From The Atlantic. The end of reading is here. Welcome to a post literate world.
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Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history, Rose Horowitch reports. https://theatln.tc/gnIIAtdC
Fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022, according to the National Endowment for the Arts. Americans get much less of their news through reading than they once did. Fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores have slid for the past decade.
Ironically, we’re likely consuming more words than ever—in the form of emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, and Instagram captions. But “this explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information,” Horowitch continues. The postliterate era has arrived.
Some Americans are proudly post­literate, Horowitch argues: “The president has spoken about his taste for bullet-pointed briefings, and aides have said he likes pictures and charts. The world’s richest men brag about getting their information from X posts, podcasts, and conversations with chatbots. Young people who seek wealth and influence are encouraged to mimic them.”
Dedicated reading is now clustered among a small minority of the population, Horowitch reports: Just 20 percent of adults accounted for more than 80 percent of all books read last year. These “readers spend more time reading each day than they did two decades ago. They appear to be even more passionate about print than their predecessors. But the people devoted to text, who derive cultural understanding and intellectual connection from the written word, are now part of a subculture,” Horowitch continues. “The remaining readers are marginalized, mocked, and in many ways irrelevant.”