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This episode is brought to you by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Hosted by Katie Milkman, an award winning behavioral scientist and author of the best selling book how to Change. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind people's decisions. Hear true stories from Nobel laureates, historians, authors, athletes and more about why people do the things they do and how to make better ones to help avoid costly mistakes. Listen to choiceology@schwab.com podcast or wherever you listen.
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Support for the show comes from ServiceNow. AI is moving fast across the enterprise, but without visibility it's just chaos. Different tools, different models, different teams using AI in completely different ways. ServiceNow turns that chaos into control. With the AI control tower, you see all your AI across the business in one place, what it's doing, what it's done, how and what it's about to do so you stay in control. To put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com.
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C
When was the last time you sat down and read a book? A full book cover to cover? What about a long magazine or newspaper article? For a lot of us, it's been a while, which is weird because we're all constantly reading. We live in the information age. We're surrounded by written content, phone notifications, Slack messages, WhatsApp threads, meeting summaries. But that content is short and not very complex. In fact, we often pride ourselves on writing things that are brief and to the point. So what is all this brevity doing to us? How are we changing and what happens to our minds and our culture when we stop reading long texts? I'm Jonathan Hill, filling in for Sean Illing, and this is the gray area. My guest today is Rose Horowitz, staff writer for the Atlantic and author of the recent article the Age of Reading Is Over. In it, she argues that we're moving into a post literate society, one where we're surrounded by text like emails, text messages, Reddit threads, AI generated content, but that we're losing our interest in reading longer book length texts. Rose argues that this is not only changing what we read, it's also changing what we think, altering our ability to engage with complex ideas. Even our ability to think for ourselves could be at risk. I invited Rose on the show to discuss what the digital age has done to our relationships, how not reading has changed our politics, and if reading is kind of overrated. Rose Horowitz, welcome to the show.
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D
Thank you so much for having me.
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C
I'd love to hear about your own relationship with reading and how that's shifted over the years.
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D
I was raised, really, in a family of readers. You know, my parents passed down their favorite books. My dad read to me. You know, my sisters were always excited to. To talk about the boxcar children with me and everything like that. I was really trying to. To read as much as I could. And then I noticed over time that, you know, as I kind of graduated college, I was just steadily reading less and less. And it wasn't that I was really conscious of until I looked back, but I, you know, was just got busier, and I, you know, checked my phone before bed instead of reading. And so I noticed that that had kind of slipped away from me. And that was a really stark change in my life. When I looked back, I was like, wow, I used to read so much, and it's just such a change now. And in the process of reporting the piece, you know, I spoke with college professors and, you know, I spoke with a researcher who did focus groups with high school students, and he most described reading for pleasure as an alien practice. So I do think that there, you know, is evidence kind of suggesting that this is broader than my personal experience. You know, I talk in the piece about how people often refer to this as a literacy crisis, but I don't think that's exactly it. You know, we know that people can still read, you know, relative to, you know, decades and centuries ago, like, the literacy rate is quite high, and we might be reading more words than ever when you think about the number of, like, emails and text messages and social media posts we read. So I was really thinking about it as more, you know, we are still reading. It's not so much a problem of literacy, but it's a problem that, you know, kind of reading so many small fragments of text has crowded out the time that people, you know, previously would have spent, you know, devoting and kind of getting, you know, really connected to a rich and complex text. So it's sort of more of a change of something that I, you know, called post literacy, which was a term that media theorists originated earlier. And I think it's more of a change of that than just a straightforward literacy crisis.
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C
What are the. Can you just sort of spell out what is the difference between a literacy crisis and post literacy?
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D
So a literacy crisis, to me, would mean that, you know, people are really struggling with the, like, building blocks of reading kind of decoding words, you know, comprehending short sentences that they really, like, can't read text. And there is evidence that, you know, 4th and 8 reading scores are in decline. Adult Reading scores have declined. You know, 30% of Americans now struggle to paraphrase or make inferences from a multi page text. So we do see, you know, that some of these kind of foundational reading skills have eroded. But you know, I think what's sort of unique about post literacy and what I think is kind of the broader phenomenon that's occurring right now is that it's just that text is no longer kind of the main way that people transmit information and news, news and entertainment and, and cultural connection. And so that's really the change that it's shifted from, from text to video. And, and that's kind of what I was trying to get across with post literacy.
