131–140 of 349 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not. Novels are fiction by the way.
Yes? What's so important about novels? They're a relatively recent innovation in literature.
> Last year’s top-selling novel was Sunrise on the Reaping, the latest in the Hunger Games young-adult series. Brian Bannon, the chief librarian at the New York Public Library, told me that young-adult fiction is one of the library’s most popular offerings—including among decidedly not-young adults.
I wonder to what extent this can be attributed to decades-long release windows for some of these novels. I find myself alienated by the dominance of simple and childrens media among my age group peers, but I read Eragon as a child, kept up with the series, and have the 2023 release in the Eragon series on my books-to-read list. The Hunger Games started in 2008; I couldn't bemoan someone who was captivated at 13 then for enjoying the occasional release in 2025.
Even if the foregoing is completely false and abhorrent to you, we must also come to terms with a "new literacy" in terms of ideograms and emoji. I am learning how to type emoji, and replace many textual expressions with singular emoji and symbols. Computers and electronic devices, as well as our own garments, are frequently labeled with ideograms that transcend human language, but must be interpreted for proper use.
I have noticed some people around me who aren't really good at reading at all, and this is a real handicap to them when paperwork, and computer readouts, and just signs posted all over, are full of words, and our world surrounds us in words to read and comprehend, and if we can't read at lightning-speed levels, and comprehend what we read, we find ourselves at distinct evolutionary/legal/financial/social disadvantages.
So I contend that future literacy will increasingly involve non-English emoji and symbology, and that not every human in the world needs to be literate in a particular written language, and while a majority of society can afford such an education, nothing of value may be lost.
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Were they though? Or were they only illiterate because literacy was measured in Latin not their native language? We know that historically that did happen, and it is hard to figure out what was done. Even today, most talking about literacy rates are using a very high level read skills to make things look bad, when most people can read just fine for the normal level things are written in. I'm near illiterate if you on…
Literacy doesn't mean your ability to speak, it means your ability to read/write. Formal schooling for the masses is a very recent invention.
> Reading has always been associated with education and more generally with urban social elites. Although contemporary commentators deplore the decline of “the reading habit” or “literary reading,” historically the era of mass reading, which lasted from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century in northwestern Europe and North America, was the anomaly.
"Reading and the Reading Class in the Twenty-First Century"
https://sociology.northwestern.edu/documents/faculty-docs/fa...
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Inflation adjusted outcomes and overall ticket sales down 30-40% Overall ticket sales Globally are down 46% since 2000. Please learn to tell financial engineering headlines from reality.
I'd suggest you do the same. You may want to believe that cinema is "dying", but none of the numbers support that argument.
And beyond that if you go deeper, the revenue growth is almost entirely attribured to higher prices in ticket sales while attendance in real terms continues to decline.
What are you struggling with here?
I was somewhat surprised to find out that illiteracy does not mean that someone needs to be a total (or near) analphabet - but rather that it is a broad and wide spectrum. I always imagined that “teenagers can’t read” meant that they couldn’t read at all, but then I never met such a person. Reading is definitely a skill that needs to be learned and maintained. Going from reading a couple of hundred words, to even a l…
(For reference, your comment and my reply combined make for about 180 words.)
Even as the author points out people are reading more, he continues to conflate books with reading - and not just that but reading specifically physical books (referring to his stats around book ownership). The reality is that before, you needed to read huge swaths of information to find/know the relevant information. Now you don’t. The density of useful information I gather from places like Wikipedia, even long form…
> The reality is that before, you needed to read huge swaths of information to find/know the relevant information. Now you don’t. > The density of useful information I gather from places like Wikipedia, even long form articles is substantially higher than I got reading non-fiction. You're in good company. Sam Bankman-Freid: I would never read a book. I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever wo…