Preserving Reading Habits and Future Outlook

Hello and welcome to The Verge Cast, the flagship podcast of Long form Text. I'm Jake Kasnakis, and today we're talking to the Atlantic staff writer Rose Horowich. Rose just wrote a story with a very bold title. The end of Reading is here And in it, she shares some pretty alarming statistics. She writes that fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in twenty twenty two She shares that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell to just sixteen percent in twenty twenty three. And that gambling has now become a more common leisure activity than reading a book This is all intimately intertwined with technology phones, notifications, devices and schools, talk of course, and what that is all doing to our free time and our ability to pay attention to pretty much anything for an extended period of time. This is all stuff we cover closely at the Vverge, so I really wanted to talk to Rose about how real these concerns are and how much we need to be thinking about what comes next But first, here's what's happening on the Vverge today This is ninety seconds on the Vverge for Thursday, july twenty third, twenty twenty six. Today in RAM apocalypse, Framework is reducing the RAM in laptops that it already took preorders on. This is happening both because it couldn't get enough units and because the RAM became way too expensive Framework writes that its latest RAM modules were delivered at a price that, quote goes far beyond anything we had predicted and anything we're able to absorb without placing our ability to operate at real financial risk Instead, Framework is lowering the RAM quantities on many preorders and raising the price on RAM upgrades One laptop config went up by eight hundred dollars Rempocalypse has hit everyone hard, and it has clearly been particularly tough on small companies like Framewor Next up, the European Commission is fining Google one billion dollars for violating its digital markets law The commission said that Google has given preferential treatment to its own services within search. That included things like placing Google's own hotel and sports results at the top of the search page The commission also said that Google was too controlling over apps within the Play store. and that it should not have stopped developers from telling users about cheaper ways to make purchases. Google has to make changes within sixty days or face more fines. Finally, LeGo has turned the original Donkey Kong arcade machine into a functional Lego set This is cool. I'm sorry, I'm into it. It's two hundred dollars. You can actually jump. The barrels roll down and automatically load back up to the top of the machine. It's very clever. It comes out next week You can read more at the Vverge. com dot That's ninety seconds on the Verge for Thursday, july twenty third, twenty twenty six Support for the show comes from serervice Now. 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Start building at Mongob dot com slash AI Rose Horrich, thanks so much for joining us Thank you for having me So Rose, your story is called The End of Reading is here. You spoke to a bunch of professors, media experts, researchers about the state of literacy in twenty twenty six. For those who, you know, Haven't read it y Tell us a little bit about what you found. So what I found was that in the data, there was this very convincing decline in reading in America. You know The share of Americans who read a book or an article on any given day has declined by forty percent over the past two decades. And as of twenty twenty two, which is the last year that we have this really good data for Fewer than half of all Americans read a book of any kind in the year. And so you know I just took that data to be very convincing and then was kind of trying to look at, okay, what are the implications? What happened when literacy first appeared in society six thousand years ago? And how know are people are these experts kind of thinking about what's happening to us now as it goes away. When I told people about this article, I kept hearing everyone say, you know, people are always declaring that reading is dead. My wife sent me a blue sky thread of like a dozen newspaper articles going back a century declaring reading dead. So I'm curious after all this research, how convinced are you? How convinced are you that there's a real problem here and that reading is actually disappearing this time You know, it's so funny because in this story, I quote a bunch of these examples. and you I quote Marshall McLuan, who wrote in nineteen sixty two that we were entering an age of post literacy where the electronic media would, you know replace the written word. And then you know, Neil Postman said the same thing in nineteen eighty five. And so I think a lot of people look at those and say, okay, people have warned about this for a long time. And, it wasn't the apocalypse. We didn't see reading rates go down to zero. know We didn't even see maybe drops of like ten percent in a year or something. And so that means that it's not real. The fact that people have been warning about it for so long. And you know I find that argument somewhat convincing, but what I tried to raise in the piece is an alternative argument is that you know people have been warning about this and in a way, they've been right. L reading rates have been declining. And so it's just been a slower and slower transition, I think than some of these people predicted a while ago. But that doesn't mean that it's not happening. It just means that it's more gradual than we think, but that the trend lines in the direction are very clear. So I found that to be a sort of convincing way to understand the evidence and data that you know was before me And I do think that's really interesting because you know, for very obvious reasons, right, the spread of alternate forms of media, reading has just been declining for decades at this point. And so when you're looking at, I think some of the most recent declines, there They might seem large, but there are large declines on what is already a diminished reading population. And so The numbers are maybe getting smaller and smaller What are the demographics where this change is being seen? Is it just among the youth where you're seeing You know where you're hearing about this, you know, apparent death of reading, or is this kind of across the board Yeah, it's definitely not just among the youth. You know, I note in the