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C
And you mentioned children and adults. Who exactly are we talking about when we talk about post literacy? Are we just talking kids? Are we just talking adults? Are we talking everybody?
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D
So we think we're talking everybody. Um, you know, you can look and in the data, this is definitely something that we can see for, you know, that stret demographics. You know, I note in the piece that retirees and college graduates and women have historically been the groups that read the most. And you know, they've seen collapses as well. So this isn't something that's confined to a single group. It would almost be potentially easier to solve if it was.
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C
Yeah, I want to dig into more of those hard numbers and more of those examples. Are there, is there anything else that tells us, hey, we're not reading like we used to?
- [07:35]
D
Yes, so the data is quite clear on this. So, you know, the share of Americans who read a book or an article on any given day has declined by 40% over the past two decades. In 2022, which is the last year that we have really great data for, you know, fewer than half of all Americans read a book of any kind, and only 38% read a novel or short story. And so, you know, the data is quite clear when we look at these kind of very authoritative sources with large sample sizes that this is happening and is kind of undeniable.
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C
What's lost if we spend our time reading more short things than long form? Like, you're right. Like, I don't know, I can look at my computer right now and find so many emails, I'm constantly reading articles, I'm constantly reading Reddit posts. So the reading's happening, but yeah, what are we losing if we're not sitting down with a long story?
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D
Well, I think it's twofold, you know, in one sense, so much of kind of what's been passed down to Us from prior generations is just contained in, you know, longer stories. And so, you know, we want to be able to access that. And, you know, reading a summary of it is not going to be the same experience. And then also, you know, I think just thinking about kind of the cognitive effects of, you know, reading and of persisting through something for a long period of time. You know, we know that two decades ago, the average attention span on a screen was two and a half minutes, and five years ago, it was 47 seconds. So, you know, I think there is sort of a change as we become more accustomed to just switching between things very rapidly and to kind of not attending to anything for an extended period of time. You know, that would. That would have effects.
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C
What's lost if we spend our time reading short form rather than long form. You have this really interesting story about researchers in Uzbekistan, and I'd love for you to tell that to us.
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D
You know, this is a story that Walter Ong wrote about in his book Orality and Literacy. And this is a really, you know, seminal, famous text kind of in media theory. He was a historian and a Jesuit priest, and, you know, he wrote about these kind of case studies that this neuropsychologist had done in the Soviet Union. And he had spoken to peasants as they were first receiving literacy instruction. And he asked them a series of questions. And, you know, one of the questions was just a syllogism, a kind of a logical question. It was like, in the far north, all bears are white. This place is in the far north. What color are the bears there? And the literate peasants, you know, all soon answered and said, okay, the bears there are white. And the illiterate peasants, you know, refused to answer the question because they were saying they hadn't been there. That wasn't their personal experience. And so they couldn't answer. They refused to try, and so on. Sort of interpreted this experiment as showing that literacy conveyed kind of an ability to think abstractly and logically and was more than just the ability to read words. I think it's important to note that in experiments since then, that hasn't always replicated. So it's not guaranteed. Obviously, they didn't have the exact same experimental standards that we would now in the 19th when this research was being done. But, you know, I think Ong's kind of larger point that, you know, literate cultures value, like sustained linear argumentation with, you know, evidence and counterpoints, you know, does stand.
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C
I think that's so interesting because I think thinking in that way is just Something so many of us take for granted. I don't think. We think, oh, I read. And therefore, it unlocks this part of my brain.
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D
Right. And it's so interesting because, you know, I feel like it really kind of started occurring to me as you're saying. I hadn't thought about that until I was reading, you know, these works. And when I was reading Ong, you know, he talks about how writing and reading are just kind of fundamentally different ways of transmitting information than speaking is. So, you know, we write much slower than we speak, so it forces you to slow down and reflect. It separates the person from the text that they're reading or writing. So it allows for. For a more dispassionate spread of information, and it endures. So you can go back to it. You can kind of reorder things, you know, look for what you might have missed on the first read or the first writing. And, you know, when you think about it, there are so many kind of complex cognitive things that would be so difficult to explain. Like if you were trying to go through a philosophical proof, just, you know, speaking it, it would be so hard to kind of organize it and remember where you were. But, you know, reading, writing really makes that possible. And so that was fascinating to me, you know, just sort of learning about the affordances of text.
