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It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history
- sdevonoes 4mo agoFor me, reading used to be a way to enjoy part of my free time. Nowadays is still that but it’s also a way to relax. Even though I don’t have accounts in the main social media networks (instagram, fb, twitter, youtube, etc) I still consume them indirectly on a weekly basis (e.g., i like to watch videoclips in YT, a friend sends me a twitter link, etc). It makes me anxious. I’ve realised that consuming in tiny bits (short videos, ads, stories, tweets, private messages, even going to those stores where everything is under $5) doesn’t suit me well, therefore reading regular books for at least 1-2h per day (plus other activities like working out alone, or going for a walk to a park) is becoming essential for my wellbeing.
- cphoover 4mo agoI'm afraid I am addicted to short-form video and wish I could go back to spending more of my free-time reading books.
- mathgeek 4mo agoHave you also run into the attention deficit effect of all these short forms of media? Overriding my brain's desire to put a book down after a couple pages is certainly not my favorite pastime.
- criddell 4mo agoPart of that might be your book choice. I found that when trying to rekindle my reading habit, book choice had a big effect. Some books are like vegetables you know you should eat but really don't want to and other books are junk food. Empty calories that you love. Pick from the latter pile at first and rebuild the muscle.
- phil21 4mo agoYep. When I need to get back into reading again I usually start with some easy to read pulp. My go-to is “trash” military sci-fi. Usually from authors who pump out a book or two a year in the genre. Honor Harrington (Honorverse) is my general go-to, although these days I’m caught up so I’ve started a few others like it.
- mathgeek 4mo agoNope that's not it for me, but appreciate the discussion!
- khutorni 4mo agoI suggest blocking all platforms that provide short-form video and firmly deciding not to consume such content for a set period of time (e.g., 2 weeks). For me, this is the only way to stop once I fall back into the habit. Doing this enabled me to spend more time developing and pursuing my own ideas, which is invigorating.
- dana-s 4mo agoOr even just setting up a timer, I've set up a 20 min timer for myself recently, once it's done I do stick to it, I did get to do some things I've been pushing away, I still get some value out of these but... I get a lot more by not spending an hour on them.
- trimbo 4mo agoThe Brick has been helping me with phone overuse. getbrick.com (I have no association with the company) On your laptop, route those sites to localhost.
- anthonypasq 4mo agovery cool, probably gonna get one, ty!
- wing-_-nuts 4mo agoIt's funny, I signed up for tiktok when I was curious about the hype, explored a bit for the science / history / educational content I normally watch on youtube and found there was almost nothing, and what little there was was of much lower quality. I deleted my account after about 15m of looking, and hilariously enough, a tiktok researcher reached out, and actually paid me ~ $200 to understand why I bounced off the platform.
- api 4mo agoShort form video is disturbingly addictive. I generally refuse to engage with it. A while back I started scrolling some YouTube shorts. Hours later my brain felt fried and… it was hours later? It was kind of shocking and frightening. It felt like I had no memory of the past three hours, like it was a true state of hypnosis.
- rvshchwl 4mo agoI realized this recently as well, on how much social media has started affected me. I've made some changes to how I use my phone now but haven't seen a lot of improvement overall, basically because I've found that there is "Social Media" everywhere I go. I removed all the Meta apps from my phone and found myself spending more time on LinkedIn. Removed that and I end up on Reddit. I do feel better about not being on FB and Instagram anymore though which I found were the biggest source of my wasted time. I'm not able to fully limit all the apps, and that may just come over time with better habits. The positive upside to all of this has been that I've been reading more in general. Finished 2 books last month, and almost done with a 3rd one. Not having any of the main apps on my phone just has meant that I end up reaching for a book or something physical to occupy my time, which in general has been a better use of my time.
- TrackerFF 4mo agoI was somewhat surprised to find out that illiteracy does not mean that someone needs to be a total (or near) analphabet - but rather that it is a broad and wide spectrum. I always imagined that “teenagers can’t read” meant that they couldn’t read at all, but then I never met such a person. Reading is definitely a skill that needs to be learned and maintained. Going from reading a couple of hundred words, to even a longer 30 - 60 min article can be tough if you’re out of shape. Same with writing. It makes me wonder if literate people can regress to illiterate, for no other reason than lack of reading maintenance.
- yomismoaqui 4mo agoI think that literate people can recover from a period of not reading (books) at all. I recently had more than a year of not reading any books that was interrupted when I found about The Culture series. I read Use of Weapons and had to read all novels from that universe. After that I tried to find some books similar to them, tried to read some recommended ones (didn't finish any of them) and stopped reading. In my case reading books is a kind of fever that I get every year or so.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- AlotOfReading 4mo agoUnfortunately there really aren't any other books like the culture series. You might enjoy Banks' "The Algebraist" and the completely unrelated though similarly named "The Alchemist".
- yomismoaqui 4mo agoAs I like how Banks writes and they are not directly related to The Culture they won't have to meet the expectations of the others I tried. Thanks, will read them.
- AlotOfReading 4mo ago
- sph 4mo ago> Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history. What dreadful hyperbole. If reading is in decline, it’s just that we are in a crisis of widespread ignorance and broken education system, but good luck navigating through life without knowing how to read. The anomaly might in fact be that we are regressing in human general intelligence compared to the rest of history.
- criddell 4mo ago> good luck navigating through life without knowing how to read Literacy isn't usually evaluated as a binary thing. Here's how one organization ranks reading levels: https://nces.ed.gov/naal/perf_levels.asp https://nces.ed.gov/naal/perf_levels.asp I think the optimists in the article once believed proficiency was inevitable but maybe basic is the best they should hope for now.