piece that even the groups that have kind of historically read the most, which are retirees and older people, know college graduates and women, that they've also seen a collapse in reading. So it's something that really cuts across demographics. and in a way, it would almost be comforting if it was confined just to one U, but it is, you know, a real wide widespread shift There's this very interesting caveat that you have in your story where you write, and I'm quoting here, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, exp posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions So Tell me how you're thinking about this because You have this bold claim the end of reading is here You also acknowledge like pretty much right away in the piece that In some ways, we're reading more than ever. So How are you making that distinction in saying We're seeing more text than ever. We're communicating by text nonstop, but also there's this end to reading happening Yeah, I'm so glad that you brought that up because I think it's a really important point that when you look around and think about how many emails you probably get for work every day or texts from your friends and everything, it's really hard to say that reading is over. And so I think it's important to think about what we are defining as reading when we're talking about it And you what I was arguing was that we are bombarded with so much text that that's taken away from is almost our kind of time and ability to really focus in on a rich and complex text and kind of read it for a sustainangeed period of time and deeply. So I argued that that's kind of the type of reading that we're losing and that's what I meant by saying that we're ost illiterate. It's not that we're illiterate. L people still know how to read, but it's a real change in what I think we mean when we talk about reading this. That's one of the things that I found so interesting about this piece. In some ways, obviously it is very much about people not reading deep, complex texts I think just as much the story is about the end of attention fans And One of the reasons I wanted to talk with you is that this phenomenon seems to be so deeply intertwined with technology and how tech is changing our habits So this is a big question. You obviously have an entire article answering this. What is your takeaway about the biggest drivers of Reading's death? Is it phones? Is it TikTok you know What is contributing to our inability to pay attention Yeah, so I think, you know, it is really multicusal, but when I was kind of looking and trying to trace, you know, the times the timing of this decline, I think it really starts, you know with television, we start to see it and television just crowds out the time that people might have previously spent reading. You know by nineteen eighty five, I think the average American household is watching seven hours of TV a day So that just takes away a lot of time that you might previously have spent reading because you didn't have other sources of entertainment. And then you know we see with streaming and smartphones and broadband internet, that just sort of makes it so much easier to not read, like there', you know, they never stop. everythingthing kind of, you know moves into the next show or you can just keep scrolling, you know until infinity. And so you know, we see it really, I guess get supercharged kind of with you know these new technologies. And, you know, when I was speaking with cognitive scientists They were saying, you know, there's nothing in our brain where It's like fundamentally changed to where we can no longer pay attention. but is what we become accustomed to. And so the more we become used to kind of using these alternate forms of media, to immediately switching away from something if it doesn't grab our attention in the first fifteen seconds, the harder it feels to pay attention to anything. And I think we do see that in the data. You know, I spoke with a researcher who found that twenty years ago, the average attention span on a screen was two and a half minutes. and five years ago that had dropped to forty seven seconds. So we just see that we become accustomed to having things change really quickly and to moving away from something that doesn't or that doesn't immediately grab our attention. It's so funny, you say that like as I was writing down questions that I wanted to ask you and reading this article tweets kept flying in on my second monitor and I kept getting distracted. And it like of course this happens. There are so many things that we have to monitor at any given moment right now and our devices are really designed to put all this stuff in front of us. You know, it's interesting to change the subject just slly for a second. you actually had another story in January about this attention span issue is showing up in some really odd ways, you talk to a bunch of film professors who were saying that feature length movies are now too long for students. There's this part where you say Students arriving in college today have no memory of a world before the infinite scroll. As teenagers, they spent nearly five hours a day on social media with much of that time used for flicking from one short form video to the next. I'm interested in this thing where It's almost like this is not just the deathth of reading that you've kind of encircling around. It seems to be sort of anything that is meaty and requires a devoted attention span. So I think there is a real change in kind of the way we relate to media. And that shows up in movies in books as well that people are just so much more used to kind of, yeah, shifting their attention all the time. You know Netflix reportedly tells directors to kind of constantly have people repeating the action that's happening or saying it again So that you know if someone's not paying attention, they still get what's going on. And you know, one researcher who I spoke to compared us to like lab rats who, you know get a hit of cocaine when we press a button. And so yeah, I think we do find that that we're just always switching between things and it makes it hard to do anything for a sustained period of time Are you a phone in hand while watching TV person Yes, ye. See I This is like sacrilegious to me. I like am like, if I'm watching a movie, I'm like lights off, phone away. but it's hard. It's hard. likeike it keeps buzzing I know. No, I I mean, as I tried to make it clear in this article, I was like trying to be very transparent about the ways that I've fallen victim to a lot of these things and I certainly am always like cleaning while I'm watching TV or cooking while I'm watching TV. and I often have my phone next to me while I'm reading and I like check my notifications every couple pages. So it's a really difficult, I think like habit to resist falling into Support for the show comes from Mongo DB AI assisted and agentic codating can help you build faster than ever. 