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C
Yeah, I think it's especially interesting because as humans, we've been in an oral tradition for so long. I mean, I think everyone's talking about the Odyssey right now. Homer was telling that story versus it being written down. You know.
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D
Yes. No, I think that that's a really interesting point. You know, it's funny because I think we often think of, like, literacy and reading as something that's like, inn or inevitable, but actually it emerged, like, relatively recently in human history, about 6,000 years ago. And it's not something that's really natural to people. We have to kind of retrain our brains to be able to read and write. And so it is interesting that reading and writing are not something that we could just kind of expect to always continue without effort in the same way as speaking is. And so it is interesting to think about how we might be transitioning to a more oral society.
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C
We've talked about what reading does for our brains, but what does not reading do to them.
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D
I spoke with a lot of cognitive scientists to try to answer that question. And, you know, the kind of principle that really emerged from that is just that, you know, we know that our brains get good at what we practice. And, you know, your brain Kind of adjusts to improve at what you spend time doing. And so if we spend less time reading, we're going to have less background knowledge to aid in comprehension. You know, we're going to be kind of less accustomed to persisting through text. It's going to feel like more uncomfortable and difficult. And you know, there is some evidence kind of finding that, you know, American adults ability to solve logic puzzles and analyze patterns and you know, do reasoning has declined over the past two decades, you know, as reading rates have declined. So, you know, I think that we can expect kind of as we read less or you know, really stop reading, our brains will just not kind of well. They'll just put less effort into, into kind of practicing it and mastering it.
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C
I want to get into how we see this play out in the world around us and I want to start with education. What's the impact on education and how students are learning?
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D
Yeah, well, so one thing that I think is really interesting is, you know, with schools we've, we've already kind of seen them, you know, both responding this and also, you know, sort of making changes that would almost further, you know, people reading less. So in middle and high schools, you know, teachers are assigning many, far fewer books than they used to. In a survey from last year, you know, most middle and high school teachers said they assigned between zero and four books a year.
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C
How do you assign zero books a year? Like I'm. So when I read that and even you saying it now 0how.
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D
Well, it's, it's, there's this emphasis on, you know, through a lot of like, well meaning education reforms on informational text and short excerpts to kind of prepare students for standardized testing. And you know, so that's a real change. And then at the same time that we've seen, you know, books leaving the classroom, we've definitely seen, you know, tablets and Chromebooks and laptops, you know, entering the classroom much more. One statistic that was really, you know, shocking to me when I was working on this piece was that 80% of elementary school teachers said that students receive a school issued device before kindergarten.
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C
Wow.
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D
Which was. Yeah. Which I found shocking. And so I think that we see, you know, a lot of changes in kind of, you know, elementary, middle and high school. And then those really manifest when students arrive at college. You know, I had written a piece a few years ago about students arriving at colleges, even like our nation's most elite universities, unprepared to read books because they hadn't been asked to do so in middle and high school. So they just didn't have the reading stamina and the kind of preparation to do that. So. And, you know, when I spoke with professors for this piece, they were saying that, you know, they've always had to obviously teach students about the content and what they were reading, but now much more they have to teach students, like, how they expect them to read and, you know, how to recognize, okay, this is irony in the text. This is a metaphor. So it's sort of doing. Doing much more of those basic building blocks before they can, you know, really focus on the content.
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C
What's really interesting about that is I can understand why teachers are responding to where the students are at the same time. I don't know. It's a little bit with the students, like, all right, you got to catch up or you're. You are going to get left behind. I don't. It just seems like this cycle of people aren't reading, so we aren't assigning reading. We aren't assigning reading, so people aren't reading.
- [17:43]
D
Yeah, it's hard. I mean, I am no expert in curriculum design, so I don't know, you know, what would be the right way exactly to fix this. But, you know, when I was talking to professors, to teachers, certainly some were saying that they are starting to see, you know, a backlash against excerpts and sort of more efforts to return to, you know, reading full books and kind of doing more knowledge building so that students would have an easier time with, you know, reading comprehension. So I think it is possible that we'll see that sort of start to swing back a little bit. But it certainly is, you know, interesting just how many shifts there's been.