- Diogenesian 4mo agoNot "the rest of history," but relative to the ~1800-2000 period of steadily increasing literacy and educational attainment. The European Dark Ages after the fall of Western Rome was a real thing. Many people regressed to the Stone Age for hundreds of years, and we lost almost every written work from ancient Greece and Rome. That can absolutely happen with the US and EU by 2200, especially considering digital information is far more fragile over centuries than papyrus and parchment.
- tomwheeler 4mo ago[flagged]
- functionmouse 4mo agoIt's true; I also started reading the comments before clicking the article. Show of hands?
- notreading26 4mo agoWell, you missed this: >Of course, the new republic was not always a haven for sober analysis. The Founding Fathers attacked their enemies in the papers, spreading lies to incite the public against their opponents. One ally of Thomas Jefferson’s called John Adams “a hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”
- RobKohr 4mo agoI made it about 15% through the article, but that is a about normal for the Atlantic. They generally get their point across and then rattle on for more time than I am interested in reading. Guess I'm part of the post literate world. I also perfer short stories instead of novels.
- apparent 4mo agoThere's actually some different content covered later in the article, but yes it is quite long. I'm sure plenty of people consume articles like these by asking LLMs for a summary.
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 4mo agoI actually read the article first, but I find it too long, and unnecessarily so. I am a huge proponent of reading, especially for the acquisition of new knowledge and perspectives, but I consider this form of writing rather entitled, beating around the bush and demanding too much of my time and attention just to make a point or two.
- cphoover 4mo agoI wonder if someone educated in this could provide the neurological benefits of reading, outside of communication. They are numerous, are they not? Memory, neuroplasticity, focus, stress relief—I'm sure there are many other benefits too.
- ashleyn 4mo agoI refuse to believe that the decline of our education system is some inevitable, intractable problem.
- breezybottom 4mo agoDecline since when? A few hundred years ago most people were illiterate farmers.
- bluGill 4mo agoWere they though? Or were they only illiterate because literacy was measured in Latin not their native language? We know that historically that did happen, and it is hard to figure out what was done. Even today, most talking about literacy rates are using a very high level read skills to make things look bad, when most people can read just fine for the normal level things are written in. I'm near illiterate if you only test me on medical papers.
- breezybottom 4mo agoLiteracy doesn't mean your ability to speak, it means your ability to read/write. Formal schooling for the masses is a very recent invention.
- bluGill 4mo agoIt isn't hard to learn how to read at a basic level.
- breezybottom 4mo agoSure, if you have books in your house and parents who are also literate and encouraging of it.
- bluGill 4mo ago
- apparent 4mo agoThis is not a fair comparison: > Only 38 percent read a novel or short story... The proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023.... Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet. It takes much less time to place a bet than to read a novel/short story. Likewise, reading for pleasure "on any given day" is a totally different measure than "placed a bet last year".
- saulpw 4mo agoYeah, at least it should be over the same time period!
- lapcat 4mo agoYour selective quote left off the part that made it a fairer comparison. "Only 38 read a novel or short story" was a follow-up to "fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022." That's a year-long stat.
- apparent 4mo agoReading an entire book takes much more time than placing an online bet.
- lapcat 4mo ago> Reading an entire book takes much more time than placing an online bet. Yes, but do you only do things for pleasure if they're done quickly? Is your sex always over in a minute? Also, I was responding to this: > Likewise, reading for pleasure "on any given day" is a totally different measure than "placed a bet last year". Yes, reading for pleasure "on any given day" is a different measure than "placed a bet last year", but "read a book of any kind in 2022" is the same length of time, though not the exact same year.
- apparent 4mo ago
- lanfeust6 4mo agoI read more than ever, but Substack is taking a sizable share of the pie whereas lit and non-fiction is now my late evening. I don't do the audiobook thing, though I understand that has become increasingly popular yet not really given much credence. Desire might be theoretically limitless, but time and attention is not. Time I spend reading is time I'm not consuming endless short-form videos. People have gotten hooked on phones and the medium dictates what they consume. There could be boom and bust cycles for this. Trends lose lustre and people are always looking for ways to signal status/competence. It's probably why "booktok" is a thing.
- Diogenesian 4mo ago[dead]
- apparent 4mo ago> Adult-literacy scores have also dropped: Nearly 30 percent of American adults cannot paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text. In 2017, that number was less than 20 percent. Shrinking the passages on the SAT from full-page to a few sentences will exacerbate this trend.
- giraffe_lady 4mo agoI don't think I learned this skill from the sat.
- criddell 4mo agoI think the point is that the design of the SAT influences what is taught in schools. If the SAT stops testing the ability to deal with multi-paragraph text, then schools will spend less time teaching those skills.
- joh6nn 4mo agoThe implication is not that people learned this skill from the SAT, but rather that not requiring it to score well on the SAT further lowers the baseline.
- apparent 4mo agoDoing well on the SAT used to require some measure of reading stamina. It no longer does, so some students who would have been prompted to increase their stamina in order to do well on the SAT will no longer feel that pressure.
- Aurornis 4mo agoFor better or worse, testing was used as an assortative matching between students and universities they applied for. Though far from perfect, a university that set their acceptance bar at a certain level could expect incoming students to at least be at or around that level. The less rigorous the filtering, the more you have to accommodate the lower ends of the incoming students’ abilities. So as standardized testing is softened, so too is the curriculum that students are exposed to. There is a movement against standardized testing that gained traction in the past decade, arguing that because it’s flawed and imperfect we should abandon it. The movement never had a good replacement for it, though, so the shift was toward looser standards and judging students based on vibes and non-academic measures. Many of the universities that went this direction are reversing course and adding standardized testing back now because the reality of higher education is that you need to filter incoming students by some academic measurements if you want to be able raise the bar for your curriculum. The effects cascade everywhere. In a perfect utopia everyone would get individualized perfect tutoring and we wouldn’t have to worry about testing, but in the world we inhabit a lot of the education decisions and realities are downstream of what we can test for.
