Before my 18-year-old grandson returned to his Australian university after a short visit, I pressed to his chest a 10-page magazine article and told him to read it. It was the cover story from the August issue of the Atlantic Monthly. The story’s title was “The Age of Reading is Over”.
Earlier, his 15-year-old brother had told me how his class received a synopsis of the plot of Macbeth to help them understand Shakespeare. I said I could accept that (because my late mother’s Junior School Shakespeare copy of The Merchant of Venice has a preface that fully outlines the plot). Nevertheless, I showed him her copy of Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare and told him he should read that if the Bard’s blank verse and rhyming couplets were a problem. The bestseller retains as much Shakespearean language as possible while telling wonderful stories. A copy of it was waiting for him when he returned to Sydney.
My grandsons are children of the digital age. While my childhood was defined by the six inches by nine inches dimensions of a hardback book, theirs is defined by the size of the latest mobile screen they have been able to persuade their parents to buy – roughly half that of my childhood page. And, while they are adept scrollers, I am fairly certain they have never scrolled as far as I read as I consumed 285 pages of Charles Dickens’ close typed Tale of Two Cities.
Don’t get me wrong: My grandsons do read books, but their generation has been hardwired into screen-based information.
After reading Rose Horowitch’s deeply disturbing article in the Atlantic Monthly I felt I had to embark on a personal mission prove to her wrong…in some small way. The timing of my grandsons’ visit made them ideal targets. I thought I was off to a good start when the 18-year-old assured he would read the article on the flight home.
It charts the decline of reading in the United States but it’s a fair bet the trend extends well beyond those borders. The statistics are alarming: Fewer than half of that country’s adults read a book of any kind in 2022, only 16 per cent read for pleasure in 2023, and now most Americans get their news on their phones or laptops.
The best-selling book in the United States last year was the latest instalment of the Hunger Games and its popularity is not limited to the young adults it is aimed at. That may be a pointer to the fact that basic reading skills are declining. Adult literacy is dropping: Nearly 30 per cent of Americans cannot paraphrase a multi-page text. It’s easy to see why: So much of what they consume is short form. And when confronted by a lengthy text, they simply ask ChatGPT or similar AI tools to summarise it for them.
Two statistics cited by Horowitch sent a shiver down my spine. The first was that most English teachers in US middle and high schools assigned zero to four books a year for students to read. The second was that 80 per cent of elementary school teachers said students had received school issued electronic devices when they entered our equivalent of primary school.
Much of her article is devoted to demonstrating how reading has shaped the modern mind and how its degradation will reshape how we think. She quotes the late Neil Postman, a cultural critic who – four decades ago – predicted what we are now witnessing. He laid the blame on show business. I pulled Amusing Ourselves to Death from my bookcase in order to quote to you a paragraph that I believe sums up why we need to continue to read. He was referring to the two centuries in America when its population relied entirely on the printed word for the dissemination of public information.
The name I give to that period of time during which the American mind submitted itself to the sovereignty of the printing press is the Age of Exposition. Exposition is a mode of thought, a method of learning, and a means of expression. Almost all of the characteristics we associate with mature discourse were amplified by typograph, which has the strongest possible bias toward exposition: a sophisticated ability to think conceptually, deductively and sequentially; a high valuation of reason and order; an abhorrence of contradiction; a large capacity for detachment and objectivity; and a tolerance for delayed response.”
He blamed the Age of Show Business for its decline, but the seductive power of the television screen was nothing compared to the digital devices that proliferated after the Internet entered general use in the mid-1990s. In a 1995 interview Postman voiced his opposition to personal computers in schools. He was worried that the personal computer would diminish socializing as citizens and human beings. Clearly no-one was listening.
Horowitch describes the period we are entering as “postliterate”. Citing numerous studies in neuroscience, she says: “If we fill our time with short-form videos instead of books, our reading skills atrophy”. Along with that skill goes comprehension, attention span, and use of our cerebellum – a part of the brain associated with learning. We don’t lose the powers of critical thinking – we don’t learn them in the first place.
Those powers are all the more important because, although reading is in decline, we are being bombarded with ever-increasing amount of information. Much of this information is curated to get our attention with algorithms that media theorist Joshua Meyrowitz says “reward simplistic, inflammatory, emotionally resonant content”. Combined with alarming reductions in attention span, we are in danger of losing the ability to think for ourselves.
Our very grip on reality is in danger when artificial intelligence is added to the mix. Look at Facebook and ask yourself how many of the images are the product of AI. I subscribe to a number of history pages, and many are now displaying images that suggest colourising of old photographs when, in fact, they are AI creations. What else on social media is the product of increasingly sophisticated – and difficult to detect – generative AI?
We are living in a sea of AI slop and disinformation, but too many of us lack the defences to see it for what it is. We have had lies, damned lies and statistics for a very long time but for the past 150 years or so we have had journalists to gather, assess and weigh them against the facts they have also gathered. The number and scope of such gatekeepers will undoubtedly diminish in a postliterate age. Our ability to assimilate, analyse and utilise information in ways that help us function as full members of civil society will diminish with them…if we let it happen.
Sadly, society has done little or nothing to stop it happening. Nor has the political establishment at the centre of civil society. Politicians are indifferent or (worse) too taken with the manipulative powers of digital media to do anything.
The Atlantic Monthly article reports a growing academic view that the Library of Alexandria was not destroyed by war so much as negligence. Humidity, mice and insects may have eliminated as much ancient human knowledge as marauding hordes, and plunged humanity into the Dark Ages. The digital equivalent of mice and marauders has the capacity to return us to a form of darkness that Rose Horowitch says is gathering again.
We need to mobilise to make reading – at length – popular again. I have started with my grandsons. If they have read this, I’ll be well on the road to achieving my goal.
