"Alexa what does this article say?"

… 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.)

😮

I couldn't read the article. Is this why the end of reading is here?

Because spoken words disappear as soon as they’re uttered, oral cultures value repetition to aid memory. Bards in oral societies make use of stock phrases and mnemonics to keep track of their train of thought. They traffic in epithets and “enthusiastic description of physical violence,” in Ong’s words, because conflict is more memorable than dispassionate discussion. Speakers can’t edit their words the way writers can, so they press on without admitting their mistakes. If they later contradict themselves, they don’t expect the audience to recall their earlier statements. Meaning depends on the identity of the speaker, not on any concept of objective truth.

It is unlikely that Donald Trump has familiarized himself with Orality and Literacy. But if he did, he might recognize himself in Ong’s description. Trump’s communication style is perfectly suited to an oral society. He employs epithets—“Low-Energy Jeb,” “Little Marco,” “Sleepy Joe”—that are easy to remember and repeat. He contradicts himself as though there is no record of his previous statements. Even his writing is almost indistinguishable from his speech. (It makes sense; Trump reportedly prefers dictation to composition.) His online posts are full of idiosyncratically placed punctuation, capital letters, and exclamation points. Many are memes with little text: One featured an image of an American warship hitting an Iranian airplane with a laser beam and included the phrase “Lasers: Bing, Bing, GONE!!!”

But the optimists overlook a crucial thread in the data: Text is thriving among a dwindling proportion of the population. Just 20 percent of adults accounted for more than 80 percent of all books read last year. “It’s becoming a kind of niche hobby, like stamp collecting or growing orchids,” Leah Price, a historian of reading at Rutgers University, told me. Readers spend more time reading each day than they did two decades ago. They appear to be even more passionate about print than their predecessors. But the people devoted to text, who derive cultural understanding and intellectual connection from the written word, are now part of a subculture. The fact that you are reading this article almost certainly makes you a member of it.

I mean... I'm reading this off the internet and found it through a message board I spend shitloads of time on instead of reading books. I read books as well; mostly reference material for childrearing or programming. It has been a while since I read a fiction book, and challenging myself to do it in spanish since that's the kind of thing that improves my language acquisition the most doesn't help my volume of reading.

IDK. I hated the classics and anything that didn't feel like the actual language I spoke even when I was an avid reader; my dad tried to make me read Dostoevsky and I just wanted to read Terry Prattchett. I hated Shakespere. Sometimes the classics are just too fucking meandering to ascertain what the fuck they want to say.

This paragraph feels like a "yay, you go audience! by reading this, you are special!

“The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining,”

In 1985, Postman, a friend and disciple of McLuhan’s, published Amusing Ourselves to Death. He argued that television had hijacked Americans’ attention and turned politics into cheap entertainment.

And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate.

and this is why movies in general too became stupid and boring ☞

If TV crowded out the silent time necessary for reading, broadband internet and the smartphone make it nearly impossible. Not too long ago, at-home screen entertainment was finite. Shows aired on a certain day, at a certain time. If you wanted to watch an old movie, you had to put your shoes on and go to a video store. Books could compete in that environment. Some people, at least, would turn off the TV and read a book before falling asleep.

Now entertainment is limitless. There’s no hard stop—one show bleeds into the next. People watch TV with their phone in hand, monitoring social media or texting with friends. Netflix has reportedly told directors and screenwriters to assume that the audience isn’t paying attention and to constantly remind viewers what’s going on.

“It is not that the disappearance of a library led to a dark age, nor that its survival would have improved those ages,” the classics scholar Roger Bagnall has written. The fact that the library was allowed to die showed that the dark age had already arrived.

👆

he End of Spelling as well.

Time to panic, I guess. 😐

I don't think the end of reading is here. That's still one of my favourite things to do on the internet / on my mobile devices, and a lot of my favourite games are reading intensive ^shoutout^ ^to^ ^the^ ^Life^ ^and^ ^Suffering^ ^of^ ^Prince^ ^Jerian^ ^which^ ^releases^ ^in^ ^11^ ^days^

I wonder if anyone actually has ever forced themselves to read a boring book outside of professional necessity. If we have a reading crisis then we have a crisis of sourcing reading material rather than anything else.

People are reading more than ever, the difference is in general people are more stressed and exhausted from life and have less freetime than in the past.

Sitting down to read a book requires amount of mental energy left over at the end of the day.

This fits into my theory that especially along with AI, we are going to see an explosion of the difference between the most and least intelligent participants in our society in the future. Where until now, mostly due to technical limitations, everyone was more less on the same level. We already see some consequences of a wider range of intelligence levels - like populist politics, where high intelligence people manipulate those with lower intelligence. But the real catastrophe will be when the strongest AI gets intelligent enough to manipulate the smartest humans in the same way.

Margaret Rennix, 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.)

… I’m sorry, what the hell?