- lp4v4n 4mo agoIt's been my impression that classic literature is going the same way as painting and other forms of high art. It was certainly a great display of human intellectual prowess and artistic capacity in bygone times when the world moved at a much slower pace, but who has the time and the energy to read a long novel today? Even cinema is dying and nobody seems to care that much.
- smith7018 4mo agoMany people still read novels. I live in NYC and see numerous people read books and Kindles every day on the train. > Even cinema is dying and nobody seems to care that much It's being replaced with an even longer form of visual media; the mini series. Stories that used to be told in an hour and a half are now being told in 8 hour-long segments
- flenserboy 4mo agowhich could, for the most part, be boiled down to 2 hour-long segments. so much is stretched out for the sake of padding. the good news is that scrubbing through shows is possible — it is usually painfully clear when to stop & watch at double speed — & time otherwise lost is recovered in this way.
- nchmy 4mo agoIf you were watching quality material, you wouldn't be scrubbing through it... Eg I've just finished watching Andor for the 3rd time, normal speed.
- deadbabe 4mo agoNot really. Movies are good for plot oriented stories, with clear beginning, middle, and end. But they are not ideal for more character driven or lore oriented content. Long slow burning stories told over many episodes let you really show many facets of characters and also opportunities to hint at a much larger world than what can be shown within 2 hours.
- tangenter 4mo ago[flagged]
- hsuduebc2 4mo agoInteresting phenomens are often discussed here so I personally do not perceive it as offtopic. Yet as you said, I have the same feeling from this article. Click bait grievance posting.
- AnimalMuppet 4mo agoI would think that the decline of reading would be relevant to discuss on a hacker forum.
- beej71 4mo agoAs a CS instructor, I find this article extremely interesting, FWIW.
- _doctor_love 4mo agoWe were in an age of reading? I gave up about 10 years ago on people as readers. I have recommended so many books and articles to software people over the years and it's honestly depressing how many people have told me they don't like to read. Like...you're a programmer? And you don't like to read? I assumed that people who enjoy software would be into intellectual stimulation but I've learned that this is wrong. More what seems to be the case is people have enjoyed coding as a kind of video game. But this generalizes to the general population too. Marshall McLuhan's message remains a very important medium.
- gosub100 4mo agoI gave up on reading because the authors want to spend a considerable number of pages telling me the color of the buttons on an imaginary character's outfit. They have no such right to waste my time with (or even worse, charge me money for) that.
- AlotOfReading 4mo agoNo one says "I gave up on eating because restaurants kept serving me spicy food". You just order different food. A short story that's a couple pages long isn't going to waste them describing the color of buttons, and not every novelist is Tolkien.
- phyzix5761 4mo agoBooks have a built in fast-forward feature.
- gosub100 4mo agoMy English teachers told me to get to the point, don't start sentences with "and", and every sentence should support the central theme. Apparently authors think they can make their book thicker and more authoritative by wasting time describing the color of something I wouldn't even look at in real life. But I notice and don't fall for it. Sorry you don't value your time.
- 4mo ago
- aboardRat4 4mo ago>Americans also get much less of their news through reading than they once did. In 1975, about half of 20-somethings said they read the newspaper every day. Today less than 10 percent do. Most of the news are not worth reading. I listen to news when eating, and I am very glad I don't have to waste my reading span on this crap.
- bluGill 4mo agoI wish there was a local news paper around me. There are national news papers with a local edition, but they don't have local reporters digging into local stories and so are not worth reading.
- aboardRat4 4mo ago>they don't have local reporters digging into local stories and so are not worth reading. National newspapers don't have reporters digging for stories any more as well. Actually, for many years. 90% of newspapers are buying or reposting their stories from news agencies, such as Bloomberg or Thomson-Reuters. 90% of their activity (in turn) is rewriting press-releases and going to press-conferences of top 500 companies and government bureaus. In the CIS we have "local telegram channels", but they are mostly run by magistrates' press secretaries, and usually don't report on anything significant, and usually just praise the district prefect and post thinly veiled ads.
- bluGill 4mo agoTrue, but at least there are reporters. For national or international news I feel if it matters I will find out. However I'm in the dark about what happens in my state. My city is even worse - and those are places an informed voter can make a difference.
- wing-_-nuts 4mo agoYou're not reading the right news sources then. I find reuters, the AP and such still worthwhile.
- quasiperfectus 4mo ago> Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book I feel like if it took me 20hr to place a bet I'm probably not doing much of that either. Anecdotal, but my 7y/o loves reading. She's flying through series' and it's getting pricey. I guess she falls in the 16% of people who enjoy it.
- apparent 4mo agoSame with my girls (parents of boys seem to mostly have a different experience). Hopefully your kid gets access to digital libraries like Epic or Sora at school. There are also public libraries with ebook lending that can make the habit cheaper.
- DeluluDon 4mo agoMy mother taught me how to read, I'm male. Incidentally, I scored higher than my peers in reading. I still read, but it has taken the form of social media which have no more length than a blurb.
- apparent 4mo agoIt's not a hard and fast rule, for sure. But we have heard from many boy parents who wish their boys read more (or much at all). We, OTOH, have to tell our girls to put their books down and do something else from time to time.
- sanmarzano 4mo agoIt does. People who bet on sports sink hundreds of hours into forums and consuming visual content. Placing a bet takes 30 seconds, deciding what to bet on takes people a very long time. As long as reading a book.