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C
I know I have a very distinct memory. I think it was. It was either my junior or senior year of high school doing standardized testing. You know, I'm a millennial. Came up during the no Child Left behind era. And in AP English, we were reading Grapes of Wrath, and everyone. After we finished the test, you would just see everyone around the room picking up the Grapes of Wrath and reading through it so that we were staying on top of our homework and getting this testing done. And looking back, it's like, oh, yeah, we were reading a lot.
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D
Yeah. And now it's interesting. You know, I was speaking with an administrator who, you know, helps with learning support at Harvard, and she was saying that, you know, students really have a different relationship to text now that, you know, sometimes what she hears is that reading sort of feels like an arbitrarily difficult way to take in information, that it's kind of like hidden in there and that, you know, why are professors not giving students kind of, you know, a short summary? Because there are much easier ways to get the information. And so that is a real shift from seeing, you know, the words that the author chose and you know, the way that they, you know, structured the piece of writing as something that is really impossible to divorce from the meaning of the text or the meaning of the information. To now sort of seeing it like, okay, what is the simplest way I can get this info that I need to get.
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C
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D
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C
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D
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C
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D
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C
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C
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D
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C
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D
Yes. So I've certainly written about in the past about kind of changing attitudes towards school, particularly towards what college is for now for people. And I definitely understand kind of the drive to do things that would help you professionally. But I think at the same time the point that I was trying to make in this piece is kind of more broad than what people are doing on any individual day or any specific year in school. But it was looking at when writing and reading first emerged in society. They really fundamentally changed things and they changed the way people thought and they changed politics and culture. And looking now, as we read much less, and reading just becomes much less important in society that we can expect kind of these really civilizational shifts in our consciousness and how we elect candidates and choose them in what our culture values. And so that was the point that I was trying to make, is that this shift will be felt on a level far greater even than just what happens in school. It's going to really be something that changes the world that we live in, and that it's sort of difficult to notice. But once you start thinking in that way, it's almost, like, impossible to miss.
- [25:53]
C
I want to get into one of the other ways that it's changed our society, and that's the impact on politics. In the article, you examine how reading can often contribute to revolutions. I want you to go ahead and lay that argument out for us.
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D
Yes. So, you know, one thing that was really striking to me as I was kind of digging into the history around this is that, you know, obviously people are always concerned about new technologies. And in the past, you know, new technologies have kind of contributed to this state of upheaval and revolutions and transitions. When the printing press was first invented, it took people a long time to sort of adjust to and figure out how to handle that as more and more people, as it kind of democratized the ability to access and to spread information like that brings in new voices, and that's always something that's kind of destabilizing and uncomfortable to the people who previously had a monopoly on the ability to share information. And, you know, we saw in the American Revolution that, you know, print played a really important role. You know, the Founding Fathers used newspapers and pamphlets to spread their message. And, you know, a lot of that is. Was what we would now refer to as, like, disinformation or misinformation. They spread a lot of lies, and they used it to kind of fight with each other and about each other. And so it played a really interesting role where, you know, Princess, the Founding Fathers thought that print and newspapers were crucial, that we needed to have an informed populace in America so that people could elect their leaders and kind of govern themselves. But at the same time, it certainly was not a purely rosy picture where they were only spreading absolutely true information. There was a lot of, you know, pretty nasty insults about each other in the. In the papers. Yeah.
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C
Does that mean that in our current political landscape, we're less likely to have a revolution now than, say, we were in the past?
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D
So I think that, you know, I think I don't know that I asked that exact question in my reporting. But I think that, you know, it wasn't something that was specific to text that allowed for revolutions. I think it really was about the new technologies. And so, you know, I think as we do continue to see, you know, kind of new inventions and new things, you know, proliferating, that it will take us a long time to kind of get a handle on them. And that will lead to some instability just, you know, inherently as change is, you know, difficult to navigate. And so I don't think we're less likely now as we, you know, move to a more oral society. I think it's just, you know, sort of figuring out the changes and, you know, responding to them and adjusting to them.
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C
Moving to a more oral society. Does that mean we should be, I don't know, looking at the past? Is it sort of like we're just back to where we started?
