The End of Reading Is Here

Should I read this? It's pretty long:

Rose Horowitch. Atlantic, 07/08/2026: shared link I hope: The End of Reading Is Here: Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history.

This link was on X in case the above doesn't work:
Americans were once members of a proudly literate society, but today, reading has declined across age groups, gender, and education levels. For The Atlantic’s August issue, @rosehorowitch explores the reading collapse—and its effects on civilization: https://theatln.tc/BYL9zqM8

You could blame William T. Vollmann. His latest novel A TABLE FOR FORTUNE is 3,025 pages & priced at $149.

>1 featherbear: From that Atlantic article:

"...Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, told me she’d spoken with a student who was struggling to read a book written in Old English. The culprit: Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. (The student used ChatGPT to “translate” the book into easier language.)"

Woof.

I'm reluctant to even click on the link, because I know other places have much higher literacy rates than anglophone (or French) countries. It bugs me that the headline is conflating one place with "human history".

There's also some evidence that literacy was higher in medieval England than was thought for a long time, though I can't recall where I saw this to find a link.

>3 keristars:

It bugs me that the headline is conflating one place with "human history".

Many such cases, it feels like there's not a topic on earth where people won't act like the Anglophone world (or sometimes specifically the US) is fully representative of the whole world. Drives me crazy... and I'm just an Anglophone Canadian, must be much worse for people coming from actually disparate backgrounds :y

>4 ngoomie: Most of the recent furor about reading and unprepared college students is doing this, especially if anyone brings up the "three cue" method of teaching reading that was popular in the USA.

I've seen college instructors from other countries talk about similar challenges with their students, but they certainly didn't all switch how they taught reading or switch to different instruction models based on new standardized testing at the same time, or whatever pet theory the author has. (other than phones, those seem to be pretty universal, but also not the culprit)

There have been debates about how to teach reading ever since I was in elementary school (in the last century). I remember my mother complaining that we were taught to memorize words rather than sound out syllables — or something like that. I don't know what the "three cue" method is. Must be a new one. Bottom line: literacy only increases when one teaches people to read and write and that is where the problem is. Most methods seem to work but ya gotta use 'em!

>6 krazy4katz: That's the three cue, I believe. Memorizing the shapes of words and using pictures and other words for context/guessing.

Actually finished reading the article now, and I've got some more to say:

The paradox is that although video contains more information than text—not just language but sounds and moving images—it does not stimulate deeper thinking. To the contrary, video thrusts so much information at the viewer at once that it’s difficult to focus on any one piece of it. The frames keep changing regardless of how much the viewer has noticed or comprehended. Few people pause and rewind to reflect on what they might have missed.

(emphasis mine)
I've always found I have this problem with video-based media, and almost thought there was something wrong with me because of it, because everyone around me acts like they don't and looks at me like I have 3 heads when I say I struggle to follow along with video and hardly absorb anything from it, and thus prefer to read. I legitimately thought for a long time it was solely because of a mix of being somewhat hard of hearing and having a couple cognitive issues that make me... slow. They definitely contribute, but maybe they're not so central to that problem as I used to think...?

Also even despite preferring text over video + audio, I've also been finding my own ability to read as of late has been going down the shitter, and I'm not even someone who uses TikTok or normal social media like at all, other than text-based chat apps like Discord. My main place I spend time online is a forum where people still write big long tirades (meant lovingly/jokingly) and I've also gravitated more towards sites like that my whole life. I'm honestly not sure what my problem is, it kinda drives me fuckin crazy.

Also another thing mentioned in this article almost just in passing, is people preferring podcasts (and sometimes ebooks) because it means they can listen while they do other things like the dishes, as opposed to reading which requires pretty singular focus. And I really wonder if this isn't part of a bigger, more important point than it might seem or than it's often treated as. With the economy going down the shitter the past handful of years, a lot of people I know have outright complained they feel like they don't barely have any time to do the things they enjoy outside of work anymore. Sometimes it's that they literally have to spend too much time on work that there's no free time left, other times they theoretically have enough time, but work leaves them so tired that in the end all they have energy to do is watch YouTube. And even when those don't apply, it's like there's a bigger pressure to be as productive as humanly possible, to constantly be grinding even in your free time. Even I feel that last one and sometimes feel "guilty" for reading for fun when I could be doing something "more productive", and I'm disabled enough that it's very very difficult for me to find a job and currently don't even have one.

Edit: Oh and I wanted to mention, I'm 23 and I think I was taught with a combination of three-cueing and more traditional phonics. Mostly phonics with the method of inferring the meaning of unknown words from the ones that surround thrown in on top. My memory of school instruction is pretty terrible, though, so I could be accidentally underplaying the use of three-cueing when I was younger, I'm not sure