- quasiperfectus 4mo agoI think you're vastly overestimating the amount of time people put into researching. A very small minority, sure, but most sports bettors look at the lines and pick.
- xmcp123 4mo agoEven as the author points out people are reading more, he continues to conflate books with reading - and not just that but reading specifically physical books (referring to his stats around book ownership). The reality is that before, you needed to read huge swaths of information to find/know the relevant information. Now you don’t. The density of useful information I gather from places like Wikipedia, even long form articles is substantially higher than I got reading non-fiction. I still read books sometimes. It’s a different experience. But it’s only a dumbing down of society, if the things you’re reading are dumb.
- Diogenesian 4mo ago> The reality is that before, you needed to read huge swaths of information to find/know the relevant information. Now you don’t. > The density of useful information I gather from places like Wikipedia, even long form articles is substantially higher than I got reading non-fiction. You're in good company. Sam Bankman-Freid: I would never read a book. I’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. You do actually need to read huge swaths of information to understand the relevant information. A good nonfiction book isn't long because of low information density: it's because the ideas are so complicated that it takes an entire book to explain it. Your approach is emblematic of a modern trend where people know a bunch of smart factoids but have no broader wisdom or understanding. Not reading books because of "information denisty" is a lazy rationalization for dumbing yourself down. Wikipedia is good as a quick reference if you already understand something, but a disaster for learning.
- breezybottom 4mo agoI've read plenty of scientific articles that read like the author is trying to fulfill a word count. There's definitely something to be said for brevity.
- xmcp123 4mo agoI do read huge swaths of information, just directly relevant to the questions that I have, and the things required to understand that information. Don’t have to read a book on every US president to understand what happened during the Reagan administration. And if I’m primarily interested in the Cold War, I can focus on that subject and skip out on when Reagan was governor of California, or how he met his wife. More than that I can get information from a variety of sources, including ones that disagree with each other and have different perspectives. That has absolutely enormous value when trying to comprehend something new…and isn’t often available in a single book. You still can’t be lazy. Laziness is antithetical to truly acquiring knowledge. But it definitely can’t only come from a book.
- expedition32 4mo agoOh well we had a good run of 5000 years! See you on the next planet.
- jdw64 4mo agoBooks have their advantages, but I don't think you necessarily need to read books—in fact, I think books can sometimes be worse. One strength of books is that their structure, starting with the table of contents, trains you in logical composition. But books also have drawbacks: 1.If there's incorrect information at the time of writing, it becomes fixed at that point. 2.The author's worldview can become overly authoritative, and the messiness of reality is smoothed over for the sake of a neat narrative. 3.Counterexamples and recent debates are often missing. There are also bad papers that manipulate data to get results, and books are no different. I think books are not bad for introductory maps and mental training. If you look at programming books from about 10 years ago, they're like historical relics—hard to apply today. In a rapidly changing world, if you only read books, you'll easily fall behind. Information is pouring in, and books are static media, slow to adapt. Training yourself to read text is important, but it doesn't have to be through books. Books help build a mental structure of tables of contents and conceptual sequences, but I question whether that structure can only be formed through books. And realistically, there's a lot of bad content in books too. Self-help books are full of nonsense and scams that exploit people's desire for success. But they're venerated simply because they come in the form of a 'book.' What we should venerate is not the 'form of a book,' but the 'way of reading that builds a mental framework.' So I question whether reading only books is really the right approach. I think of this as 'form over substance.' The core is training logical thinking—that doesn't have to come in the form of a book. I sometimes think it's worth recalling what Socrates said in Plato's Phaedrus: 'Writing is not a remedy for memory, but a means of making it external, leading to forgetfulness. Once you write something down, you no longer try to remember it within yourself. You come to trust the external symbols. Writing doesn't give people true wisdom—it only gives them the appearance of wisdom. What matters is not what's written in a book, but what knowledge you internalize. I don't understand the obsession with the form itself.
- logicchains 4mo agoThere's a quote from Marcus Aurelius: "Perhaps there are none more lazy, or more truly ignorant, than your everlasting readers". People who just believe whatever they read in books don't actually learn to think, just to regurgitate, and often become out of touch with how the world actually works (although this happens to heavy consumers of any kind of fiction).
- microtherion 4mo ago“A Clockwork Orange” as “Old English” is an amusing anecdote, but it might be worth noting that the novel is written in deliberately nonstandard English mixing in Russian words, so it might be nontrivial to read for people lacking interpolation skills. In the first paragraph, e.g., there is: > There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim. Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.
- qingcharles 4mo agoJust wait till they open Trainspotting.
- microtherion 4mo agoI could handle that, but reached my limit with Feersum Endjinn.
- N1ckFG 4mo agoIt's also New Wave science fiction, and once you get past the conlang and the genre conventions, it's still incredibly violent! Kubrick iirc even once said in an interview that he removed some book scenes from his (initially X-rated) film adaptation, because he thought the invented language helped make them less disturbing to read, but audiences watching them dramatized would just give up and walk out. Anyway I sure do see some of the trends described in the article with my younger students and relatives, but such a strange unforced error makes me suspicious of the strength of the research.
- dominotw 4mo agoi got xelink ereader few months ago and i've been reading a ton more. i have all sorts of kindle but i stopped reading but xelink attached to my phone got me back. I would love a phone where this is a standard feature. dont care about fancy cameras and stuff.
- beej71 4mo agoI couldn't attach my xteink to my phone because of a standoff around the camera on my phone case. I just now realized that the standoff could be removed and now the magnet works! :) Did you install Crosspoint on it? I absolutely recommend it. For reading on my phone Moon Reader is my go-to.
