenly believe we live in the most literate age of all.
- wirrbel 6y ago
  Key bias is that when you read old stuff and people seem to be well read it appears that way also because canons have shifted so it appears as if they read „more than the literature canon“
- keiferski 6y ago
  The issue isn't whether there are abundant "literate" resources (podcasts, in your example) but whether the average member of a democratic society is literate. More importantly, whether the elites are deeply literate. I don't know about you, but when I look at the popular media and at political leaders, they seem highly illiterate compared to those from just a century ago. Even the "literate elite" media, e.g. The New Yorker, has dropped in quality from a few decades ago. Just read some old issues to see what I mean. Regardless, this article is hardly the first or only study of this problem. Allan Bloom wrote The Closing of the American Mind in 1987. Harold Bloom and John Simon wrote a few books on the topic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mi...
MisterBastahrd 6y ago
I like to read books. I do not like to read long-form articles. Why? Because the vast majority of long-form articles are written by people who are lacking a quality editor. They are virtually always a superfluous, stream-of-consciousness verbal vomit that beats the reader over the head with information that is tangentially related to the purpose of the article, and they are usually 4-5x as long as they really need to be to get their point across. This article is no exception.
- JoeAltmaier 6y ago
  Yes! My wife is an Editor. Once office publishing became a thing, folks forgot they needed and Editor. Downhill ever since, at least on that front.
- bobcostas55 6y ago
  As the saying goes, "Most books should be blog posts, most blog posts should be tweets, and most tweets should be deleted."
- hue3 6y ago
  I noticed writers trying to come off as highly educated and pompous often write sentences that are too long, with too many adverbs and adjectives. Not to mention excessive use of passive voice and useless phrasal verbs. This is precisely the type of writing that needs an editor.
sevenoftwelve 6y ago
Is this AI-generated? And that's why it's called "Deep Literacy"?
- sevenoftwelve 6y ago
  Maybe the author just lacks deep editing skills…
onecommentman 6y ago
“If you do not deep read, you do not cultivate a capacity to think, imagine, and create; you therefore may not realize that anything more satisfying than a video game even exists.” Hence universal public education. The author, though, is talking about making additional effort, as though schooling alone didn’t achieve these basic ends. Glad I didn’t go to his high school. Given a finite amount of time (albeit a near-infinite amount of easily accessible material to read), there must be a trade off between deep reading and broad reading. No explicit mention of “broad reading” as the alternative in the text, assumedly because having a broad reading experience is viewed as a fine thing. And for good reason. Consider the most deeply read (non religious) texts in the 20th C....Little Red Book, Communist Manifesto, Ayn Rand, Mein Kampf. Throw in religious cult classics of your choosing. One could argue less deep reading of those texts would have been a very good thing, and millions of lives could have been saved. Silent sustained reading of political and economics texts, if you don’t swallow the arguments made book, line and thinker, can be a good thing. Cliff Notes and simply reading summaries/critiques of those classic works instead are better, and allow a breadth of reading in limited time that provides context and perspective. Losing one’s self in a deep read is an act of trust and faith, an act that too often in the 20th Century led to betrayal, abuse and death via the distorted view of reality that resulted. Even in non-political texts, the assumptions underlying popular novels, from Bellows and Mailer to bodice rippers, can have profound renormalizing consequences in the lives of these who lost themselves in these alternative realities. Sometimes having the attention span of an over-caffeinated golden retriever puppy is a good thing.
- refactor_master 6y ago
  I think what the article tries to get at (and what I’ve also read being echoed elsewhere in similar works) is that this “deep read” ability means having a working memory able to process and extrapolate from what you’re reading. Reading and chanting the Bible or Little Red Book and taking everything at face value is not being skilled at deep reading. Only if you possess the ability to read and think at the same time will you stop and say “hey wait a minute, this doesn’t make sense”. On the other end is shallow reading which is defined as reading “God said this, and these people are bad”, and internalizing that instantly without thinking about why. But as a stand-alone piece I see how this article has a few “gaps”.
keiferski 6y ago
