The Age of Reading Is Over

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• Hacker News
• Who cares about reading? Take a step back - humans don’t exist to read, reading is a tool, a means to an end. It’s to transmit information from one to another. If we can do that with more information-dense, less lossy methods, all the better.

  Lamenting the end of reading is like lamenting the end of manual farm work: the goal isn’t to work in fields, it’s to harvest. We found ways to harvest more than ever for less effort and time than ever, let’s celebrate it.

  by 4er_transform
• Culture is "a tool, a means to an end. It’s to transmit information from one to another"?
  by squidbeak
• If you can’t read, you can’t write, and if you can’t write, you can’t think.

  Depending on your place in the class hierarchy, and the orientation of your moral compass, this may or may not be a good thing.

  by nxc18
• What method do you suggest is more information-dense and less lossy?

  What people are lamenting is that reading is being replaced with less information-dense, less accurate, less effective mechanisms, like Tiktok shorts and TV news.

  by avalys
• I'm trying really hard not to be judgemental about this...

  Until we invent some sort of matrixesq knowledge transfer, the printed word is hands down the best technology we have to transfer knowledge from one human to another. If a student finishes their education, and is so uncomfortable with reading that they never read another book, we have failed them.

  Images / Video can be useful to convey something which is hard to describe in words, but books give an author the ability to dive in much deeper depth on a subject than a video ever could.

  by wing-_-nuts
• Half joke: If I had to bet, I would guess that reading will exist for as long as civilization does.

  More seriously: I am less certain that it will exist in its current form (mass media, publishing houses, etc), but I am certain that textual information will be a standard means of communication and that people will read it. I do think that computer-assisted cognition (including computer-assisted reading) are eventualities at this point. This sort of thing fundamentally challenges the concept of reading: is your brain (by computer-assistance) scanning a hard drive reading? Even though it's alien to us now, I think the answer is yes.

  by nothal
• I’ve flagged the article and I would suggest others do the same. The Atlantic never posts things that satisfy the hacker spirit in any way. It is almost always puffery and melodrama meant to attract clicks and views, but the subject matter itself is trite and not worth discussing on a hacker forum.
  by tangenter
• Interesting phenomens are often discussed here so I personally do not perceive it as offtopic. Yet as you said, I have the same feeling from this article. Click bait grievance posting.
  by hsuduebc2
• I would think that the decline of reading would be relevant to discuss on a hacker forum.
  by AnimalMuppet
• As a CS instructor, I find this article extremely interesting, FWIW.
  by beej71
• Are you reading this? Consider yourself a reader. I quit reading The Atlantic a decade ago due to their hot takes. Slate and Salon a decade before that. If you read Reddit and romance, you’re literate.

  Jerry ”I read,” Elaine “Books, Jerry. Books.”

  by melvillain
• to put it politely it's demographic changes
  by frwrfwrfeefwf
• i got xelink ereader few months ago and i've been reading a ton more. i have all sorts of kindle but i stopped reading but xelink attached to my phone got me back.

  I would love a phone where this is a standard feature. dont care about fancy cameras and stuff.

  by dominotw
• I couldn't attach my xteink to my phone because of a standoff around the camera on my phone case. I just now realized that the standoff could be removed and now the magnet works! :)

  Did you install Crosspoint on it? I absolutely recommend it.

  For reading on my phone Moon Reader is my go-to.

  by beej71
• Oh well we had a good run of 5000 years! See you on the next planet.
  by expedition32
• Written communication serves separable purposes:

  * Replicating speech, Archiving speech, and separating the acts of speaking and listening from each other. There are alternatives to written format.

  * Speech that can be edited easily, until it is perfected.

  * Speech that be sped up, slowed down, and jumped around with random access and search.

  * Silent speech.

  These features can be achieved with alternative technologies.

  Written communication also has drawbacks. It is a lossy compression of spoken speech.

  by gowld
• I would like to argue against the common opinion that Reading Is Good. I don't believe that reading pulp is good in any way. I don't believe that reading an airport novel is any better than watching TV.

  Books have the potential to better the mind, but they don't do so simply by being written words. The books must be of a certain artistic caliber. The push to get people reading in general cannot be the end goal. The end goal is to get people to read quality books, to better the mind, affirm life, practice empathy, experience pathos, feel the grace of God. Too many forget this is the end goal and just think reading words on paper is somehow intrinsically a noble endeavor.

  I think the common advice to get people into books is wrong and misses the point. "Find a fun trashy book and just read it" is maybe not productive advice unless attention rehabilitation is needed. Sure, some of those people might eventually stumble upon a good book, but advice can be much more efficient than that.

  Here's what I would recommend to a burgeoning reader: There are many easy and fun books that have artistic merit; read those. Find them via Booktok lists from pretentious looking people, or common school reading lists, or wherever; generally only read things you have heard of or that you saw on a list somewhere; don't randomly pick off the shelf. Teenager classics like 1984, Book of the New Sun, Kafka on the Shore, American Psycho, Lord of the Rings are fun and easy reads that have meat on the bone. Ignore the airport novel and anything published recently. The average book has the same lack of value as the average TV show, just less entertaining, more boring, and more effortful to experience. Why would you waste time and effort consuming boring, less entertaining media when the phone and the TV are right there? But when you find good books, there is no replacement; you are doing an entirely different thing than mindlessly entertaining yourself. That is what we're trying to do.

  by eudamoniac
• The United States has made literacy into a Holy Grail of education, and our systems have reduced illiteracy levels to record lows. However, in the real world, there are so many basic jobs, unskilled labor jobs, that should not require literacy at all, and for thousands of years there were all kinds of workers who were never required to achieve literacy at all. So there may be a lot of wasted investment in education trying to make people literate when it's not actually required.