- dominotw 4mo agoi want to but it came with usba charing cable pogo pin
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- bell-cot 4mo agoWhether or not people are reading long or complex works for pleasure - what does this trend do to hiring for jobs which require serious comprehension of long, complex documents? Will we see in-person-only "interviews", where candidates drop their smart phones & glasses into a box, spend hours reading documents, then have to answer questions about 'em?
- frwrfwrfeefwf 4mo ago[dead]
- melvillain 4mo agoAre you reading this? Consider yourself a reader. I quit reading The Atlantic a decade ago due to their hot takes. Slate and Salon a decade before that. If you read Reddit and romance, you’re literate. Jerry ”I read,” Elaine “Books, Jerry. Books.”
- gowld 4mo agoWritten communication serves separable purposes: * Replicating speech, Archiving speech, and separating the acts of speaking and listening from each other. There are alternatives to written format. * Speech that can be edited easily, until it is perfected. * Speech that be sped up, slowed down, and jumped around with random access and search. * Silent speech. These features can be achieved with alternative technologies. Written communication also has drawbacks. It is a lossy compression of spoken speech.
- ranprieur 4mo agoReading is declining because of computers, which are a much more fragile and dependent technology than text on paper.
- snarfy 4mo agoI read non-fiction all day long. I'm sure you do too. Even as a kid I was never really interested in fiction. I'd rather read the encyclopedia.
- beej71 4mo agoI know there are a number of us who read encyclopedias over our breakfast cereal as kids. Ours were World Book.
- lynndotpy 4mo agoThis is a nit-pick, and I agree with the long arc of this article. (And it is very well-written, to boot). But, on this phenomenon, > Last year’s top-selling novel was Sunrise on the Reaping, the latest in the Hunger Games young-adult series. Brian Bannon, the chief librarian at the New York Public Library, told me that young-adult fiction is one of the library’s most popular offerings—including among decidedly not-young adults. I wonder to what extent this can be attributed to decades-long release windows for some of these novels. I find myself alienated by the dominance of simple and childrens media among my age group peers, but I read Eragon as a child, kept up with the series, and have the 2023 release in the Eragon series on my books-to-read list. The Hunger Games started in 2008; I couldn't bemoan someone who was captivated at 13 then for enjoying the occasional release in 2025.
- ButlerianJihad 4mo agoThe United States has made literacy into a Holy Grail of education, and our systems have reduced illiteracy levels to record lows. However, in the real world, there are so many basic jobs, unskilled labor jobs, that should not require literacy at all, and for thousands of years there were all kinds of workers who were never required to achieve literacy at all. So there may be a lot of wasted investment in education trying to make people literate when it's not actually required. Even if the foregoing is completely false and abhorrent to you, we must also come to terms with a "new literacy" in terms of ideograms and emoji. I am learning how to type emoji, and replace many textual expressions with singular emoji and symbols. Computers and electronic devices, as well as our own garments, are frequently labeled with ideograms that transcend human language, but must be interpreted for proper use. I have noticed some people around me who aren't really good at reading at all, and this is a real handicap to them when paperwork, and computer readouts, and just signs posted all over, are full of words, and our world surrounds us in words to read and comprehend, and if we can't read at lightning-speed levels, and comprehend what we read, we find ourselves at distinct evolutionary/legal/financial/social disadvantages. So I contend that future literacy will increasingly involve non-English emoji and symbology, and that not every human in the world needs to be literate in a particular written language, and while a majority of society can afford such an education, nothing of value may be lost.
- Planktonne 4mo ago> there are so many basic jobs, unskilled labor jobs, that should not require literacy at all > So there may be a lot of wasted investment in education trying to make people literate when it's not actually required. Our society doesn't warrant its own existence if the only considered criterion is how much value we can extract from each other.
- tolerance 4mo agoLong read. But this has been known for over 20 years. > Reading has always been associated with education and more generally with urban social elites. Although contemporary commentators deplore the decline of “the reading habit” or “literary reading,” historically the era of mass reading, which lasted from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century in northwestern Europe and North America, was the anomaly. "Reading and the Reading Class in the Twenty-First Century" https://sociology.northwestern.edu/documents/faculty-docs/faculty-research-article/annual-review-reading-copy.pdf https://sociology.northwestern.edu/documents/faculty-docs/fa...
- madhacker 4mo agovery long winded this article
- ramijames 4mo agoMy kids are active, voracious readers. At least one book (500-700 pages) a week. It feels like one of the only things that I've really done right as a parent.
- dash2 4mo agoHow did you do it?
- pastage 4mo agoMake it joyful Read books yourself Make book an important part of your life Read to the kids Teach them to read early Little to no phone use early on
- mercutio2 4mo agoThis is one of those questions non-parents ask. Kids come out as a person, with strong opinions and desires. You can shave off some rough edges, and maybe bend a few branches of their experience. But if you present a kid with the opportunity to read, and they read, you can’t take much credit. That’s just who they are. Others are given the opportunity and don’t. You can fail to provide the opportunity, but after that, it’s pretty much up to the kid. As a life long reader, on my own, and to my kid, including many a night time baby -> toddler -> easy chapter -> harder chapter read, my kid doesn’t read books. Certainly competent to do so, but just doesn’t. Possibly we could have continued to deny access to Netflix until later (it was 1 hour a week until about 10). No YouTube allowed. Still, didn’t read. Other kids do, and I’m jealous.