Trying to take an optimistic view on this: what if creators simply haven't mastered new media technologies (video, audio, etc.) well enough yet? It's easy to forget, but the earliest forms of language were probably used in extremely mundane circumstances ("Me hungry, food there, etc.") Writing itself was used primarily for imperial accounting purposes for thousands of years before anyone bothered to use it and create art. I hope that we're merely "illiterate" because we're in between two technological eras.
bem94 6y ago
> Thus, we have a writer privately squeezing into an artificial, decontextualized "space" in order to convey something, fictive or not, to unknown readers in unknown but theoretically very distant times who are similarly situated, so to speak, in an artificial, decontextualized space. Good grief. Edit: This whole article could use a furious edit.
g5095 6y ago
LOOK AT THE MEDIUM. I pick up a book, it has HEFT. I FEEL satisfied with my selection in hand, that I have acquired a goodly amount of reading material on a subject or by an author who I feel is worthy of my time. I open the book and skim the contents page, a worthy array of subjects that pique my interest entice me on but the MEDIUM prevents me from an indulgent glance. I understand inherently that I am expected to progress through the material with the author, at their pace before I can uncover the gold within. I open the article 'The Erosion of Deep Literacy' in my browser. A PROGRESS METER appears on the right-hand side known as the scroll-bar telling me this article is longer than a three minute read, and that I have a LONG WAIT ahead before my progress is complete. Immediately I want to know if the article is worth my time and without a CONTENTS PAGE to assure me I flick the oh-so convenient mouse wheel or thumb across my screen and scroll to the bottom with happy abandon! JUDGEMENT BEGINS as I scan for hints of life; highlighted text, INFO BOXES.. PICTURES!? my guide-posts of worthiness are lacking and emotions set in.. Do I really WANT to spend fifteen whole minutes here? Long-form is dead on the web of my heart, flicked away like a tik-tok meme that took too long to load... oh look, a butterfly!
- sergeykish 6y ago
  Paper medium is not that different — I can estimate size by sight, I can skim through pages, check pictures. It is different in publishing, books are often good enough to buy. But yes, scrollbar helps to "finish" article even if it is not worth it. Disable in Chrome: html::-webkit-scrollbar { display: none } https://github.com/sergeykish/hide-scrollbars https://github.com/sergeykish/hide-scrollbars
- samizdis 6y ago
  That made me chuckle; I like your sense of humour. I read a great deal, print and online. HN frequently serves as my filter for hefty online articles; I look at the comments to inform decisions to read or avoid.
auganov 6y ago
If abstractness and departure from orality is the ultimate goal, you'd want highly technical writing, mathematical notation and so forth. The type of reading the author encourages - long-form societal discourse, is still relatively oral. There are many contradictory ideas in this piece. Speed-reading is cited as a sign of poor literacy but then so is vocalization. The two are pretty much opposites.
- niek_pas 6y ago
  Mathematical notation is highly limited in the sets of ideas it can express.
alkonaut 6y ago
This article was way too dense and long so I couldn’t focus long enough to actually finish reading it.
- hue3 6y ago
  Because, ironically, this article is poorly written and needs an editor.
nathias 6y ago
I think it's an effect of replacing literature with communication and other types of entertainment, paired with a lack of free time.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
anonu 6y ago
When the telegraph came out we also lamented the thought that the end of face-to-face social communication was nigh.
scott_meyer 6y ago
>Deep reading has in large part informed our development as humans As a statistic, reading is only significant in the past 200 years or so. Given that there was a similar kerfuffle a couple thousand years ago when we shifted from memorizing to writing things down, I doubt that this is too significant. Literacy is also shifting. Growing up with memes and Instagram and Tiktok has produced a generation that is vastly more literate in design, photography and film.
LudwigNagasena 6y ago
There are over 4 million of people with PhD only in the US, whopping 14% of the population, that’s more than the percentage of people with a comparable level education in any other period of history in any part of the world. This makes the whole premise of this article seem very dubious.
- glial 6y ago
  Curious where you get your numbers, because I think they're wrong.
  - LudwigNagasena 6y ago
    14% have a postgraduated degree, I jumbled my thoughts into an obviously wrong sentence.
- TheCoelacanth 6y ago
  4 million is a bit over 1% of the US population, not 14%.
  - LudwigNagasena 6y ago