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D
Well, it's interesting because in, you know, Walter Ong's book, he talks about this age of secondary orality where, you know, it's kind of information spread through audio and video, but it's like, mediated through literacy. So I don't think we're going back to a kind of pre literate culture, exactly, but it'll be something that's new. As more information is spread through audio and video, it's obviously different because it can be replayed and repeated and preserved. Whereas in the oral societies in the past, people had to remember everything because there was no way to kind of memorialize speech. And so, you know, but I do think that there are certainly lessons that we can draw from that time and parallels we can see and interrogate as we think about how to, you know, respond to our current moment, even if it won't be exactly the same.
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C
What are ways you see post literacy playing out in our current politics?
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D
So I talk in the piece about how, you know, Donald Trump is the first post literate president. And what I meant by that is that it's difficult to imagine him, you know, being elected in a society where information is primarily spread through text, but that he's really well suited and he's really figured out how to get his message out in this, you know, current information environment. So, you know, what's interesting, he actually retrieves a lot of the conventions of pre literate culture. He, you know, speaks and contradicts himself as though there's no record of his previous words. He uses a lot of repetition and emotional language, which is easier to remember, and he even uses these epithets that are almost. Almost like homeric, as he introduces people, you know, Sleepy Joe and Crooked Hillary, all these things that, you know, bards used to use because they're easier to remember and repeat. And so, you know, it's interesting, I was speaking with media theorists as I reported this story, and, you know, a lot of them had kind of predicted the rise of a figure like Donald Trump that would, you know, kind of use populist messaging and simplistic messaging and emotional messaging and would, you know, able to kind of succeed in politics because they understood this information environment.
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C
What do you think this lack of reading means for the future of politics in this country?
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D
So I spoke with, you know, experts who are looking at how our politics might play out. And what they were talking about is that, you know, if Trump is our first post literate president, he will not be our last. You know, people, there's going to be more of an emphasis on kind of grabbing attention in the first 10 or 15 seconds. And, you know, we really see that social media algorithms privilege, you know, populist, simplistic, emotionally resonant messaging. And so I think we'll continue to kind of see that, to see communication, you know, having to be filled with much more kind of emotional intensity, simplifying complex policy issues down to something that's really easily digestible and easy to remember, and then just people portraying themselves as kind of authentic outsiders and Americans, you know, almost choosing their leaders based on kind of how they appear and, you know, whether you would want to hang out with them. I spoke to one media theorist who was talking about how people now choose their politicians much more through dating criteria. Like, would you, you know, want to spend time with this person instead of resume criteria, like, do I, you know, care about the kind of amount of experience they have now? It's much more about, like, how do they make me feel?
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C
How new is that, though? Because, you know, if you look back to the first televised debate, that's kind of how JFK mopped the floor with Nixon. Or when you think about George W. Bush, people were like, oh, that's a president I want to have a beer with. Like, has this really shifted our politics that much, or were we kind of always headed in this direction?
- [33:16]
D
Well, I think it's definitely true that, you know, as television arose, that kind of changed the, you know, politicians that people liked. And certainly, you know, this media theorist who I was talking to, Josh Meyerowitz, he was talking about how, you know, the founding Fathers would not have succeeded on television. They did not look great up Close. And so, you know, they were much better suited for the times that they lived in. But I think what's changing now is, you know, first from television to now social media is, you know, there are studies that do find that these algorithms do reward more populist parties and populist messag. And then, you know, with television, it was longer. There were kind of fewer other channels to switch to. Now, you know, with videos and the fact that people can just kind of scroll through if something doesn't immediately grab their attention, I think that that is what's new. Kind of the need to go viral and, you know, immediately keep eyeballs on you or else risk sort of people not seeing you. Whereas before, you know, there were. If there weren't that many channels, you of had to watch the whole thing. Now it's really about the. The clip in the moment.
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C
Okay, I have to admit something to you. I sat down to read your article. It is very good. It is also very long. And I kept getting texts from friends, I kept getting notifications, I kept getting distracted by my phone. And, you know, I did not have a smartphone until my senior year of high school. I had a BlackBerry Pearl and Instagram did not exist, I think, until my senior year of college. But even though I didn't come up with these things, I still get so distracted by my phone. Can you explain what is going on in my brain that I cannot focus on reading or a long piece without popping to check on other things?