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That's odoo dot com slash boox I wantan to make sure I talk about the education side of this too, because you are an education reporter. That's what your primary beat at the Atlantic. And your story kind of gets into the fact that Yes, there's technology, but there's also Education is morphing around short form too. Can you tell me a little bit about that? I'm curious, is that a cause or an effect of what we're seeing here Yeah, so it's a couple of years ago, I had written this piece about students arriving to universities, even you know the top universities in the country, kind of unprepared to read full books. And what I found really interesting about that was that it didn't just seem like it was, an issue of phones or something as people often talk about. You know what we were finding was that cururricula had really changed in middle and high school. And so people were unprepared to read full books because they hadn't been asked to before. And so you know I think what I tried to then kind of follow up with here was looking at Okay, what is happening in elementary, middle and high schools? And I think what we see is that kind of successive waves of education reform, even when they were very well meaning, have just over time led teachers to assign a lot fewer full books. You know, A survey from last year found that most middle and high school teachers assign between zero and four books a year And you know instead, there's a lot more focus on excerpts and kind of doing reading comprehension drills to prepare for standardized tests. And so that is just a fundamentally different kind of way of teaching because school is usually where kind of kids were forced to read. Obviously, you know, there has also been, you, a decline in interest and pleasure reading among young people. but it's really, you know, I focus on researchers who were like, when did kids ever really come home and like, you know open a book or when did the majority of kids ever do that, but they would have been expected to do that in school. And now that's a real change. I think something else that's really interesting what's happening in schools is that you know we are seeing that as books have left the classroom, we're seeing a lot more like tablets and chromebooks. And I think a lot of that can be sort of related to a COVID phenomenon But you know in a recent survey, like eighty percent of elementary school teachers said that students receive a digital device from school before kindergarten. So again, that's just a really fundamentally different way of teaching and learning. And it makes sense that that would change our habits and interests. That's so interesting. And it really sounds to me like These are sort of two separate things that are happening at the same time, where Technology exists outside of schools in a way that is pererhaps hurting our abilities to pay attention to one thing for a long time. And then in schools they are separately deciding to optimize around short form. You kind of said it yourself like kids were forced to read these long books, and it's not necessarily you know, that is a way that you instill those abilities. It is interesting though, you know, I think back to my time in college and You know, I didn't always read all of the books I'm curious. you spoke to a bunch of professors for these stories. And a lot seems to be pointed at the state of collge students and these anecdotes about inattentive students. I'm curious what you're hearing and how the professors are kind of assessing the distinction from the days of kids who would just read spark notes to todayod where, you know, theoretically they can't get through a, you know four page paper Yeah, no and definitely in these pieces, you, one thing that's come up is that oftentimes college students kind of have a changed relationship to university than they used to. we know that they're spending a lot more time in extracurriculars. And so certainly that can be kind of cutting into time that they might have spent reading or like pretending to do the reading in the past But at the same time, you know the professors that I spoke with, they were aware of all of this. They were aware that everyone, you know, professors have been complaining about kids not reading for a really long time. and yet they were still saying that there is really a fundamental change in the way students are relating to text. You know, I spoke with one professor at Brown who was saying that, you know, in he's always had to, of course, you know talk to students about the content of what they were reading. but now he really has to, he and his colleagues really have to teach them how they expect them to read and help them like identify, okay, what's the metaphor here? How do I approach this? You know, where's the author using irony? and that they have to kind of figure out how to read, how to think before they can even get the content? And another thing that I found really interesting is I was speaking to you know an administrative staff member at Harvard who, you know supports the humanities and social sciences. She was saying that there's really a changed relationship to text among a lot of the students that she works with where you know students kind of see reading as a It kind of arbitarily difficult way to get information and think that know when professors are assigning them reading, they're kind of hiding something from them. And it's like, why can't you just give me the chat GPT know cut down version or claud cutdown version? Why are you like making me get it through this hard medium? And so that is a real shift, I think, in relationship to text just because there weren't other alternatives before. you could read spark notes, but it wasn't going to be like as tailored to exactly what you wanted, anyy question you would ask I mean, that's fascinating. And again, I think it just goes back to how much technology is shifting what is possible for our attention spans and for our ability to read? And