    Sure, I wanted to say that 14% of population have a postgraduate degree, i.e. masters or higher.
etempleton 6y ago
This article mourns the loss of something that only has ever existed among a very small minority of any population in recorded history. Deep Literacy, as the author defines it, relies on the luxury of time that most individuals around the world do not have. It is the great disconnect between academia and the rest of society. This article took a very large amount of my time to read in proportion and relation to the point it was trying to make. It could have easily been 500-1000 words, but it was written in the scholarly tradition of more is more. It did not value the readers time. Are there more distractions now? Certainly, but it is an elitist view to act as if this impacts the amount of deep reading your average citizen of any given country partakes in. If anything, the proliferation of smart phones will increase base level literacy among the masses globally allowing more individuals from more diverse backgrounds the opportunity to one day have the opportunity to engage in deep literacy. What we are seeing now is more people engaging in conversations and debates that were previously relegated to the elites—academics, politicians, aristocrats. Are their opinions impacted by their lack of deep literacy? Certainly, but their opinions always have been, their voices just weren’t heard quite so loudly before.
- throwaway2245 6y ago
  > This article took a very large amount of my time to read in proportion I read it, and I felt that I would have learned more, been more entertained, and had more insight into creators' direction and meaning, if I had instead used that time flicking through TikToks. The author's "you do not cultivate a capacity to think, imagine, and create" - seems very wrong and itself unimaginative.
- tompccs 6y ago
  Not only that, printed word used to be expensive! There's a remark made by George Orwell somewhere in which he addresses the claim made in the early 20th century that the working class don't read because they can't afford books. He counters that assertion by calculating that, based on the cost of going to the pictures, and the number of times a year a working-class person is likely to go, they could afford to buy enough second-hand books to read for several hours a week. On the other hand, for anyone with a smartphone (something like 90% of adults in the developed world), there is zero marginal cost to accessing unlimited written word. I think, on the contrary, we've never as a society been more literate. Never before has such a large proportion of our communication been through text. The "deep reading" complaint might be re-characterised (and in fairness the article hints at it) as the fact that the internet makes many-to-many communication by written word as cheap as one-to-many. When the economic barriers to reaching an audience are removed, the written word more closely represents the average reader, which has never been closer than today to the average person.
Kaibeezy 6y ago
The article has been posted on HN half a dozen times since it was published earlier this year. It’s no surprise people feel it’s worth bringing up here. I wonder why it happens to be getting traction this time. I printed it out on actual paper after following one of the links from several weeks ago, but only got around to reading it last week. Since then I have forwarded it to several colleagues and friends. It may be the scariest thing I’ve ever read. It’s struck a gong of inexorable doom resonating through the largest fragments of my lifetime collection of existential worry. The bad things that happen; the good things that don’t. The forces that didn’t make sense; now they sort of do. Not happy.
MajorBee 6y ago
Unrelated to the content of the article -- it appears that the font used in the article has (some) letters "dipping down" below others; for example, the "t" and "i" in "noticing" don't have their bottoms at quite the same level. I don't know if this is just an illusion caused by font thickness or if this is stylistic choice, but I've seen a few of these styles floating around (usually in these "serious" longform articles). Since this doesn't technically have anything to do with the spacing between letters, is it accurate to call this a feature of kerning? If not, what is the term here? Is it mean to be evocative of typewritten text? While I don't necessarily dislike it, it did prove to be mildly distracting, hence the questions.
- abdusco 6y ago
  It might simply be a side effect of text rendering/hinting. The text looks flawless on my phone's display (>400 dpi pixel density)
Iv 6y ago
Add it to the list: https://xkcd.com/1227/ https://xkcd.com/1227/ And I think Aristotle was complaining about that as well.
LVTaxIsLife 6y ago
Another good article to drill down the point: https://aeon.co/essays/why-working-class-britons-loved-reading-and-debating-the-classics https://aeon.co/essays/why-working-class-britons-loved-readi...