- [35:14]
D
Yeah. So I think, you know, when I was speaking with neuroscientists, they were saying, like, there's nothing that's fundamentally changed in our brains to where we can't pay attention. You know, if you had to and if, if your phone was away, we still could. But what's changed is that as we sort of spend less time doing it and become less accustomed to doing it, it just feels really hard. You know, we know that when people read something on a digital device, they absorb less and comprehend less, particularly if it's something that's complicated. And a lot of that seems to be, you know, when we read on paper, we actually kind of naturally go back and reread things, but we're much less likely to kind of scroll upwards and go back to something that we might have missed. And of course, you have notifications flash across your screen and kind of hyperlinks that you can follow. So there's a difference there. And then I was speaking with a researcher who does imaging of children's brains, and he was saying that we're all like lab rats that push a button and get a hit of cocaine. It's very exciting to kind of switch to something new and to control that. And it gives us this dopamine. And so it's. It's very hard to stay away and to keep our attention focused on something because it's just not something that we really ask our brains to get good at anymore.
- [36:34]
C
Is this about physical books specifically? Because I think I'll sit on my computer and I'll read the latest article from the Cut, or I have an E reader, and that's how I get a lot of my library books. Is it about the fact that it's a screen, any screen? Is it. Is it about physically holding a paper book in your hand? Like. Yeah. What is it?
- [36:57]
D
Well, so E readers, you know, usually don't have the notifications that I was talking about or the hyperlinks as much, so that's gonna be a little bit easier to focus on. And so it does seem that people read better on E readers than they do on, like, phones or laptops or something where, you know, you can really just get a million messages and then you're going to turn to those. You know, I think that the one of the differ that came up with reading a physical book is that you do have more of a sense of kind of spatially where on the page something was that you're not going to have when it's a Kindle or something, and then you just flick to a new page, but it's all on the same screen. But I think that the difference is really the, I guess, plethora of distractions on a lot of digital devices that just make hard to focus on one thing.
- [37:51]
C
Does what we're reading matter, I think, of how popular young adult fiction is these days among adults. Like, is that a factor in this at all?
- [38:01]
D
Yes. So, you know, I. I spoke with the head of the New York Public Library, and he was saying that young adult fiction is. Is sort of one of their most popular offerings, even among people who are not young adults. And so we certainly do see a change where the books that people are reading are generally shorter and simpler than they used to be. You know, New York Times bestsellers have sentences that are about one third shorter than they were a century ago. And so I think that, you know, that is a real change that, you know, it's not just that the amount that we're reading has changed. It's like even when we do read, what we're reading is different. And so that figures into this as well.
- [38:39]
C
Are there hints of elitism to that though? You know, like should we really be judging people for reading the Hunger Games instead of Crime and Punishment? Like should we just be happy that people are picking up a book at all?
- [38:51]
D
Well, I think definitely. And more. You know what I was trying to point out it was not to say that anything is inherently bad or that on a day to day level I read popular fiction books and different gossip articles and everything. And I don't think the more the point that I was trying to make was that it really matters what we're choosing over and over again and that that will just lead to a big shift. And it's not that this shift is inherently negative, like people can have any value judgment on it that they want to. But I just wanted to point out that it is happening and it's something that we should be aware of. And so if people want to choose differently, they should know so that they have the opportunity to. But you know, of course anyone can read whatever they want and you know what people read. It's good to have people reading anything.
- [39:50]
E
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- [41:16]
B
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F
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- [43:20]
C
So I'm in two book clubs right now and part of the reason that I joined them, one, it's a cool way to spend time and have something to talk to my friends about, but also it's an attempt to claw back my attention span. Does that work? Or, you know, this endless scroll that we have does it kind of destined us to have our minds atrophy in some way.
- [43:43]
D
So that definitely works. You know, the cognitive scientists who I spoke to stressed that, you know, there's nothing that permanently changed or damaged in our brains at all. So people can certainly choose to kind of practice persisting through something for a longer period of time and they would totally be able to. Nothing is irreparable. And so I think we do see sort of some of these positive efforts to push back against the decline of reading. Almost two dozen states have banned cell phones during school hours. And when Texas did that, this school district in Dall saw 200,000 more library books checked out compared to the year before the ban. Went into effect. So I definitely think that, you know, there are some of these, you know, other people who are kind of making the choice that we should be, you know, pushing back and, I guess, reclaiming our attention.
