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Edit: sorry for being so dismissive, but I just can't stand rhetoric that says something about "us" and "we". There were seriously stupid people back when we supposedly had larger attention spans. There are still stupid people now.
But over time I’ve started to feel there’s at least some truth to some of those moral panics, and it's not correct to dismiss all. I remember laughing at an old article about “calcu-holism,” basically the idea of becoming too dependent on calculators. At the time it sounded ridiculous, but looking back, the point wasn’t that bad. Reaching for a calculator even for doing basic math is a silly habit, a sign of extreme mental laziness. And it's inefficient too.
I’ve noticed something similar in myself with attention. I remember reading The Power Broker, a 1,000+ pages tome, in under a month. Now I struggle to finish books that are a fraction of that length. And if it feels this way for me, I can only imagine what it’s like for teenagers who’ve grown up with smartphones their entire lives. Possibly, being completely engrossed in a book would be an alien experience to them.
Most books are useless and boring. Some books have good concept but drags things needlessly.
I still read a good amount everyday but not a 300 page book where the core content is 2 page.
However, a great book is still interesting and being "completely engrossed" is still possible.
It is the book content quality (compared to other things in society) that dropped.
I remember for a history project at secondary school reading the notes from a parish meeting in the 1600s from my local church, where the elders were complaining about young people meeting in the porch of the church at night to drink and socialise. Which is pretty much what my friends and I were doing at as a teen (though local park over the church).
For most of time, until the industrial revolution, technology didn't really advance that quickly. The world you were born into would be technologically near identical to the one you died in.
Technology is now advancing at such a rate that most if not all of humanity is in a permanent state of future shock, and it's only going to get worse. Nobody really seems to have a clue how to deal with that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_ep...
Also, the article and book claim that people have read less classics than some time ago. But the same argument is even worse in reverse: people from some time ago had no clue about climate change, computers, women's rights, or AI. With all their smarts, they let this happen. How does that suggest that reading the classics is useful?
Can you point to a specific observation or claim that this is relevant to? I don't see any argument that's sensitive to the absolute number of stupid people in the world. This is a non-sequitur at best.
> Also, the article and book claim that people have read less classics than some time ago. But the same argument is even worse in reverse: people from some time ago had no clue about climate change, computers, women's rights, or AI. With all their smarts, they let this happen. How does that suggest that reading the classics is useful?
Your argument here is implicitly that if reading the classics were useful, then we should've invented computers sooner than we did? Do you find that compelling?
I agree with the sentiment that we tend to misrepresent the culture of mass societies, as if at one point in time there were droves of people reading Aristotle. But the ability to read and our transition to an oral or post-literate culture is very much affecting elites too. There is pretty good evidence when you compare contemporary histories. Or if you live in a bourgeois milieu, you just need to ask around.
I don't think that reading necessarily makes you a better person. I've met a good amount of people of the highest moral dignity who do not read. But on the whole, reading helps build competence - moral and technical - and create a sense of shared culture. Going back to an "oral culture" is nothing but a regression.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-eli...
If you haven't had the distinct displeasure of being around an iPad kid, I envy you.
There's anecdote that aligns with experience, that aligns with studies. And frankly, it seems silly to me that we need science to empirically prove something we can all witness with our own brains. That said, whichever method you submit to: they all bear witness to the same conclusion:
Social media (especially the brainless forms like TikTok) is incredibly damaging.
https://literacytrust.org.uk/research-services/research-repo...
We also know from colleges and schools that students coming in are having difficulty doing the reading needed for classes, even in literature classes.
AI is making this worse, since it’s unleashed an epidemic of cheating and the tool itself is inimical to learning. (Learning is friction. The tool to remove friction also removes learning)
The issue isn’t that we have stupid people then and now. The issue is that trends of literacy and development now are changing direction.
AI also allows for a lot more learning. Using ChatGPT to read and better understand Moby Dick works wonders for me.
As to your point, literacy rates have been declining since the 80s. 40, going on 50 years is plenty of time to study a trend and draw conclusions.
Can you point me to any time in history where low literacy led to better outcomes for the average person than high literacy? Or even a study that looks solely at modern times and doesn’t manage to correlate literacy with positive social achievement?
But even if you can’t accept a historical argument due to the spans of time being incomparable, I personally believe from a more normative perspective that literacy is a foundational and fundamental good for humanity. But, if you can’t accept that argument either, consider how much of our ability to interact with and understand our own society requires literacy: imagine trying to sign up for healthcare, understand your taxes, weigh the risks of a surgical procedure, or figure out who to vote for if you either can’t read, can’t understand nuance, or are constantly missing words due to a lacking vocabulary.
And of course, being less literate means you are more likely to be convinced by people whose rhetoric is convincing, whether or not their ideas are correct and whether or not they are actually trying to fleece you.
