Quote from: rcjordan on August 16, 2025, 05:29:58 PMI feel like we're only now just starting to understand the damage that algorithmically-delivered short form video is doing to our attention spans

Lots of talk about the Atlantic article on reading. Of course, I haven't read it LOL. It actually is interesting enough based on excerpts that it has me thinking of an Atlantic subscription though.

Sadly and ironically, I know about the contents via... X
https://x.com/nxthompson/status/2077016904968069471

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-postliterate-age/687618/

Reading is defined as reading a book, newspaper or magazine OR listening to an audiobook. The percentage of Americans who any of the above on a given day is now 16% down from 28% in 2003. Meanwhile 57% of Americans placed a bet online in the last year.

Also, the school curricula have switched to excerpts rather than whole books (I hear this from colleagues still teaching college - you basically can't assign books to college students anymore). The interesting thing here is that this is not just a consequence of short-form video. It is also a consequence of high-stakes testing where reading ability is measured based on the ability to analyse short excerpts. So it's also a consequence of Goodhart's Law

"post-literate America" ^-bsky

It is possible that we are seeing the end of mass literacy.

I have written before about how changes in SEO and now AI are forcing a sort of regression to the mean in terms of the number of people who make a living as "writers" broadly defined.

I hadn't quite imagined a regression to the mean for the number of people who were competent readers.

But it does make me think that the value of reading and writing will rise dramatically as they become more rare skills. Originally, a humanities education had two purposes: vocational education to feed the burgeoning bureaucracies of Europe and character formation. It seems to have lost both of those purposes, but I think the value of a humanities education for vocational training will reassert itself. I am not convinced that education will happen at a university, but that's another story.

For nuts and bolts writing of the sort that created most "SEO writing" positions, I think AI will out-perform humans.

But reading and writing train a type of intellectual rigor that is difficult to train by other means.

>train a type of intellectual rigor

Very well said.  Being able to command the (English) language will always serve you well.

David Wallace Wells digs in and finds almost all the decline in average minutes of reading is due to decline in reading among those over 65.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/opinion/reading-test-scores-smartphones.html

> decline in reading among those over 65.

I quit reading paper-based products in 1995. Too linear. I thrive in feed torrents.

All the other eldsters stay glued to their phones. They're as bad or worse than 14yos.

This was the very accusation leveled this morning by the 18yo who independently(!!!) read that article.

But she asked, if youth reading hasn't changed that much, why have scores plummeted. My guess based on the original article was that the focus on excerpts driven by high stakes testing was a problem.

She the informed me that the known strategy on the AP English exam is to NOT read the excerpts, but to answer all questions that reference a specific line number, then using what you have learned reading just those lines, guess at the other questions.  Since the test prioritizes speed, this works best. IF you finish ahead of time, you can go back and revisit those other questions, but generally reading the example texts is a bad strategy.