- [44:38]
C
I want to ask a question that's sort of been back in my mind, in the back of my mind throughout this whole conversation. You know, we're sitting here, we're having this conversation, conversation on a podcast. Are we part of the problem? Are we distracting the people from doing the reading they're supposed to be doing?
- [44:56]
D
So, you know, I certainly think that, like, podcasts and, you know, a lot of videos, there's no problem with, like, getting information that way. In many ways, it's actually, you know, sometimes a more effective way to get information, depending on what you're looking at. You know, one person who I interviewed was talking about how when you're trying to, you know, get directions to, like, set something up, it's way easier to watch a video than to interpret that. So, you know, more the point that I guess I wanted to make with the piece is that it's really what we're choosing over and over and over again. And, you know, any given decision that we make or way that we spend our time is not all that significant. And so, you know, I certainly don't think that there's any problem with podcasts or, you know, I've watched so much tv, you know, over time and everything, it's more just like, what is what we're choosing day in and day out and kind of what our society values more, what happens on the larger scale with those changes. And so, yeah, definitely think it's fine to me to be talking about this on a podcast, but it's interesting just thinking about if that's the only way that people are taking in information.
- [46:13]
C
You know, this isn't the first time there's been a panic over changing media. You know, what did we hear about television when it first came out? What did we hear about books when they first became mass produced?
- [46:27]
D
Right. So I talk in the article about if he's The Atlantic, published 126 years ago, where the author was really concerned about the rise of the daily newspaper and how, you know, that would distract people with frivolous things and they would never, you know, read books anymore. And so, you know, and we saw that earlier with novels, too, that Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was really concerned about. You know, the biggest obstacle to educating women was that they loved, you know, novels so much, and they, you know, only wanted to read these kind of fanciful things. And so I definitely wanted to be cognizant of that, that, you know, people are always concerned about new technologies and they are always concerned about change. I think at the same time, you know, an example that was really illustrative to me and that I talk about in the piece is this work by Plato, the Phaedrus. You know, in it, Socrates kind of worries about the advent of WR and that it will destroy people's memories, you know, because they won't have to remember anything more. They'll be able to write it all down and they'll think that they know things, but they won't actually have internalized them because it'll just be in writing and they'll trust that it's there. And a lot of people point to that, that work as an example that, you know, actually we've, we've always worried about this. So what does it matter, you know, if we're always complaining about new technologies? And I take it differently, I think that as we look back on it, it's like Plato's right, Socrates was right, you know, that like, who could memorize the Iliad or the Odyssey now, like, it's not something that we practice and kind of select for. It would be really hard to do. But at the same time, you know, we all probably would say that, you know, being able to read and write has been worth it. And so I think that's something that I really wanted to point out. Just that, you know, there may be real advantages, this new information environment, this new communications medias that we use, but at the same time there also will be trade offs and we should just go into that very clear eyed.
- [48:31]
C
Should we embrace the trade offs? I mean, let's get super skeptical for a minute. And look, I love to read. I love a book. I got so many on my shelf, I got two on my like table ready for me to get through for my book clubs. But is it possible that we are overstating the importance of reading?
- [48:54]
D
I mean, I certainly think it is possible and you know, I definitely want to be open to that. And I wouldn't presume to tell, you know, anyone what they should or should not be doing or how they should be spending their time. You know, I do think that, you know, clearly I'm convinced having written the article and just from doing this reporting that, you know, reading and text have been really fundamental in, you know, our kind of modes of thinking and our nation and our culture. But, you know, it's certainly possible and some people will make the decision that, you know, they're happy to give that up and, you know, they'd rather embrace kind of, you know, some of these new forms and they really enjoy them. And so I think that's up to each person to, to make the choice. I just wanted to sort of point out what, you know, I thought was happening or my reporting suggested to me was happening so that, you know, people could be aware of it.