- beej71 4mo agoGenX here... I thought this was a great read. I still hope for a young rebellion against the forces the presented in the article. And the author does point out some reasons to hope. Personally, I read and write every day. I usually have 2-3 books I'm going through at any one time. I've noticed that on long-haul flights, the movies typically hold no interest and I just read for hours—what a luxury to have nothing else to do! We gave away our TV. The shows were just less compelling, we found. We don't miss it. I feel like we tried to catch the wave, and almost did, but we were unable. It rolled out from under us and now we're floating once again in the calm sea beyond. I have Moonreader installed on my phone, so I can reach for a book any time. This morning I was hypothesizing that since I use my phone for reading books, I'm fooling my brain into that association and maybe that's helpful in consuming long-form content online...? I also read paper books, a Kobo, my computer, and an Xteink x4. Really anything, I guess! That hardest part is knowing that more has been written than I will ever have time to enjoy.
- bluetrain 4mo agoNo offense, but this comes off as incredibly smug... Glad you're able to find the time to read and write every day, but not not everyone has that luxury.
- adamtaylor_13 4mo agoAre you sincerely suggesting, as you write a digital comment on Hacker News, that some people don't have 10-15 minutes in their day to read or write? Who are these people? Why do they not have the same 24 hours you and I do?
- axus 4mo agoIt must be nice, using Hacker News for education and entertainment, instead of cynically exploiting it as another online marketing opportunity.
- beej71 4mo agoIt's true that I'm in a place of privilege in the world. But it's amazing how much time gets freed up of one doesn't watch TV or read social media. Like the numbers show, it's hours per day. I sympathize with people who truly do not have the time, but that's different from most people who simply choose not to spend their time reading or writing.
- everdrive 4mo agoYou would be surprised just how quickly you can re-learn the focus to enjoy long-form writing and novels. Much like exercise, don't let your ego get in the way. Find something you enjoy, even if it's a bit trash, and just make it a habit. Like with everything you do regularly, your brain will get better at it, the habit will become more automatic, and you'll find yourself wanting to read more, and more often. It's very much not too late to turn the ship around on an individual level.
- taeric 4mo agoTo add to this, it isn't "doing it bad" if you aren't out there reading deep texts. Just as it isn't "doing it badly" if you can't run a 4 minute mile. As you say, you get better at what you are doing. If you want to get faster, at anything, you don't really have the option of skipping the slow phase.
- eudamoniac 4mo agoBut it's also important to realize that it is "doing it bad" if you are hoping to run a 4 minute mile but your only training is slowly walking around the block forever. At some point you have to seek out more substantial books. You can't just continually read pulp fiction and think you're going to improve at anything; you have to progress.
- taeric 4mo agoLargely fair. This is one where the specific goals, I think, work against people. I know most coaches will attach "attainable" to goals, to combat that. To that end, if your goal is just to read more, there is no reason to worry about how substantial your books are. However, if you goal is to read more substantially, you should start by aiming a bit higher than where you are. Achieve that, then adjust target. Progress, then, can come either in more volume of reading where you are; or in more substantive reading. Either are valid, to me. To take this to the exercise. If your goal is to do a fast mile, agreed that just walking the dog is unlikely to help. If your goal is to be physically active, simple walks punch well above what people think they do.
- quotemstr 4mo ago> > London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. > The researchers quoted students’ attempts to parse the passage. “So it’s like, um, the mud was all in the streets, and we were, no … so everything’s been, like, kind of washed around and we might find Megalosaurus bones but he says they’re waddling, um, all up the hill,” one student said. At least a quarter of the subjects interpreted the figures of speech literally, leading to the inference that dinosaurs walked the streets of 19th-century London. It's less that we've forgotten to read and more that technology has made maintaining the historical pretense of mass intellectualism non-viable. The mass bulk of humanity has always been this stupid. Curiosity, epistemic discipline, critical thinking, and counterfactual evaluation have always been the privilege and burden of a few. We've only pretended otherwise to flatter our sense of fair-mindedness, which itself is sparsely distributed among the primate biomass of humanity. Reality punishes you for refusing to model it properly. A non-predictive theory is worthless. An anti-predictive theory is a hazard. Let's remediate the epistemic toxic waste that is the idea that everyone is capable of the highest level of thought if only properly trained. If you're out in public, look around. A good chunk of the people you see can't understand, having had breakfast, that if they hadn't, they'd be hungry. When you're selected into an environment of concentrated rigor, you lose track of just how dumb most people are. The article is sad yet unsurprising.
- Planktonne 4mo agoThe issue with this stance is that it folds under immediate scrutiny. It posits that there are intellectually-capable elites and dull, leaden-eyed masses, and uses literacy levels as evidence of that. Except the people our society views as intellectual elites can't read that well. Every tech billionaire demonstrates a fatal lack of meaningful literacy, and everyone who shares your opinion disqualifies themselves. It's a running joke [1]. Either our elites aren't that elite, and we should ignore their vicious misanthropy, or they are, but their evidence is faulty (and so we should ignore their vicious misanthropy). More succinctly, Preacher points out that the people with the strongest superiority complexes tend to be the worst examples of the relevant trait [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torment_Nexus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torment_Nexus [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/comicbooks/comments/guckwf/life_imitates_art_sometimes_preacher_book_five/ https://www.reddit.com/r/comicbooks/comments/guckwf/life_imi...
- 4er_transform 4mo agoWho cares about reading? Take a step back - humans don’t exist to read, reading is a tool, a means to an end. It’s to transmit information from one to another. If we can do that with more information-dense, less lossy methods, all the better. Lamenting the end of reading is like lamenting the end of manual farm work: the goal isn’t to work in fields, it’s to harvest. We found ways to harvest more than ever for less effort and time than ever, let’s celebrate it.
- squidbeak 4mo agoCulture is "a tool, a means to an end. It’s to transmit information from one to another"?