Some 2,000 years later, under very different circumstances, the darkness is gathering again. Americans, once members of a proudly literate society, read much less than they used to. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, which conducts the most comprehensive survey of the nation’s reading habits, fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38 percent read a novel or short story. A study analyzing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. (The study looked at people who had read a book, magazine, or newspaper; listened to an audiobook; or read an e-book.)

I mean, that excludes people who are reading text in electronic form other than e-books. Websites, various forms of text messaging, social media. My guess is that people most likely read considerably more text than they used to. They just may not be reading it in book or traditional mass-media form.

And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information.

...as the article body points out, somewhat at odds with the title.

Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis.

I mean, maybe. But that's a pretty different proposition than reading ending, and a lot of the numbers cited really aren't directly relevant to that claim, like the proportion that read newspapers.

Reading has come to seem extraneous even to some of the best-educated members of society. Margaret Rennix, 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.

I mean...I can't read much Old English. And I'm pretty sure that if you go back 40 years or so, pre-mass-Internet-use, most of society would have a lot of trouble with even Middle English.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English

Fæder ūre þū þe eart on heofonum,
Sīe þīn nama ġehālgod.
Tōbecume þīn rīċe,

Ġeweorðe þīn willa, on
eorðan swā swā on
heofonum.

Ūrne dæġhwamlīċan hlāf sele
ūs tōdæġ,

And forġief ūs ūre gyltas, swā
swā wē forġiefaþ ūrum
gyltendum.

And ne ġelǣd þū ūs on
costnunge, ac ālīes ūs of
yfele.

Sōðlīċe.

It isn't the Internet doing that. It's the Norman occupation of Britain and subsequent language shifts.

The culprit: Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange.

I haven't read it, but I'm pretty sure that that's not written in Old English.

https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.182027/2015.182027.A-Clockwork-Orange_djvu.txt

So off we went our several ways, me belching arrrrgh on the cold coke I’d peeted. I had my cut-throat britva handy in case any of Billyboy’s droogs should be around near the flatblock waiting, or for that matter any of the other bandas or gruppas or shaikas that from time to time were at war with one. Where I lived was with my dadda and mum in the flats of Mumapal Flatblock i8a, between Kingsley Avenue and Wilsonsway I got to the big mam door with no trouble, though I did pass one young malchick sprawling and creeching and moanmg m the gutter, all cut about lovely , and saw in the lamplight also streaks of blood here and there like signatures, my brothers, of the night’s Allying.

Yeah. That's definitely not Old English.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clockwork_Orange_(novel)

The book is partially written in a Russian-influenced argot called "Nadsat"

Yeah.

The books that people do read are simpler than they used to be. New York Times best sellers today have sentences that are about one-third shorter than they were a century ago. Longer sentences aren’t inherently better. But their former ubiquity suggests an age when Americans had the inclination and ability to read serious works of literature.

Okay, but there's also been a shift that long predates the Internet towards shorter sentences. In general, spoken English uses shorter sentences than written English. Let me dig up a George Washington speech

those sentences would be long by even written English standards of, say, 1990.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/George_Washington%27s_Farewell_Address

While, then, every part of our country thus feels an immediate and particular interest in Union, all the parts combined cannot fail to find in the united mass of means and efforts greater strength, greater resource, proportionably greater security from external danger, a less frequent interruption of their peace by foreign nations; and, what is of inestimable value, they must derive from Union an exemption from those broils and wars between themselves, which so frequently afflict neighbouring countries not tied together by the same governments, which their own rivalships alone would be sufficient to produce, but which opposite foreign alliances, attachments, and intrigues would stimulate and embitter. Hence, likewise, they will avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments, which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican Liberty. In this sense it is, that your Union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty, and that the love of the one ought to endear to you the preservation of the other.

EDIT: Maybe the author's point is that the student thought that it was written in Old English, just because it was incomprehensible, and he was able to read it via ChatGPT without even learning which language he was reading? I guess that'd be kind of surprising, but...I'm not sure that that misunderstanding represents some sort of technology-induced downfall of civilization either. considers Honestly, if anything, I'd say that breaking down language barriers to that degree is probably a positive (though I suppose if part of the point of the work is to create linguistic barriers, you could say that it's defeating part of the point of the work). I mean, I read Journey to the West in an English translation rather than the original Chinese. I read Don Quixote in an English translation than the original Spanish. They were human translations rather than machine translations, but I don't think that anyone would hold those up as signs of the end of reading, either.

Not in our family. Reading is mandatory. Someone has to keep the scrolls from the Library intact while the conservatives try to burn it down.

As always with The Atlantic, there is not a single mention of class in the entire lengthy article. These movements away from the written word are not happening in a vacuum and cannot be divorced from the further concentration of wealth in the hands of capital. Capital has decided that it would rather we be idiots (or dead, even better) than pose the risk of a communist revolution. They are all-in on AI because they want to make the worker obsolete; they want to live in luxury without having to pay anyone, and when they have achieved such a feat, they'll cull the rest of us like the cattle they think we are. It's a pipe-dream of course, but it's still up to us to resist before climate change does us all in.

You can have my books if you take them out of my cold dead hands.