  Even if the foregoing is completely false and abhorrent to you, we must also come to terms with a "new literacy" in terms of ideograms and emoji. I am learning how to type emoji, and replace many textual expressions with singular emoji and symbols. Computers and electronic devices, as well as our own garments, are frequently labeled with ideograms that transcend human language, but must be interpreted for proper use.

  I have noticed some people around me who aren't really good at reading at all, and this is a real handicap to them when paperwork, and computer readouts, and just signs posted all over, are full of words, and our world surrounds us in words to read and comprehend, and if we can't read at lightning-speed levels, and comprehend what we read, we find ourselves at distinct evolutionary/legal/financial/social disadvantages.

  So I contend that future literacy will increasingly involve non-English emoji and symbology, and that not every human in the world needs to be literate in a particular written language, and while a majority of society can afford such an education, nothing of value may be lost.

  by ButlerianJihad
• > there are so many basic jobs, unskilled labor jobs, that should not require literacy at all

  > So there may be a lot of wasted investment in education trying to make people literate when it's not actually required.

  Our society doesn't warrant its own existence if the only considered criterion is how much value we can extract from each other.

  by Planktonne
• very long winded this article
  by madhacker
• It's very telling about myself that the length of the article troubled me... I really gotta read more ffs (if I had the time)

  (then again, if I have the time to write an unnecessary comment, then I also have the time to read something)

  by azerix
• that and the middle class
  by analog8374
• Whether or not people are reading long or complex works for pleasure - what does this trend do to hiring for jobs which require serious comprehension of long, complex documents?

  Will we see in-person-only "interviews", where candidates drop their smart phones & glasses into a box, spend hours reading documents, then have to answer questions about 'em?

  by bell-cot
• > Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history.

  What dreadful hyperbole. If reading is in decline, it’s just that we are in a crisis of widespread ignorance and broken education system, but good luck navigating through life without knowing how to read.

  The anomaly might in fact be that we are regressing in human general intelligence compared to the rest of history.

  by sph
• > good luck navigating through life without knowing how to read

  Literacy isn't usually evaluated as a binary thing.

  Here's how one organization ranks reading levels:

  https://nces.ed.gov/naal/perf_levels.asp

  I think the optimists in the article once believed proficiency was inevitable but maybe basic is the best they should hope for now.

  by criddell
• Not "the rest of history," but relative to the ~1800-2000 period of steadily increasing literacy and educational attainment.

  The European Dark Ages after the fall of Western Rome was a real thing. Many people regressed to the Stone Age for hundreds of years, and we lost almost every written work from ancient Greece and Rome. That can absolutely happen with the US and EU by 2200, especially considering digital information is far more fragile over centuries than papyrus and parchment.

  by Diogenesian
• Reading is declining because of computers, which are a much more fragile and dependent technology than text on paper.
  by ranprieur
• I read more than ever, but Substack is taking a sizable share of the pie whereas lit and non-fiction is now my late evening. I don't do the audiobook thing, though I understand that has become increasingly popular yet not really given much credence.

  Desire might be theoretically limitless, but time and attention is not. Time I spend reading is time I'm not consuming endless short-form videos. People have gotten hooked on phones and the medium dictates what they consume.

  There could be boom and bust cycles for this. Trends lose lustre and people are always looking for ways to signal status/competence. It's probably why "booktok" is a thing.

  by lanfeust6
• Books have their advantages, but I don't think you necessarily need to read books—in fact, I think books can sometimes be worse. One strength of books is that their structure, starting with the table of contents, trains you in logical composition.

  But books also have drawbacks:

  1.If there's incorrect information at the time of writing, it becomes fixed at that point.

  2.The author's worldview can become overly authoritative, and the messiness of reality is smoothed over for the sake of a neat narrative.

  3.Counterexamples and recent debates are often missing.

  There are also bad papers that manipulate data to get results, and books are no different. I think books are not bad for introductory maps and mental training.

  If you look at programming books from about 10 years ago, they're like historical relics—hard to apply today.

  In a rapidly changing world, if you only read books, you'll easily fall behind. Information is pouring in, and books are static media, slow to adapt. Training yourself to read text is important, but it doesn't have to be through books.

  Books help build a mental structure of tables of contents and conceptual sequences, but I question whether that structure can only be formed through books.

  And realistically, there's a lot of bad content in books too. Self-help books are full of nonsense and scams that exploit people's desire for success. But they're venerated simply because they come in the form of a 'book.'

  What we should venerate is not the 'form of a book,' but the 'way of reading that builds a mental framework.'

  So I question whether reading only books is really the right approach. I think of this as 'form over substance.' The core is training logical thinking—that doesn't have to come in the form of a book.

  I sometimes think it's worth recalling what Socrates said in Plato's Phaedrus: 'Writing is not a remedy for memory, but a means of making it external, leading to forgetfulness.

  Once you write something down, you no longer try to remember it within yourself. You come to trust the external symbols.

  Writing doesn't give people true wisdom—it only gives them the appearance of wisdom. What matters is not what's written in a book, but what knowledge you internalize. I don't understand the obsession with the form itself.

  by jdw64
• There's a quote from Marcus Aurelius: "Perhaps there are none more lazy, or more truly ignorant, than your everlasting readers". People who just believe whatever they read in books don't actually learn to think, just to regurgitate, and often become out of touch with how the world actually works (although this happens to heavy consumers of any kind of fiction).
  by logicchains