122 points by longdefeat 6y ago

bzg 6y ago

Long and nice read. Ten years ago, there was still heated debates about whether Nicolas Carr was right. Now we kind of know he somehow was right, so parts of the debate are over, while others, still relevant parts, leave us speachless. Or maybe that's just me.

galangalalgol 6y ago
I haven't read Carr, but the article makes it sound as if only reading attention span is addressed. I am astounded at my inability to watch films I enjoyed as a young adult because the scenes are too long and the story unfolds too slowly.
- 1996 6y ago
  Likewise, I am astounded at my inability to watch most modern media, because the scenes are too short and the story unfold too quickly. I feel that the most in the Simpsons: same characters, but it feels so different than the early seasons!! My absolute favorite sci-fi show is Star Trek TOS. It's not from my generation, but I relate far more to the way the story is told - without 3 different plotline unfolding at once in the same show, and without 1 of them requiring me to remember perfectly what happened in the last 3 episodes. I want self contained episodes and slow action.
  - spacemansam 6y ago
    Hear hear, I wondered if I was alone in this. There's shows I'd watch and even (as far as I can tell) enjoy, but after a few episodes, I'd skip to Wikipedia for a summary so i didn't have to spend a couple weeks just watching. And it's only over the last 5 years or so. No idea what happened to my attention span.

galaxyLogic 6y ago

What has changed is that most everyone now has the ability to contribute to civil discussion on social media. That means even very ignorant people. This must have some kind of effect on the public discourse I would think

tbrownaw 6y ago
Not sure how it bears on the article, but yes I'd think that "very ignorant people" being able to more easily engage in discussion with those different from themselves and learn new facts and perspectives ought to very much raise the level of public discourse.
- TheButlerian 6y ago
  I think you are: A: Blind B: An idiot
- analognoise 6y ago
  That's the THEORY. The water level will rise and we'll all be smarter. What actually happens is Trump, anti-vaxxers, anti-science people find each other and they actually grow in numbers. It becomes harder to distinguish reality from bullshit. That fundamental tenet of liberalism is wrong. Seriously wrong, and needs to be reworked in light of new information. People don't critically examine new information and become smarter as a whole. They band together, form tribes, and actively seek out information that confirms their feelings and biases while blocking out other voices, and social media has made it worse as has the rapidity of modern communications.
  - galaxyLogic 6y ago
    > actively seek out information that confirms their feelings and biases while blocking out other voice That sounds about right from what I've seen on social media. Apart from that it also seems that that is what the social media companies WANT to happen. They want to rile-up people to get them more engaged. The more engaged they are the more time they will spend on social media which causes other people to spend more time on social media and more adds they will consume.

ultramundane8 6y ago

This is a really interesting piece. I've been wanting to rage against illiteracy lately but I'm not too active in public discourse (even this). That said, I don't think it's some secret key to improving humanity. I think this because literacy is ultimately a luxury, even in modernity. The literate may be able to form more nuanced opinions, but that matters less if they can't increase literacy consistently across populations. There's an irony here that assumes deep literacy is productive and essential but doesn't use it to explain the proposed lack of deep literacy itself.

samoa42 6y ago
"those who dont know history are bound to repeat it" literacy is the only way to improve humanity.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ezequiel-garzon 6y ago
  I'm quite sure Germany's population was as literate in the 1930's as any other. It's subtler than that.
- EL_Loco 6y ago
  I would say the ability to think critically, coupled with a good literacy foundation, is more important than just literacy. I know many will say literacy is the building block to critical thinking, or something along those lines, but I don't know, I've now known many, many examples that don't support the idea.
- hrktb 6y ago
  I can’t imagine people trying to bring back a “golden age” of white supremacy are ignorant of the past. I think there is a solid point made by the GP about what literacy is needed for. To me the end game is not to have a randomly erudite population, but well adjusted people. Literacy is only a small part of that.
- 6y ago