Do you speak more than one language? I think that is also a telling experience. It would be extraordinarily difficult for me to live in a country where my second language is the only one. Sure, I can follow along with a conversation well enough, but dealing with government bureaucracy, forms, healthcare, and politics without the ability to be certain in my interpretation of the text would be a nightmare.
The irony of people sitting here on this all-text discussion site, responding to a textual article about the effect of technology on literacy, responding with “well, maybe literacy is actually not so important,” is so utterly ridiculous that I hope it’s satire and I’m just missing the joke.
Some even equate attention discipline to intelligence of all things.
"Celeb takes a bath in baked beans for charity"
The existence of slop in the 90s doesn't prove that slop is not more prominent in the 2020s.
There’s a little bit of frenetic emotional dysregulation, and then they say the weirdest stuff to me.
I don’t think you could have made a similar argument about heavy trash tv watchers. They may have had less to talk about, you may have found them less interesting, but it didn’t literally alter their personalities.
We have a big problem.
Is he not aware that Mr. Jobs has been dead for over a decade?
That’ll teach them.
Jokes aside, reading something doesn’t mean it’s valuable. I think people read more than ever. Subtitles, captions, social media posts, source code. Most of it is jank.
> people in positions of power and influence are now notably ignorant about history and the classics, comfortable only with referencing pop culture
Reads like unsourced depressionwave slop. First source that comes to mind: https://www.ranker.com/list/us-presidents-by-iq/lauren-slocu...
Assuming memory capacity would yield the best decisions and best leadership ignores charisma, personal life experience, sociopathy, interdependence, society, uncertainty about the future and more.
You can’t be too literate and educated: it’s a rat race / status race like any other.
Even if the classics and history siphon into modern productions such as Hades.
> The cultural elite has abandoned cultural elitism.
Cultural accessibility is at an all time high. Next to oceans of entertaining things more optimized for consumption it’s hard to stay relevant.
Expertise and being able to rely on others with expertise is more valuable than requiring every leader to have read the classics or being part of some intellectual elite. Knowing things is awesome mainly because it’s fast and helps with survival.
Requiring everyone to be an expert on everything is a form of punishment to all.
Edit: wrong any/every
You are correct and yet it's a straw man. At no point did the author advocate for everyone knowing everything.
He IS advocating that everyone know something. A position that is increasingly, comically, tragically untrue.
It's a crisis in literature. How do we fix this?
As best I can tell, the problem is contained to kindle self publishing and the like, which were always unfiltered. And we buy plenty of new books.
I figure in ten years when someone asks what "doomscrolling" means, we'll probably just shrug and say it means scrolling away to our doom.
The argument is basically here is what happened to civilisation X when it abandoned virtue/cohesion/tradition; therefore contemporary liberalism, immigration, feminism, secularism, etc. are leading us towards the same fate.
No interest really in people whose project it is to launder reactionary opinions through ancient history.
And while many ppls throughout the centuries would never enter a library (and thus many would never consciously talk to AI), we can assume one cannot use AI atm if they don't read through all (or at least some) of its response. Perhaps we'll reach the Lady's Illustrated Primer* at some point (amazing we're not there yet, but we are actually given all the visual artifacts produced by Gees), but right now - everyone on a computer with AI access reads more than they did back in the 90s. It is just not reading off a book.
And there is also a strong argument that reading off the endless (still, sadly) stream of generated text is more beneficial to the person than reading endless nonsense on everyday media. Because media is super biased, and local media even more so.
* ref. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age
> One particularly desperate ... strategy I developed was to kick my phone haphazardly across the room so it would lodge under some unknown piece of furniture
So over privileged people buy $1500 iphones, only to kick them across room, to hide? I do not think reading yet another master piece would help such person!
The reason we read less long form prose is because we have more information-dense, relevant, and personalized forms of communication and knowledge transfer available to us. If you take a book from world top 100 and compare it to average youtube feed, you will be horrified. But it's not like people in the recent past were primarily reading Conrad and contemplating physical isolation's impact on social norms.
A viral article in The Atlantic [1] shows evidence and testimony that kids at elite universities simply can't read anymore. I've seen the claim repeated in many other places and looking around me I believe it. Those kids are not replacing Dostoevsky or Aristotle with more compact versions of it.
The airport book industry is indeed full of books that could be fit in ten pages. But there's a universe of useful - potentially life-changing - books beyond that, and not only in the humanities. Some modern technical books justify their length. I seriously doubt that something like The Data Warehouse Toolkit can be replaced by reading piecemeal blogposts online.
Same goes for history, I sincerely doubt you can properly learn it in depth without reading long-form. In my experience, people who only listen to history podcasts or consume 10-minute videos tend to have a much poorer command of the facts and of the broader motions of history.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-eli...
Maybe you have only been reading the wrong books.
All would be well with the World if this was actually true…