The Erosion of Deep Literacy

This article makes far reaching societal claims with essentially no evidence. The evidence presented is in the form of "feelings" of various writers concerned of their own decline in literaryfocus.

An unvoiced assumption that people were historically more literate pervades the entire article. As a former lit. major I used to buy into this kind of thing. But I now think this belief is the product of profound selection bias. Literature and history libraries are full of the very best diaries and letters of the very best diary and letter writers because those are enjoyable to read and being more detailed are more useful. History is not written by the victors but by the literate.

People of letters that write this kind of article are obviously inclined towards letters and therefore inclined to sample history through literate means and therefore greatly overestimate the literacy of the past.

But let us pair anecdote to anecdote. There is a podcast network called "The New Books Network". It examines weekly the release of new academic works. It began as "New Books in History" covering one new history book each week. Now it features dozens of podcasts each covering a new book every week. Engage these podcasts for six months and at the end, tell where your biases lie. You will probably suddenly believe we live in the most literate age of all.

Is this AI-generated? And that's why it's called "Deep Literacy"?

“If you do not deep read, you do not cultivate a capacity to think, imagine, and create; you therefore may not realize that anything more satisfying than a video game even exists.”

Hence universal public education. The author, though, is talking about making additional effort, as though schooling alone didn’t achieve these basic ends. Glad I didn’t go to his high school.

Given a finite amount of time (albeit a near-infinite amount of easily accessible material to read), there must be a trade off between deep reading and broad reading. No explicit mention of “broad reading” as the alternative in the text, assumedly because having a broad reading experience is viewed as a fine thing.

And for good reason. Consider the most deeply read (non religious) texts in the 20th C....Little Red Book, Communist Manifesto, Ayn Rand, Mein Kampf. Throw in religious cult classics of your choosing. One could argue less deep reading of those texts would have been a very good thing, and millions of lives could have been saved.

Silent sustained reading of political and economics texts, if you don’t swallow the arguments made book, line and thinker, can be a good thing. Cliff Notes and simply reading summaries/critiques of those classic works instead are better, and allow a breadth of reading in limited time that provides context and perspective.

Losing one’s self in a deep read is an act of trust and faith, an act that too often in the 20th Century led to betrayal, abuse and death via the distorted view of reality that resulted. Even in non-political texts, the assumptions underlying popular novels, from Bellows and Mailer to bodice rippers, can have profound renormalizing consequences in the lives of these who lost themselves in these alternative realities.

Sometimes having the attention span of an over-caffeinated golden retriever puppy is a good thing.

Trying to take an optimistic view on this: what if creators simply haven't mastered new media technologies (video, audio, etc.) well enough yet? It's easy to forget, but the earliest forms of language were probably used in extremely mundane circumstances ("Me hungry, food there, etc.") Writing itself was used primarily for imperial accounting purposes for thousands of years before anyone bothered to use it and create art.

I hope that we're merely "illiterate" because we're in between two technological eras.