tbrownaw 6y ago

Educational attainment has been increasing steadily since at least 1940 (as far back as the chart on Wikipedia shows): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Educational_Attainment_in_the_United_States_2009.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_... I am skeptical that this "deep literacy" is in fact eroding, since it's what lets you learn a topic well enough to get a degree. It's also hard work; I'll put in the effort on topics that matter -- as in topics that usefully inform my future actions, rather than topics that have abstract moral weight or whatever -- or sometimes for entertainment, but it's not a casual "all the time" thing and there seems to be a limit to how much I can do in a given day. I learned growing up that TV rots your brain. Modern social media works the same way, except that sometimes you can actually engage with it and maybe it rots your brain a bit less in that case. This is called "mindless entertainment", and various forms of it have always been fairly popular. When I use shallow reading for mindless entertainment, it displaces whatever else I'd be doing for mindless entertainment. Which is different from displacing serious reading, or even from displacing learning things for entertainment / mental exercise.

pmichaud 6y ago
I haven't read the article yet, but I want to say that I do not find your educational attainment stat to be a compelling counter argument. I don't think earning a degree represents deep literacy anymore if it ever really did--certainly not undergrad, and mostly not graduate level either. I think the incentives are wrong and the results are not "deep literacy" in any meaningful sense. Your point about mindless entertainment replacing other mindless entertainment is pretty interesting. I guess my misgiving about that is the relative addictiveness or follow on effects of your chosen entertainment? Like if your mindless entertainment is heroin, that has effects on your mind that go beyond the time spent. If our new mindless entertainment also saturates not only our time but our attention--not just at the moment, but our ability to attend to things in general, given the feedback cycle our brain is habituated to--that is potentially worth worrying about.
scottlocklin 6y ago
>Educational attainment has been increasing steadily since at least 1940 Absolute hogwash. In my parents day (in the 60s) high school included mastery of at least one foreign language and one dead language. Mom and dad read Beowulf in high school, in Anglo Saxon; something modern English majors don't do. And my parents were working class people at working class schools in a factory town. Moving the goalposts to allow morons to get a high school diploma isn't improving educational attainment. Hell, I could point out a dozen examples of decline in Bachelors degrees in my lifetime. This was a meme a few years ago: a 1800s era Harvard entrance exam, and Harvard was the easy school: https://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvardexam.pdf https://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvard...

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

One thing that is interesting that the medium matters. For me, I am much more likely to read a programming physical book cover to cover in a short time, than an ebook. Sometimes, I have had an ebook for months, reading just snippets of it, but when I get the same book in physical form, I finish it in a few days. Anybody else have that experience?

jmfldn 6y ago
Yeah all the time! It doesn't help that for certain technical books, they work much better on a tablet, phone or laptop. I wish e readers worked better for certain kinds of material.
bamboozled 6y ago
I "think" I do, if I care about reading a book, I always buy a physical copy for this particular reason.

DubiousPusher 6y ago

This article makes far reaching societal claims with essentially no evidence. The evidence presented is in the form of "feelings" of various writers concerned of their own decline in literaryfocus. An unvoiced assumption that people were historically more literate pervades the entire article. As a former lit. major I used to buy into this kind of thing. But I now think this belief is the product of profound selection bias. Literature and history libraries are full of the very best diaries and letters of the very best diary and letter writers because those are enjoyable to read and being more detailed are more useful. History is not written by the victors but by the literate. People of letters that write this kind of article are obviously inclined towards letters and therefore inclined to sample history through literate means and therefore greatly overestimate the literacy of the past. But let us pair anecdote to anecdote. There is a podcast network called "The New Books Network". It examines weekly the release of new academic works. It began as "New Books in History" covering one new history book each week. Now it features dozens of podcasts each covering a new book every week. Engage these podcasts for six months and at the end, tell where your biases lie. You will probably suddenly believe we live in the most literate age of all.