- [49:56]
C
You're part of this generation that people say does not read. And despite all that, here you are writing a cover story for the Atlantic about post literature literacy. Why do you think you have personally been able to buck that trend?
- [50:14]
D
Well, you know, as I talk about in the piece, I don't think that I've, you know, fully bucked the trend. I don't think that I am, you know, exempt from this. I certainly have seen a change in my reading habits, you know, but I think that this is something that is, you know, much broader than my generation. I think it's really occurring, you know, across age groups. And so, you know, but. But yeah, I think it's, you know, reading was just so fundamental to kind of the way I grew up and, you know, my past experiences that it definitely is something that I have a fondness for and, you know, wanted to work on this piece. And it definitely is ironic to, you know, write about how nobody reads in a, like almost 9,000 word piece, but hopefully people can get past the irony of that.
- [51:11]
C
Yeah, I wonder what do you think it will take for us to become literate again, to not slide into post literacy, but to hold our digital age and our, I don't know, print age one at the, I don't know that
- [51:31]
D
I feel convinced that we're going to move back to kind of an age where reading is the primary way that people spread information. But I think that, you know, if we wanted to. An example that really helps me. I started with the piece and I end the piece, you know, talking about the Library of Alexandria. And you know, it was, of course, this, you know, really a center of intellectual life in ancient times. And I talked about it in the piece because. Because, you know, for a long time scholars thought that it was destroyed by an external act of war. You know, Julius Caesar burned it down and that started the Dark ages. And now kind of the scholarly consensus is that actually it was just destroyed by neglect. That, you know, it wasn't sort of something so dramatic. It was much more mundane. And it was just that people didn't care enough to maintain the library and that that was kind of evidence that the Dark Ages were already there, that people didn't have the means or the will to maintain this library. And so I wanted to kind of use that to draw out the point that, you know, we all can still read. And so this is completely within our power and control. But it would take kind of a different decision of, you know, choosing that this is something that's really important, that this is something that's too valuable to give up. And so we want to choose different. And I think that would need to be a really large scale shift for people to make.
- [53:06]
C
How optimistic are you, though, that we can make that shift? Because you bring up the Library of Alexandria, and back then, it's not like we had temperature control. It's not like we knew, okay, this is what you have to do for the paper, not to disintegrate. And now I can have an entire library at my fingertips. There is so much information. Information out there that we have access to. Are you hopeful at all that, you know, maybe this puts us in a better spot for preservation?
- [53:38]
D
Yeah, I mean, I think that the fact, you know, as you talk about it, you know, information is so much more widely available to us. It would be so easy for us to, you know, access books that have been written anywhere, whereas in the past, you know, it would have been incredibly challenging to send or preserve them. You know, I think at the same time, it's interesting that we've seen kind of books and text become much more widely available at the same time that we kind of, I guess, more take it for granted, maybe, and choose not to read it or access it. And, you know, so I'm not, you know, I write in the piece that I don't think this is as much of an issue of, you know, the knowledge being lost forever compared to, you know, the Library of Alexandria, where, you know, they would just have, like, one copy of things and, you know, they have a Mediterranean climate, and it's not easy to, you know, preserve things. But I think it's not so much that issue as it is one of kind of apathy and, you know, not kind of valuing or choosing to access what is so widely available to us. And in that sense, I don't know, I do not feel that I can say whether I think, you know, which way I think this will go. I think that is up to. To everyone.
- [54:56]
C
All right, Rose Horowitz, thank you so much for joining us.
- [55:01]
D
Thank you for having me.
- [55:08]
C
All right. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I know I did. But as always, we want to know what you think. So drop us a line at the gray area vox.com or leave us a message on our voicemail line at 1-800-20-214-5749 and once you've finished with that, go ahead, rate and review and subscribe to the podcast. This episode was produced by Thor Neue Rider and Beth Morrissey, who also runs the show. It was engineered by Shannon Mahoney. Fact Checked by Melissa Hirsch and Alex Overington wrote our theme music. Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy. The Gray Area comes out on Mondays and Fridays. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts. If you watch podcasts while you listen, you can do that too. Go to YouTube.com Vox for video versions of the Gray Area. This show is part of Vox. Support Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to Vox.commembers to sign up and if you decide to sign up because of this show, let us know.
- [56:17]
A
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- [56:55]
B
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