5 ms·
Are we becoming a post-literate society?
- 6855789890898 2y agohghjj nnbbb
- 6855789890898 2y ago$1084542 @wwggkk
- homebrewer 2y agohttps://archive.is/Kp4ZV https://archive.is/Kp4ZV
- amelius 2y ago[flagged]
- dawatchusay 2y agoAbility to write wasn’t the original literacy! It’s about reading. If you can’t read code or commentary about code how are you supposed to write good code or formulate new ideas about what good code should be and propagate those?
- cgio 2y agoThen again, one could argue that the point of literacy is writing or creating in general. We transfer knowledge so that we can expand on it, not to merely consume it. You allure to it yourself in your concluding statement.
- ahi 2y agoAn old literature teacher tried to instill in us that we hadn't read until we had responded in writing.
- magic_smoke_ee 2y agoWhat a stupid and flippant statement.
- 6510 2y agoI wonder how much easier coding would be if we upgrade the user. There are of course combinations of many different upgrades to consider. It would also be interesting to discover a generic update is not worth it. I do suspect some occupations that currently lack them should not go without programming skills.
- dang 2y ago[stub for offtopicness]
- owenpalmer 2y agoI don't understand why people post paywalled content on HN.
- _bin_ 2y agoBecause it's still a good article and can be unpaywalled. I believe we're supposed to link the original source and someone can just comment the sci-hub/archive.ph/whatever. Same reason you'd cite the original in a paper.
- dawatchusay 2y agoUsually someone will come along and post a link that gets around the paywall.
- dang 2y agoIf there's a workaround, it's ok. Users usually post workarounds in the thread. This is in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and there's more explanation here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=paywalls%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989
- hanney 2y agoThe irony of this article being hidden by a paywall..
- dawatchusay 2y agoUnpaywalled link has been posted already
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- karaterobot 2y ago> “Thirty per cent of Americans read at a level that you would expect from a 10-year-old child... It is actually hard to imagine — that every third person you meet on the street has difficulties reading even simple things.” It isn't hard to imagine, if you've spent any time on internet message boards or social media. The level of reading comprehension is astonishingly low. Heck, even the willingness to read short articles is low, let alone to understand them. I'm not by any means excepting places like Hacker News from this.
- magic_smoke_ee 2y agos/excepting/exempting/ What other places are like HN? I can't think of a single one, much less multiple others.
- baud147258 2y agoI'd say the comment section of the website acoup.blog (which have been linked a few times on HN, that's how I discovered it), the commenters usually give the impression they've read the article. Of course it can also be due to the fact that it's a blog comment section, not those of a link-sharing site.
- DarknessFalls 2y agoSlashdot is at least part of the same haplogroup, if not a close cousin.
- dredmorbius 2y agoThere are some HN-alikes, such as Lobste.rs, which appears to be ~10% the size but often carries similar article selections. <https://lobste.rs/ https://lobste.rs/> There is Tildes.net, which was inspired by Reddit (founder is an ex-Reddit employee). <https://tildes.net/ https://tildes.net/> There remains Metafilter, which continues to have exceptionally high S/N: <https://www.metafilter.com/ https://www.metafilter.com/> Individual blogs and podcasts occasionally have useful discussion. Mostly the mode seems to be waning in my experience.
- atmavatar 2y ago
- dawatchusay 2y agoIf you think of reading as one means of consumption of information then the ability to read may just be outdated, and people are moving to new forms of information consumption. Reading was never particularly exciting for me even though I wanted to discover what was hidden (often buried) in texts and if you can get the information in a more engaging and streamlined way so be it. Maybe the issue is really the content people are streaming and the lack of critical thinking and not that they are streaming at all.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- potsandpans 2y ago> If you think of reading as one means of consumption of information then the ability to read may just be outdated, and people are moving to new forms of information consumption. Im not sure that this is an accurate observation -- at least wholly accurate. The implication being, "other forms of consuming information are equal to the desired end goal." Or perhaps more strongly, "other forms of consuming information are better at achieving the desired end goal." For which, you'd have to define an end goal. If it's pure entertainment, I think I'd agree with the above. But there are other important reasons to consume information, and I'm unconvinced that there is anything better than reading. Things such as synthesizing complex ideas and retention of information come to mind. I realize this is unsubstantiated, there may be research into it. To me if feels self evident, but i can only offer anecdotal evidence to support it.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- nottorp 2y agoIs that the politically correct term for illiterate?
- magic_smoke_ee 2y agoAmerica's illiterati idiocracy went mainstream.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y agoI'd answer, but I didn't read the article
- OutOfHere 2y agoI don't believe that entirely captures where we have been going. The danger is more that people now read only what they already believe in. They don't read to question, update, or correct their beliefs, mostly only to reinforce them. This can be done with bad books just the same. The open-mindedness is unidirectional rather than omnidirectional. It moves people into extreme orientations.
- hagbard_c 2y agoIt is more likely to be akin to the development described in Stephenson's Anathem where textual writing eventually is displaced by something called kinograms which seem to resemble animated emoji. Only scholars locked in in walled institutions of learning from which they rarely venture still read script, outside those walls it is only in some religious orders where textual writing is still practised. Kinograms seem to be mostly used to convey commercial and practical information like user manuals, not for storytelling which is done through some form of video. In a way this is 'post-literate' since it adds an extra dimension to illiteracy: relatively complex information is still conveyed by standardised symbolic means, just not through text. Having said all this it does seem like society is dumbing down, partly due to the way information is distributed. Having said that I think this sentiment was common in previous generations as well.
- jareklupinski 2y ago> textual writing eventually is displaced by something called kinograms > I think this sentiment was common in previous generations as well you're the man now, dog
- devops99 2y ago[flagged]
- aithrowawaycomm 2y agoI'm very skeptical of books. I don't want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post. - Sam Bankman-Fried
- HideousKojima 2y agoThis is how Adderall addiction looks, folks.
- WeylandYutani 2y agoSo what is he going to do in prison?
- netbioserror 2y agoAs it relates to book publishing, I can say from personal experience that the mass-published bookshelf is an absolute trash heap. Most genres are shadows of their former selves. All the intellectually and literarily valuable work is either in the past or self-published online due to lack of mass appeal.
- boznz 2y agoGood books are still there (even self-published), but the book scene is absolutely swamped with garbage and "the algorithm" generally does not favor new/unknown authors
- dredmorbius 2y agoBy way of Tildes and another comment in this thread: "The Big Five Publishers Have Killed Literary Fiction" ...Instead of an eye-blackening scrum over who gets to publish the next Tom Wolfe, nobody’s quite sure that his fresh, satirical voice is worth chancing in the first place. As a consequence of this mode of thinking, literary fiction has fallen to only two percent of the fiction market. From the publishers’ perspective literary fiction is just too risky—and that risk has nothing to do with questions of form or taste. It’s much more simple and less political than that.... <https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-big-five-publishers-have-killed https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-big-five-publishers-h...>
- Havoc 2y agoI was shocked to discover during my 2024 year in review I had only completed a single book. Obviously still read loads (internet) but that realization hit kinda hard & don’t think they’re equivalent for mental wellbeing On the plus side Ive got a good nye resolution line up!