wirrbel 6y ago
Key bias is that when you read old stuff and people seem to be well read it appears that way also because canons have shifted so it appears as if they read „more than the literature canon“
keiferski 6y ago
The issue isn't whether there are abundant "literate" resources (podcasts, in your example) but whether the average member of a democratic society is literate. More importantly, whether the elites are deeply literate. I don't know about you, but when I look at the popular media and at political leaders, they seem highly illiterate compared to those from just a century ago. Even the "literate elite" media, e.g. The New Yorker, has dropped in quality from a few decades ago. Just read some old issues to see what I mean. Regardless, this article is hardly the first or only study of this problem. Allan Bloom wrote The Closing of the American Mind in 1987. Harold Bloom and John Simon wrote a few books on the topic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mi...

MisterBastahrd 6y ago

I like to read books. I do not like to read long-form articles. Why? Because the vast majority of long-form articles are written by people who are lacking a quality editor. They are virtually always a superfluous, stream-of-consciousness verbal vomit that beats the reader over the head with information that is tangentially related to the purpose of the article, and they are usually 4-5x as long as they really need to be to get their point across. This article is no exception.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago
Yes! My wife is an Editor. Once office publishing became a thing, folks forgot they needed and Editor. Downhill ever since, at least on that front.
bobcostas55 6y ago
As the saying goes, "Most books should be blog posts, most blog posts should be tweets, and most tweets should be deleted."
hue3 6y ago
I noticed writers trying to come off as highly educated and pompous often write sentences that are too long, with too many adverbs and adjectives. Not to mention excessive use of passive voice and useless phrasal verbs. This is precisely the type of writing that needs an editor.

sevenoftwelve 6y ago

Is this AI-generated? And that's why it's called "Deep Literacy"?

sevenoftwelve 6y ago
Maybe the author just lacks deep editing skills…

onecommentman 6y ago

“If you do not deep read, you do not cultivate a capacity to think, imagine, and create; you therefore may not realize that anything more satisfying than a video game even exists.” Hence universal public education. The author, though, is talking about making additional effort, as though schooling alone didn’t achieve these basic ends. Glad I didn’t go to his high school. Given a finite amount of time (albeit a near-infinite amount of easily accessible material to read), there must be a trade off between deep reading and broad reading. No explicit mention of “broad reading” as the alternative in the text, assumedly because having a broad reading experience is viewed as a fine thing. And for good reason. Consider the most deeply read (non religious) texts in the 20th C....Little Red Book, Communist Manifesto, Ayn Rand, Mein Kampf. Throw in religious cult classics of your choosing. One could argue less deep reading of those texts would have been a very good thing, and millions of lives could have been saved. Silent sustained reading of political and economics texts, if you don’t swallow the arguments made book, line and thinker, can be a good thing. Cliff Notes and simply reading summaries/critiques of those classic works instead are better, and allow a breadth of reading in limited time that provides context and perspective. Losing one’s self in a deep read is an act of trust and faith, an act that too often in the 20th Century led to betrayal, abuse and death via the distorted view of reality that resulted. Even in non-political texts, the assumptions underlying popular novels, from Bellows and Mailer to bodice rippers, can have profound renormalizing consequences in the lives of these who lost themselves in these alternative realities. Sometimes having the attention span of an over-caffeinated golden retriever puppy is a good thing.

refactor_master 6y ago
I think what the article tries to get at (and what I’ve also read being echoed elsewhere in similar works) is that this “deep read” ability means having a working memory able to process and extrapolate from what you’re reading. Reading and chanting the Bible or Little Red Book and taking everything at face value is not being skilled at deep reading. Only if you possess the ability to read and think at the same time will you stop and say “hey wait a minute, this doesn’t make sense”. On the other end is shallow reading which is defined as reading “God said this, and these people are bad”, and internalizing that instantly without thinking about why. But as a stand-alone piece I see how this article has a few “gaps”.