- nxc18 4mo agoIf you can’t read, you can’t write, and if you can’t write, you can’t think. Depending on your place in the class hierarchy, and the orientation of your moral compass, this may or may not be a good thing.
- nothal 4mo agoHalf joke: If I had to bet, I would guess that reading will exist for as long as civilization does. More seriously: I am less certain that it will exist in its current form (mass media, publishing houses, etc), but I am certain that textual information will be a standard means of communication and that people will read it. I do think that computer-assisted cognition (including computer-assisted reading) are eventualities at this point. This sort of thing fundamentally challenges the concept of reading: is your brain (by computer-assistance) scanning a hard drive reading? Even though it's alien to us now, I think the answer is yes.
- avalys 4mo agoWhat method do you suggest is more information-dense and less lossy? What people are lamenting is that reading is being replaced with less information-dense, less accurate, less effective mechanisms, like Tiktok shorts and TV news.
- wing-_-nuts 4mo agoI'm trying really hard not to be judgemental about this... Until we invent some sort of matrixesq knowledge transfer, the printed word is hands down the best technology we have to transfer knowledge from one human to another. If a student finishes their education, and is so uncomfortable with reading that they never read another book, we have failed them. Images / Video can be useful to convey something which is hard to describe in words, but books give an author the ability to dive in much deeper depth on a subject than a video ever could.
- bkandel 4mo ago> Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, told me she’d spoken with a student who was struggling to read a book written in Old English. The culprit: Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. (The student used ChatGPT to “translate” the book into easier language.) Has the author read A Clockwork Orange? It is filled with made-up "slang" that's basically just Russian. Needing some help to understand that is totally reasonable to me -- I definitely looked up a bunch of the words when I read it!
- ogogmad 4mo agoWow. That went over the heads of both a Harvard student and an Atlantic journalist.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- smcg 4mo agoGive me an A... A! Give me an A... A! Welcome to Harvard!
- shimman 4mo agoYeah, this is definitely a massive slight. If it was any other book I'd buy it, but when you read terms like "horrorshow," or "platty", or "droogs" in the first few paragraphs it's not hard to see why one would look up words. Also who describes "A Clockwork Orange" as old english? There has to be a phrase for journalists that a conclusion ready in hand but their work is just finding scant/nonexistent evidence proving such a conclusion. Something like "parallel construction" for law enforcement.
- SoftTalker 4mo agoI read all day, every day. I read email. I read news. I read HN. I don't read books though. I've probably read one novel in the past five years. I used to read more books, newspapers, and magazines and can't really say why I don't anymore other than the news and magazine content is all online now, and it just doesn't seem like there is time left in the day to sit down with a book.
- underlipton 4mo agoIf you want people to read, you have to be willing to accept a population that does not feel harassed and hurried. You have to give them a raise when they say they can't afford shelter and food. You have to stop gatekeeping education as a scarce credential rather than giving it freely as a public good. You have to build systems that allow them to access their needs without movement or seeking help being difficult or even a death trap. You have to rein in the forces that wish to monopolize their attention. People read when they feel secure. We don't live in a particularly secure society.
- Arubis 4mo agoUrsula K. Le Guin on this in 2008: https://harpers.org/archive/2008/02/staying-awake/ https://harpers.org/archive/2008/02/staying-awake/
- jjk166 4mo agohttps://xkcd.com/1227/ https://xkcd.com/1227/
- azerix 4mo agoIt's very telling about myself that the length of the article troubled me... I really gotta read more ffs (if I had the time) (then again, if I have the time to write an unnecessary comment, then I also have the time to read something)
- analog8374 4mo agothat and the middle class
- trashb 4mo agoAnd yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. This sentence undermines the whole article. People do read more than ever. But we don't recognize it as such. We read on our phone while intermittently reading subtitles of Netflix in the background. We read every time we look at a computer, phone, advertisement etc. But we only count reading paper as "real reading". The shape of reading is changing yes. I think the "deep" thinking associated with reading has always been a bit of an elitist idea. Why would reading 1000 words of a great philosopher be any different from reading 1000 words of smut online. In some way losing this kind of stigma will make reading more accessible. Writing and publishing is dying first. And that has to go long before reading dies anyway.
- fellowniusmonk 4mo agoSome random thoughts: It is very odd, I do more deep reading then ever before but its curated through llms. I do the exploration then the dive on papers. Many novels we love were released as serials. I haven't gotten stuck trying to understand an idea because its poorly explained in a book in a while. I think humans have been very inefficient at finding gaps in logical progression in explanations because anyone who already knows it subconsciously skips steps in the explanation. That said, llms, woof. Still so much misunderstood.
- switchbak 4mo ago"the "deep" thinking associated with reading has always been a bit of an elitist idea" - precisely. This is all about massaging the categories such that consuming or producing a given type of media in a particular style is "good" and everything else is inadequate. So if I read a bunch of tech manuals, I'm not a reader because it's not fine literature? What if I read them as PDFs? What if I print them? Where's the line? I think we ought to call it something other than simply "reading", because the author seems to be leveraging the dual-meaning of that word to make their point more strongly. But "consuming literature for enjoyment" doesn't come off quite as spicy as pretending that others that don't are illiterate.
- babelfish 4mo ago> Why would reading 1000 words of a great philosopher be any different from reading 1000 words of smut online Agree that we should work on reducing the stigma around reading (which, incidentally, feels ridiculous to type); but very clearly one of these exercises your mind and one doesn't. People should want to learn things!
- wayeq 4mo agoSocial media and nearly all news articles covering the past decade or so have made me want to forget how to read entirely.
