Teen reading slumps to worst this century due to surge in screen time
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Re: Teen reading slumps to worst this century due to surge in screen time
#2And they're not quoting poetry at each other anymore. It's a great loss.
Re: Teen reading slumps to worst this century due to surge in screen time
#3And they're not quoting poetry at each other anymore. It's a great loss.
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Re: Teen reading slumps to worst this century due to surge in screen time
#4Every generation worries that the behaviors of the next will be the downfall of humanity. I wouldn't be surprised if the Greeks and Romans felt the same.
I grew up reading and still do it today. But my teen kid, who's a great student, hates reading books. He knows many things but gets all his information from Discord chats, AI and social media videos (and his parents, but he ignores that).
It does sound terrifying. "Grew up reading Gemini". But, at the same time, I think it's going to be okay. Hippies, role playing gamers and punk rockers also terrified parents and most of us turned out fine.
Re: Teen reading slumps to worst this century due to surge in screen time
#5Well for whatever it's worth, I feel like I understand why. At least when I was in school, nobody really made a very persuasive case for why reading was important (which I think it is) and I'd routinely get assigned books like Animal Farm or whatever and be told like "Spend X hours reading this thing and learn some profound lesson about life."
And I'd just be like, "What? This book cannot prove anything, other than one person's opinion on history. It's I guess cool as a parable about things my history class has failed to teach me, but without even knowing the base truth about USSR I can't even know what point Orwell was attempting to make."
Like still to this day we have a story about some pigs going corrupt, which, great, but if you ACTUALLY want to know whether corruption is a key part of human nature you cannot achieve that through fiction. You need actual research studies (e.g. Milgram, etc), or history, or something.
Re: Teen reading slumps to worst this century due to surge in screen time
#6imagine what happens for a generation when you normalize access to gambling to a population with zero self-control
but just like most states took the billions in smoking settlements and used it for everything else but to stop smoking, you can guess what they are going to do with the gambling settlements
Re: Teen reading slumps to worst this century due to surge in screen time
#7And they're not quoting poetry at each other anymore. It's a great loss.
a fine way to point to the real issue. a loss of critical thinking.
Re: Teen reading slumps to worst this century due to surge in screen time
#8Every generation worries that the behaviors of the next will be the downfall of humanity. I wouldn't be surprised if the Greeks and Romans felt the same. I grew up reading and still do it today. But my teen kid, who's a great student, hates reading books. He knows many things but gets all his information from Discord chats, AI and social media videos (and his parents, but he ignores that). It does sound terrifying. "…
the difference is you can have bookshelves full of knowledge to keep. those discord chats will be deleted / inaccessible at someone else's doing. thats different than going into peoples homes and libraries and burning books, which is what you have to do to stop readers from learning and sharing.
Re: Teen reading slumps to worst this century due to surge in screen time
#9Every generation worries that the behaviors of the next will be the downfall of humanity. I wouldn't be surprised if the Greeks and Romans felt the same. I grew up reading and still do it today. But my teen kid, who's a great student, hates reading books. He knows many things but gets all his information from Discord chats, AI and social media videos (and his parents, but he ignores that). It does sound terrifying. "…
> I wouldn't be surprised if the Greeks and Romans felt the same.
reading and writing are corrupting your ability to remember everything you need to know!!
Re: Teen reading slumps to worst this century due to surge in screen time
#10For what it's worth, there seems to be no evidence that reading increases IQ.
And it's kinda always struck me as slightly weird how proponents don't feel the need to gather evidence on the matter before making bold prescriptions for everybody else.
1. https://chatgpt.com/share/6aa158f6-b980-83e9-997e-e65be209f9...