keiferski 6y ago

Trying to take an optimistic view on this: what if creators simply haven't mastered new media technologies (video, audio, etc.) well enough yet? It's easy to forget, but the earliest forms of language were probably used in extremely mundane circumstances ("Me hungry, food there, etc.") Writing itself was used primarily for imperial accounting purposes for thousands of years before anyone bothered to use it and create art. I hope that we're merely "illiterate" because we're in between two technological eras.

bem94 6y ago

> Thus, we have a writer privately squeezing into an artificial, decontextualized "space" in order to convey something, fictive or not, to unknown readers in unknown but theoretically very distant times who are similarly situated, so to speak, in an artificial, decontextualized space. Good grief. Edit: This whole article could use a furious edit.

g5095 6y ago

LOOK AT THE MEDIUM. I pick up a book, it has HEFT. I FEEL satisfied with my selection in hand, that I have acquired a goodly amount of reading material on a subject or by an author who I feel is worthy of my time. I open the book and skim the contents page, a worthy array of subjects that pique my interest entice me on but the MEDIUM prevents me from an indulgent glance. I understand inherently that I am expected to progress through the material with the author, at their pace before I can uncover the gold within. I open the article 'The Erosion of Deep Literacy' in my browser. A PROGRESS METER appears on the right-hand side known as the scroll-bar telling me this article is longer than a three minute read, and that I have a LONG WAIT ahead before my progress is complete. Immediately I want to know if the article is worth my time and without a CONTENTS PAGE to assure me I flick the oh-so convenient mouse wheel or thumb across my screen and scroll to the bottom with happy abandon! JUDGEMENT BEGINS as I scan for hints of life; highlighted text, INFO BOXES.. PICTURES!? my guide-posts of worthiness are lacking and emotions set in.. Do I really WANT to spend fifteen whole minutes here? Long-form is dead on the web of my heart, flicked away like a tik-tok meme that took too long to load... oh look, a butterfly!

sergeykish 6y ago
Paper medium is not that different — I can estimate size by sight, I can skim through pages, check pictures. It is different in publishing, books are often good enough to buy. But yes, scrollbar helps to "finish" article even if it is not worth it. Disable in Chrome: html::-webkit-scrollbar { display: none } https://github.com/sergeykish/hide-scrollbars https://github.com/sergeykish/hide-scrollbars
samizdis 6y ago
That made me chuckle; I like your sense of humour. I read a great deal, print and online. HN frequently serves as my filter for hefty online articles; I look at the comments to inform decisions to read or avoid.

auganov 6y ago

If abstractness and departure from orality is the ultimate goal, you'd want highly technical writing, mathematical notation and so forth. The type of reading the author encourages - long-form societal discourse, is still relatively oral. There are many contradictory ideas in this piece. Speed-reading is cited as a sign of poor literacy but then so is vocalization. The two are pretty much opposites.

niek_pas 6y ago
Mathematical notation is highly limited in the sets of ideas it can express.

alkonaut 6y ago

This article was way too dense and long so I couldn’t focus long enough to actually finish reading it.

hue3 6y ago
Because, ironically, this article is poorly written and needs an editor.

nathias 6y ago

I think it's an effect of replacing literature with communication and other types of entertainment, paired with a lack of free time.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

anonu 6y ago

When the telegraph came out we also lamented the thought that the end of face-to-face social communication was nigh.

scott_meyer 6y ago

>Deep reading has in large part informed our development as humans As a statistic, reading is only significant in the past 200 years or so. Given that there was a similar kerfuffle a couple thousand years ago when we shifted from memorizing to writing things down, I doubt that this is too significant. Literacy is also shifting. Growing up with memes and Instagram and Tiktok has produced a generation that is vastly more literate in design, photography and film.