- gwbas1c 4mo ago> The study looked at people who had read a book, magazine, or newspaper; listened to an audiobook; or read an e-book. Uhm, what about Facebook, web-based news articles, and internet message boards? What about video games that involve significant reading? The above statement is just so biased about what reading is, that I discarded the article as alarmist! Just because someone isn't reading what you want them to, doesn't make them illiterate.
- FumblingBear 4mo agoOne thing that helped my friends and I really enjoy reading again is book clubs! Since the start of Covid, I've personally run ~3 books clubs with different people where we all vote on a book together, set a pace (usually a few chapters a week), and a time to meet weekly on discord and then discuss. It's been a great way to solidify friendships, broaden my interests (Not every book that's been voted on was one I'd have picked alone), and cultivate a habit of reading and enjoying meaningful time with people. I highly recommend anybody with friends who might be interested to reach out and give it a shot! It's been a delight! I've even branched off into hosting a movie club now with the same idea, just pick a movie weekly and watch it asynchronously, then hop on a call to discuss :)
- DamnInteresting 4mo agoAs a non-fiction author, I find myself reading a lot of non-leisure material for research--books, old newspapers, and that sort of thing. A few years ago I noticed that my leisure reading was on the decline, so I decided to delete all of the social media, news, and gaming apps from my phone, and replace them with an e-reader app. Now, when I have a few idle moments away from my computer, instead of checking something like reddit, I read a few pages from a book. It's great, I recommend it! I'm back to reading a couple of novels per month, and I don't have so much of that queasy wasted-time feeling that social media tends to give me. I've even learned how to pause reading mid-paragraph and resume easily later; that part took some practice.
- eudamoniac 4mo agoI would like to argue against the common opinion that Reading Is Good. I don't believe that reading pulp is good in any way. I don't believe that reading an airport novel is any better than watching TV. Books have the potential to better the mind, but they don't do so simply by being written words. The books must be of a certain artistic caliber. The push to get people reading in general cannot be the end goal. The end goal is to get people to read quality books, to better the mind, affirm life, practice empathy, experience pathos, feel the grace of God. Too many forget this is the end goal and just think reading words on paper is somehow intrinsically a noble endeavor. I think the common advice to get people into books is wrong and misses the point. "Find a fun trashy book and just read it" is maybe not productive advice unless attention rehabilitation is needed. Sure, some of those people might eventually stumble upon a good book, but advice can be much more efficient than that. Here's what I would recommend to a burgeoning reader: There are many easy and fun books that have artistic merit; read those. Find them via Booktok lists from pretentious looking people, or common school reading lists, or wherever; generally only read things you have heard of or that you saw on a list somewhere; don't randomly pick off the shelf. Teenager classics like 1984, Book of the New Sun, Kafka on the Shore, American Psycho, Lord of the Rings are fun and easy reads that have meat on the bone. Ignore the airport novel and anything published recently. The average book has the same lack of value as the average TV show, just less entertaining, more boring, and more effortful to experience. Why would you waste time and effort consuming boring, less entertaining media when the phone and the TV are right there? But when you find good books, there is no replacement; you are doing an entirely different thing than mindlessly entertaining yourself. That is what we're trying to do.
- zjp 4mo agoIt's more than reading. Peoples' patience for long-form anything is dying, and I'm guilty too. Too often I'm on my phone with a movie playing in the background. When it ends, I can't even tell you what happened. It was just noise in the background, to raise the dopamine floor of twitter even higher, and because nothing goes in long enough to remember, nothing interesting comes out in conversation.
- 1970-01-01 4mo agoThis "age of reading" is clickbait.
- woopah 4mo agoI also see the decline of reading, at least more "serious" long-form works, partly as an extension of the cult of productivity. Why read a 300 page book on something when you can get 75% of the main points in a 30s TikTok video? What's the point of "beautiful" language if it makes the sentence twice as long? I once had a coworker refer to Washington's farewell address as "deprecated" English, and he wasn't interested in reading it at all unless it was compressed down to an easily digestible structure. Similar to the sentiments expressed in the article, I do think something is lost when your mind is no longer allowed to wander before getting "to the point," but it's hard to articulate this loss clearly without reaching for vague justifications like "aesthetics". However, I also don't think we should force our kids just to read for the sake of reading; I think there should be some intrinsic desire to read a well-articulated sentence, whether it be from books or articles or even Twitter, and it's the seeming lack of that desire which is sad to see.
- blightful 4mo agoA few years ago I realized I hardly read books any longer. I maybe read a few books a year. I made an effort to start reading and read around 50 a year for a few years. That has dropped quite a bit the past year or two. It definitely took me a while to gain back my ability to focus on reading and I feel I am regressing again. I built a decent home library so have plenty to read but the desire comes and goes. I tried branching out into graphic novels and some have managed to hold my interest. Also some philosophy and psychology books. Lately nothing has really drawn me in though. In the past browsing a used book store or library usually had me getting interested in something different so I might do that soon. Also asking my family and friends for their favorite books.
- mortsnort 4mo agoIs this reading specific? It feels like just about every activity that is not social media is in decline. I keep reading that streaming TV services are losing users to Tik Tok and YouTube. People can't even be bothered to watch TV.
- bitlax 4mo ago"You're in Plato's cave but everyone is bed rotting."
- browski 4mo agoEducation is too obsessed with reading. It's passive cognitive copy paste. Writing seems way more important. Requires reading and establishing one's own voice. But writing in school (at least the district my ex worked for) is focused on boring research essays. There's little if any time spent fostering creative writing.
- kderbyma 4mo agoThe Atlantic.....mouthpiece of the globalist hegemonies and military oligarchs..... right.... yeah....thanks for nothing