Excellent Reads

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.

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

… 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.)

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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!

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.

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!!!”

“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 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.

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.

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.

“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.

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he End of Spelling as well.