how right? It's interesting Spark Notes is itselff reading, even if it is simpler reading I want to ask and this is A very dumb question, but Why is this a problem? Right? Like intuitively, Reading being dead feels very, very bad you know, you can argue, okay, you can listen to fascinating conversations on podcasts. You can see world class film from home. you can discover new cultures and perspectives with endless swipes on TikTok. So what is the argument for why reading is inherently better So I think that's a great question. And know it's interesting because definitely there is no problem with getting information from podcasts and you can learn a ton of. Yes. It's important to note right now. But I think that what I was trying to argue in this piece was not that it was inherently a negative, but that this is a real shift that the medium that we use to communicate with one another the world that we live in, it shapes the way we think in our politics and our culture. And so as we see not just on a day to day level or minute by minute level that people are picking a podcast instead of picking up Dickens or something, but that we're seeing like a real shift in from text and the written word to these more oral forms of communication, I was arguing that that will fundamentally change society and it will change kind of our consciousness, know the candidates that we elect and how we choose them, and what our culture values. And so that was really the case that I was trying to make that Yeah, that this will will just be a fundamental shift. So youaking of fundamental shifts, there's this very funny moment, I think, like two thirds of the way into the piece where you go I haven't even mentioned AI yet What are you looking at as AI proliferates in schools and workplaces. you, what is the concern about what happens next Yeah, so I think AI is really interesting because you know we've talked, of course about a lot of different technologies that have affected reading. But you know I talk about in the piece how AI is the first that can really you know write for you and it's the first to kind of affect writing. And I think the challenge with that is that Writing is not just transcribing what you already thought and you know, the reason that writing is really difficult is because oftentimes you think You know what you're going to say, and then writing actually helps you figure out that you had no idea what you were going to say. And writing helps you figure out what you think. And so I think the concern with AI is just that if we become overreiant on AI to kind of write for us, we won't go through the process of really deciding what we think and figuring out what arguments are convincing to us And I think something that's really interesting here is that it was kind of ironic to talk about how AI is threatening writing and reading when so much of its output at least currently is in text form. So, you know One thing that I was thinking about there was kind of that AI, as it gives us so much polished, kind of convincing text that studies show is really pleasing to people to read, that we or will need our powers of discernment and comprehension even more to figure out what's right, where did the AI potentially make a mistake within this kind of you know, beautifully polished essay, Is there something that's inaccurate or misleading And the challenge is that those are the very skills that AI threatens to erode as we're using it. And I think this is one of the most fascinating tensions of your piece, which is Again, there is so much more text in the world, so much more text being put in front of us And what is perhaps breaking down is not necessarily all reading it is that ability to critically read everything that is put in front of us or even the ability to pay attention long enough to do that critical reading. I was going to say, yeah, it's so interesting. You know on Amazon since ChachaT was released in twenty twenty two, there's been like a threefold increase in the number of books that are released every month. And you know we see more like scientific papers published, you know, and a lot more that have hallucinated references. And so there's just going to be like so much more text around us that we will have to figure out How do we sift through this? What do we pay attention to? what do we believe? And I think that reading and writing is really like fundamental in honing those skills You talk to a lot of people who are concerned about this What do they think should be done? Is there a path to restoring reading or critical reading or attention spans or what have you Um Is that even possible nowadays when when video and distractions are everywhere Yeah, so I think you most of the people that I spoke with they did not think that we were going to go back to a world that was really premised on reading and move away from videos. It seems that that was unlikely. And so I think what they were more thinking about was how do we preserve what really matters to us and what we believe is important,, if these are some of the things that reading is kind of inculcated in us. And so know we saw that nearly two dozen states have banned cell phones in school and that when Texas did that know this Dallas school district saw two hundred thousand more library books checked out in the year after the ban went into effect compared to the year before So, you know, there certainly are people in places that are thinking about Okay, where is it really important that people do read and we preserve that and those abilities? And what you know where can we kind of embrace video and it might not be such a bad thing. But in terms of a society wide sort of shift, I think this is all kind of an act of will. You know, as we just discussed We all know how to read we all can read. And so I think it's more about us just deciding that it is important and there are things that reading has brought us that we don't want to lose and making the decision to read. And that's something that you know everyone can do every day, but obviously, there's no sort of simple solution, unfortunately. I think that's very encouraging though, right? There are ways that we can emphasize what we value here and, you know, I think the phone bands are clearly an obvious step for some of the stuff when it comes to education. I think, you know, we're both in New York and I've heard from teacher friends of minees that there has been a big change in the attitudes of students as a result of this