The End of Reading?

I am going to tackle a summary of The Atlantic’s August cover story “The End of Reading Is Here” with full understanding of the irony of summarizing a story about how no one reads anymore. But that’s where we are in society and the other option is for me to write a blog post about “the baselines of defining what is cool” and I am simply not in a head space to go down that road again. Though if anyone wants to debate whether or not ‘Comfort = Cool’ I am all ears.

Rose Horowitch begins her 27 page article with a brief history of the Library of Alexandria. It’s pretty snappy to get from Ptolemy I had it built to collect all the knowledge to … and then a buncha shit happens and whether through war or negligence, we mostly lost all the knowledge. I think this is a useful place to begin a discussion about literacy because she sort of speed runs literacy as a concept, jumping from The Library of Alexandria anecdote to a shitting on the Latest Hunger Games book which was the number one top selling novel last year, and Onyx Storm — a book v popular with the Romantsy crowd over on BookTok.

From there we jump to a statistic I’m tempted to wax poetic on but instead will merely present it:
38% of Americans read a novel (OR SHORT STORY last year); 57% of Americans placed a bet last year.
Is this to say that gambling has replaced reading as a pastime? Not exactly, but it certainly hints at where society is headed. The barrier to entry on gambling is admittedly a lot lower than reading a novel, but a short story? Come on society. Do better. Enrich your brain, save your bank account!

She then posits what I guess is the main thesis of the piece. It’s not that we’re becoming ILLITERATE, it’s that we’re POST LITERATE. Even those of who are literate no longer engage in any complex reading. If it’s hard, we skip it. It’s not that people can’t read, it’s more that they simply won’t.

She builds a foundation of understanding behind the notion that literacy itself helps people think logically, abstractly and make linear thought. Some people simply think of reading as a knowledge transfer but it’s more than that. Reading changes the way our brain processes information. All information. Not just the information you’re reading. Reading builds a structure for cognition and currently we are weakening that structure and it’s unclear what we’re replacing it with. Horowitch explains that even the founders (she name checks Franklin) believed that the American experiment relied on literacy (for whites) as a precondition for self-governance. How can you govern, or make decisions if you can’t think? It was impossible.

AND YET HERE WE ARE.

She then gives a nice anecdote about the death of letter writing. She talks about how civil war soldiers sending missives back to their families or wives was the equivalent of sending flowers. Now what do we send? Memes? Dick pics? How far we’ve fallen from “O the humanity. O the horrors of war,”

Marshall McLuhan suggested we were on our way to post-literacy in the 1960s so, chicken little’s always sorta seen this coming. Then Neil Postman wrote that TV hijacked our attention span in the 80s and so here we are 40 years after tv complaining not of TV (or the internet, or cell phones, or social media) but more of a collection of all of it. Similar to the Library of Alexandria. It didn’t die with a bang but with a wimper. We’re losing critical thinking skills one vertical video at a time (now) but it began all the way back with the printing press, ironically.

It used to be people had to speak to think, then Gutenburg made it easier to print and now we can slow down and read to think. Thereby transforming human consciousness. But very quickly books and non fiction pamphlets were threatened by book, then newspapers, then, newspapers then radio. With infinite content came shrinking attention. We used to be able to focus because there was only so much to consume but now we can consume ALL OF IT. So why waste your time on any of it? We are becoming jacks of all trades, masters of none. All of us thinking an inch deep and infinite miles wide instead of digging into anything.

And now we must bring AI into the discussion. I mentioned infinite content and that's been true since basically the invention of the newspaper. There's always been something to consume but now, not only are we able to consume the real content, we must contend with the fake content! There is more content and infinitely LESS THINKING. No one ponders anything the see anymore. We've outsourced thinking to the AI. We've outsourced content creation to the Ais. Take job hunting for example. Ai generated resumes serving AI generated job descriptions, being failed by Ai generated resume optimizers, and Ai generated cover letters being flagged by AI generated recruiters. It's AI all the way down, so what's the point of reading? Or thinking? In a world where we have so much content, I think the most telling fact is that content is destroying our attention spans. In 2004, the average person's attention span on a screen was two and a half minutes. By 2012, it was 75 seconds. Five years ago, it had cratered to about 47 seconds. We're not reading less because we can't.
We're reading less because we physically cannot sit still long enough to finish the sentence you're currently — wait, are you even still here?

Our president famously doesn’t read. Kanye west told us he hates books. Venture cap bros hate introspection. Founders and creators are thinking about what’s next not what was.

Horowitch is self-aware enough to know what you're thinking right about now: "hasn't every generation cried wolf about this exact thing?" And yes! She knows! She digs up a 126-year-old Atlantic essay — from The Atlantic — panicking about newspapers rotting the youth's brains with sports scores and gossip instead of Real Literature. Before that it was novels themselves getting blamed, Jefferson apparently thought fiction turned women's brains to mush and kept them from "wholesome reading" (he woulda really hated BookTok and OnyxStorm). So the pattern is: new medium arrives, elders lose their minds, society survives, everyone forgets they panicked. Sure.

Except her whole argument is that THIS time the ratchet doesn't go back — you can't un-invent the infinite scroll, there's no version of TikTok that gets less addictive with time. Every previous panic had an eventual equilibrium. She's betting this one doesn't. And I think I tend to agree. How do we put the milk back in the cow on this one?

Then she throws the reader a bone — book sales are actually UP, indie bookstores are opening, Substack's thriving, audiobooks are a billion dollar industry, so maybe reading's fine actually? — and then snatches the bone back immediately.

Turns out 20% of adults account for 80% of all books read. Reading isn't dying, it's just becoming a hobby. Like beekeeping. Or knitting. Something a shrinking, proud little subculture does while everyone else watches a guy eat increasingly large gummy bears on YouTube. And if you're reading this right now — congrats, you're in the club, population: dwindling.

Though shout out to me for taking a 8500 word essay and condensing it to 1500!

This leads into the part that actually stung a little: we've flipped who culture flows from. It used to run vertically — old people who read a lot handed down wisdom to young people through books. Now it runs horizontally, kid to kid, algorithm to algorithm. The elders aren't the authority anymore. MrBeast is. The dude who buries himself alive for views is now, structurally speaking, doing the job Aristotle used to do. Imagine in 2000 years people studying MrBeast along side Aristotle.

Is there a happy ending? Doubtful but maybe. Some states are banning phones in schools, library checkouts are ticking up in response, so it's not a completely done deal — before she zooms all the way in on herself. Turns out the writer of a 27-page eulogy for reading is ALSO someone who used to read every night as a kid and now scrolls before bed like the rest of us. She doesn't end with a solution. She ends with a shrug and a "this is ours to lose," which, coming from someone who just spent 27 pages proving we're losing it, is either humility or a cop-out, you decide.
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