So much interesting stuff in this article from The Atlantic - absolutely worth settling in and reading the whole thing. However, these are the bits I digitally underlined:
‘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’
‘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.’
‘Rennix told me that some students now view reading as an unnecessarily burdensome way of acquiring knowledge. “By asking them to read,” she said, “professors are arbitrarily withholding information from students by forcing them to get it through this more difficult medium.”’
‘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. In this environment, people have to be really determined to read. Most aren’t.’
‘But what if you consistently replace one kind of action (reading a word) with another (watching an Instagram Reel)? One of the most robust findings in neuroscience is that people’s brains master what they practice. If we fill our time with short-form videos instead of books, our reading skills atrophy. We have less background knowledge to aid comprehension. There’s no danger of spontaneous mass illiteracy, but the complex cognitive skills that reading fosters start to degrade. The library of the mind falls into disrepair.’
‘A number of digital technologies have hijacked attention and made focused reading all but impossible. Generative AI is the first tool to threaten the continued existence of writing. Writing is hard. Orwell likened the experience to a “long bout of some painful illness.” AI promises a simple remedy. The trouble is that writing is not merely the act of transcribing fully formed thoughts—if it were, it wouldn’t be hard. Writing is the way people figure out what they think, and how to convey those thoughts to someone who doesn’t already share them.’
‘The skill of deep thinking will likely become rarer and rarer in a world where much of the population uses AI to avoid writing. It will also become more and more important. AI is creating a superabundance of text. It has led to a threefold increase in the number of books released on Amazon each month since 2022, when ChatGPT was launched. Over the same period, scientific-journal submissions have also surged. Many were written at least in part by artificial intelligence.’
