It was certainly a great display of human intellectual prowess and artistic capacity in bygone times when the world moved at a much slower pace, but who has the time and the energy to read a long novel today?

Even cinema is dying and nobody seems to care that much.

> Only 38 percent read a novel or short story... The proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023.... Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet.

It takes much less time to place a bet than to read a novel/short story. Likewise, reading for pleasure "on any given day" is a totally different measure than "placed a bet last year".

Like...you're a programmer? And you don't like to read? I assumed that people who enjoy software would be into intellectual stimulation but I've learned that this is wrong. More what seems to be the case is people have enjoyed coding as a kind of video game.

But this generalizes to the general population too. Marshall McLuhan's message remains a very important medium.

I feel like if it took me 20hr to place a bet I'm probably not doing much of that either.

Anecdotal, but my 7y/o loves reading. She's flying through series' and it's getting pricey. I guess she falls in the 16% of people who enjoy it.

Reading is definitely a skill that needs to be learned and maintained. Going from reading a couple of hundred words, to even a longer 30 - 60 min article can be tough if you’re out of shape. Same with writing.

It makes me wonder if literate people can regress to illiterate, for no other reason than lack of reading maintenance.

Most of the news are not worth reading. I listen to news when eating, and I am very glad I don't have to waste my reading span on this crap.

In the first paragraph, e.g., there is:

> There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim. Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.

Shrinking the passages on the SAT from full-page to a few sentences will exacerbate this trend.

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.

Nowadays is still that but it’s also a way to relax. Even though I don’t have accounts in the main social media networks (instagram, fb, twitter, youtube, etc) I still consume them indirectly on a weekly basis (e.g., i like to watch videoclips in YT, a friend sends me a twitter link, etc). It makes me anxious. I’ve realised that consuming in tiny bits (short videos, ads, stories, tweets, private messages, even going to those stores where everything is under $5) doesn’t suit me well, therefore reading regular books for at least 1-2h per day (plus other activities like working out alone, or going for a walk to a park) is becoming essential for my wellbeing.

The reality is that before, you needed to read huge swaths of information to find/know the relevant information. Now you don’t.

The density of useful information I gather from places like Wikipedia, even long form articles is substantially higher than I got reading non-fiction.

I still read books sometimes. It’s a different experience. But it’s only a dumbing down of society, if the things you’re reading are dumb.

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.

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.

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

What initially attracted me to programming was the ability it gives one to create. As a kid the idea that a “regular” person like myself could make computer programs — and not just simple CLI toys but full on lovingly crafted, end user friendly complex GUI applications — blew my mind. Programs weren’t like every nearly every other product which only ever came out of some factory that nobody saw themselves.

As such my interest in programming comes with a slant towards practical usability. I don’t do well with abstract concepts without a rock solid grounding real world use case, even though those are intellectual candy for a few subgroups of programmers.

It was truer in the 1980s-1990s, when programming was not a prestigious or high paying job and computers were much cruder and required much more skill to get adequate performance from them. Generally, aspiring hackers were very well read people.

There were, of course, corporate programmers doing business programming back then too but they weren't considered hackers and wouldn't even have wanted themselves to be considered hackers.

Under normal circumstances for a healthy human, I'd say no, at least directly. Not a scientific analysis of course, but I don't feel reading ability in a language that you use regularly is going to degrade that significantly. A very similar problem might come about through a drop in attention span which is definitely an issue for many these days, but I wouldn't count this as a literacy problem: the written letters/words/sentences/… are not the issue and other things are going to be equally impacted.

For a second+ language, especially if you never got to a particularly fluent state, this is probably quite different - for anecdata I did pretty well at Spanish GCSE then never spoke a word the 32 years before starting to relearn last year. But again I would not really call this a general literacy problem.

One place where you do see literacy fall precipitously is due to mental degradation due to common complications of old age, if you have relatives with dementia you will have seen this first hand. While literacy is only part of a massive problem here, reading and writing abilities are things that fall away relatively quickly for many (presumably due to them being relatively complex operations, and needing conscious concentration rather than being autonomic life-preserving functions).

It's a very recent redefinition, pushed by people looking to make money from a panic. They're trying to make people who are simply incurious (through stupidity, fear, boredom or whatever) into illiterates. More people are literate than ever before because of the internet. Before the internet, there were an enormous number (up to a quarter of the US population) of actual illiterates.

The new definition of illiteracy is (manipulatively) somehow including people who wouldn't be able to understand something that is being read to them.

I suspect that a lot of middle-class people are illiteracy truthers, because they've never met someone who actually couldn't read. I'm from poor, black, uneducated, working people, and before the internet there were plenty who simply couldn't read. If you asked them to write the word "STOP" they would make a good attempt to copy what they remembered from a stop sign, and draw it like a picture. They're normal people, though, and if you didn't know them well, the strategies that they've developed over a lifetime would keep you from noticing.

It's going to be back again - technology has removed the need to read and write because of voice recognition. We're calling it too early.

> It makes me wonder if literate people can regress to illiterate, for no other reason than lack of reading maintenance.

I think it's too easy to be exposed to words. To fall into illiteracy through atrophy would be like forgetting Spanish while living in Mexico. The good thing about comprehension-type skills is that they put you into a virtuous circle passively. Once your French gets to a certain point, it takes an effort not to understand French; and every piece of French you fail to fail to understand makes you better at understanding French. If you're in Paris, riding the bus, and somebody is babbling into a cellphone, you'll wish you didn't understand French.

I recently had more than a year of not reading any books that was interrupted when I found about The Culture series. I read Use of Weapons and had to read all novels from that universe. After that I tried to find some books similar to them, tried to read some recommended ones (didn't finish any of them) and stopped reading.

In my case reading books is a kind of fever that I get every year or so.