LudwigNagasena 6y ago

There are over 4 million of people with PhD only in the US, whopping 14% of the population, that’s more than the percentage of people with a comparable level education in any other period of history in any part of the world. This makes the whole premise of this article seem very dubious.

glial 6y ago
Curious where you get your numbers, because I think they're wrong.
- LudwigNagasena 6y ago
  14% have a postgraduated degree, I jumbled my thoughts into an obviously wrong sentence.
TheCoelacanth 6y ago
4 million is a bit over 1% of the US population, not 14%.
- LudwigNagasena 6y ago
  Sure, I wanted to say that 14% of population have a postgraduate degree, i.e. masters or higher.

etempleton 6y ago

This article mourns the loss of something that only has ever existed among a very small minority of any population in recorded history. Deep Literacy, as the author defines it, relies on the luxury of time that most individuals around the world do not have. It is the great disconnect between academia and the rest of society. This article took a very large amount of my time to read in proportion and relation to the point it was trying to make. It could have easily been 500-1000 words, but it was written in the scholarly tradition of more is more. It did not value the readers time. Are there more distractions now? Certainly, but it is an elitist view to act as if this impacts the amount of deep reading your average citizen of any given country partakes in. If anything, the proliferation of smart phones will increase base level literacy among the masses globally allowing more individuals from more diverse backgrounds the opportunity to one day have the opportunity to engage in deep literacy. What we are seeing now is more people engaging in conversations and debates that were previously relegated to the elites—academics, politicians, aristocrats. Are their opinions impacted by their lack of deep literacy? Certainly, but their opinions always have been, their voices just weren’t heard quite so loudly before.

throwaway2245 6y ago
> This article took a very large amount of my time to read in proportion I read it, and I felt that I would have learned more, been more entertained, and had more insight into creators' direction and meaning, if I had instead used that time flicking through TikToks. The author's "you do not cultivate a capacity to think, imagine, and create" - seems very wrong and itself unimaginative.
tompccs 6y ago
Not only that, printed word used to be expensive! There's a remark made by George Orwell somewhere in which he addresses the claim made in the early 20th century that the working class don't read because they can't afford books. He counters that assertion by calculating that, based on the cost of going to the pictures, and the number of times a year a working-class person is likely to go, they could afford to buy enough second-hand books to read for several hours a week. On the other hand, for anyone with a smartphone (something like 90% of adults in the developed world), there is zero marginal cost to accessing unlimited written word. I think, on the contrary, we've never as a society been more literate. Never before has such a large proportion of our communication been through text. The "deep reading" complaint might be re-characterised (and in fairness the article hints at it) as the fact that the internet makes many-to-many communication by written word as cheap as one-to-many. When the economic barriers to reaching an audience are removed, the written word more closely represents the average reader, which has never been closer than today to the average person.

Kaibeezy 6y ago

The article has been posted on HN half a dozen times since it was published earlier this year. It’s no surprise people feel it’s worth bringing up here. I wonder why it happens to be getting traction this time. I printed it out on actual paper after following one of the links from several weeks ago, but only got around to reading it last week. Since then I have forwarded it to several colleagues and friends. It may be the scariest thing I’ve ever read. It’s struck a gong of inexorable doom resonating through the largest fragments of my lifetime collection of existential worry. The bad things that happen; the good things that don’t. The forces that didn’t make sense; now they sort of do. Not happy.

MajorBee 6y ago

Unrelated to the content of the article -- it appears that the font used in the article has (some) letters "dipping down" below others; for example, the "t" and "i" in "noticing" don't have their bottoms at quite the same level. I don't know if this is just an illusion caused by font thickness or if this is stylistic choice, but I've seen a few of these styles floating around (usually in these "serious" longform articles). Since this doesn't technically have anything to do with the spacing between letters, is it accurate to call this a feature of kerning? If not, what is the term here? Is it mean to be evocative of typewritten text? While I don't necessarily dislike it, it did prove to be mildly distracting, hence the questions.

abdusco 6y ago
It might simply be a side effect of text rendering/hinting. The text looks flawless on my phone's display (>400 dpi pixel density)

Iv 6y ago

Add it to the list: https://xkcd.com/1227/ https://xkcd.com/1227/ And I think Aristotle was complaining about that as well.

LVTaxIsLife 6y ago

Another good article to drill down the point: https://aeon.co/essays/why-working-class-britons-loved-reading-and-debating-the-classics https://aeon.co/essays/why-working-class-britons-loved-readi...