Last week, Rose Horowitch published a splashy Atlantic article titled “The End of Reading is Here.” (Ironically, given the subject matter, it weighed in at over 8,500 words.)
Horowitch’s argument, which elaborates on similar concerns recently raised by commentators such as James Marriott, is that distracting digital technology has led to a sudden and radical reduction in reading.
Here are just some of the data she cites to back up this claim:
- Less than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38% read a novel or short story.
- The proportion of American adults who read for pleasure on any given day has fallen from 28% in 2004 to 16% in 2023, while the proportion who read to a child is down to 2%.
- Over 60% of high school seniors struggle, to varying degrees, with interpreting text.
- Nearly 30% of American adults cannot paraphrase a multipage text (representing a 50% increase from a decade ago).
- Between 1984 and today, the proportion of 13-year-olds who said they “rarely or never” read for fun rose from 8% to 29%.
- (To be sure, book sales have been holding steady in recent years, but as Horowitch notes, this potentially obscures a shift in which a small percentage of serious readers are consuming more books, compensating for an overall drop in people who read regularly.)
- And so on…
The key question is whether these reductions matter, or if they just represent a normal evolution of communication technology, similar to how fewer people listen to the radio than they did a century ago.
Horowitch argues for the former stance, noting that reading plays a critical and privileged role in the human experience:
“The advent of reading and writing transformed society. It altered people’s consciousness and politics, along with the intellectual feats they were capable of. The decline of reading will bring about changes of the same magnitude. It will affect our innermost thoughts, our society’s politics and culture, and how we tell the history of our civilization.”
Those who read my recent New York Times op-ed on cognitive fitness know that I fervently agree with this conclusion. I recently finished reading (!) Walter Ong’s classic, Orality and Literacy, which further convinced me that essentially every cultural attribute that we celebrate – from human rights, to logic, to progress, to the very notion of an independent self – are conceptual children born from the mind-shaping power of the written word.
Literacy is not simply a technology, but is instead, in some sense, the technology that enabled the cognitive world we currently take for granted. When we spend less time grappling with words, we’re taking a step backward, which helps explain why James Marriott titled his upcoming book on this phenomenon, The New Dark Ages.
As a technology theorist, I’m often accused of being reactionary or overly conservative in my analysis of new tools. But when it comes to the digital assault on literacy, the concerns I share with Horowitch and Marriott seem self-evidently justified.
But what should we do about all of this?
As I argued in my op-ed, one obvious response is to tackle this mental decline today similarly to how we tackled the decline in our physical health in the second half of the last century: by embracing specific routines around information consumption designed to arrest this slide away from advanced literacy. We should treat highly distracting digital garbage like junk food – something we largely avoid – and purposefully schedule a non-trivial amount of time each day to read, write, and self-reflect, just as we now dedicate time to walking, jogging, and weight lifting.
“An astonishing wealth of information and wisdom has been bequeathed to us,” writes Horowitch in the conclusion to her article. “What we’ll do with this inheritance is up to us.”
I agree. It’s time to get up and take action.
