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It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history

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Re: It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history

#41

Post by AlotOfReading »

gosub100 wrote: post #27
_doctor_love wrote: post #21

We were in an age of reading? I gave up about 10 years ago on people as readers. I have recommended so many books and articles to software people over the years and it's honestly depressing how many people have told me they don't like to read. Like...you're a programmer? And you don't like to read? I assumed that people who enjoy software would be into intellectual stimulation but I've learned that this is wrong. Mor…

I gave up on reading because the authors want to spend a considerable number of pages telling me the color of the buttons on an imaginary character's outfit. They have no such right to waste my time with (or even worse, charge me money for) that.

No one says "I gave up on eating because restaurants kept serving me spicy food". You just order different food. A short story that's a couple pages long isn't going to waste them describing the color of buttons, and not every novelist is Tolkien.

Re: It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history

#42

Post by phyzix5761 »

gosub100 wrote: post #27
_doctor_love wrote: post #21

We were in an age of reading? I gave up about 10 years ago on people as readers. I have recommended so many books and articles to software people over the years and it's honestly depressing how many people have told me they don't like to read. Like...you're a programmer? And you don't like to read? I assumed that people who enjoy software would be into intellectual stimulation but I've learned that this is wrong. Mor…

I gave up on reading because the authors want to spend a considerable number of pages telling me the color of the buttons on an imaginary character's outfit. They have no such right to waste my time with (or even worse, charge me money for) that.

Books have a built in fast-forward feature.

Re: It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history

#43

Post by dspillett »

TrackerFF wrote: post #3

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…

> It makes me wonder if literate people can regress to illiterate,

Under normal circumstances for a healthy human, I'd say no, at least directly. Not a scientific analysis of course, but I don't feel reading ability in a language that you use regularly is going to degrade that significantly. A very similar problem might come about through a drop in attention span which is definitely an issue for many these days, but I wouldn't count this as a literacy problem: the written letters/words/sentences/… are not the issue and other things are going to be equally impacted.

For a second+ language, especially if you never got to a particularly fluent state, this is probably quite different - for anecdata I did pretty well at Spanish GCSE then never spoke a word the 32 years before starting to relearn last year. But again I would not really call this a general literacy problem.

One place where you do see literacy fall precipitously is due to mental degradation due to common complications of old age, if you have relatives with dementia you will have seen this first hand. While literacy is only part of a massive problem here, reading and writing abilities are things that fall away relatively quickly for many (presumably due to them being relatively complex operations, and needing conscious concentration rather than being autonomic life-preserving functions).

Re: It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history

#45

Post by cjpearson »

lp4v4n wrote: post #23

It's been my impression that classic literature is going the same way as painting and other forms of high art. It was certainly a great display of human intellectual prowess and artistic capacity in bygone times when the world moved at a much slower pace, but who has the time and the energy to read a long novel today? Even cinema is dying and nobody seems to care that much.

Energy is more difficult to gauge, but the average American has over 5 hours of leisure time daily. When there was more of a time crunch in the past, Americans read more.

Re: It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history

#46

Post by cosmic_cheese »

_doctor_love wrote: post #21

We were in an age of reading? I gave up about 10 years ago on people as readers. I have recommended so many books and articles to software people over the years and it's honestly depressing how many people have told me they don't like to read. Like...you're a programmer? And you don't like to read? I assumed that people who enjoy software would be into intellectual stimulation but I've learned that this is wrong. Mor…

Given that I have mental bandwidth available, I enjoy a mentally stimulating read (though, the definition of that surely varies between individuals), but people do indeed come into programming from a variety of different angles.

What initially attracted me to programming was the ability it gives one to create. As a kid the idea that a “regular” person like myself could make computer programs — and not just simple CLI toys but full on lovingly crafted, end user friendly complex GUI applications — blew my mind. Programs weren’t like every nearly every other product which only ever came out of some factory that nobody saw themselves.

As such my interest in programming comes with a slant towards practical usability. I don’t do well with abstract concepts without a rock solid grounding real world use case, even though those are intellectual candy for a few subgroups of programmers.

Re: It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history

#47

Post by apparent »

lapcat wrote: post #20
apparent wrote: post #13

This is not a fair comparison: > Only 38 percent read a novel or short story... The proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023.... Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet. It takes much less time to place a bet than to read a novel/short story. Likewise, reading for pl…

Your selective quote left off the part that made it a fairer comparison. "Only 38 read a novel or short story" was a follow-up to "fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022." That's a year-long stat.

Reading an entire book takes much more time than placing an online bet.

Re: It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history

#48

Post by AlotOfReading »

yomismoaqui wrote: post #14
TrackerFF wrote: post #3

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…

I think that literate people can recover from a period of not reading (books) at all. I recently had more than a year of not reading any books that was interrupted when I found about The Culture series. I read Use of Weapons and had to read all novels from that universe. After that I tried to find some books similar to them, tried to read some recommended ones (didn't finish any of them) and stopped reading. In my ca…

Unfortunately there really aren't any other books like the culture series. You might enjoy Banks' "The Algebraist" and the completely unrelated though similarly named "The Alchemist".

Re: It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history

#49

Post by apparent »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #17
apparent wrote: post #16

> Adult-literacy scores have also dropped: Nearly 30 percent of American adults cannot paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text. In 2017, that number was less than 20 percent. Shrinking the passages on the SAT from full-page to a few sentences will exacerbate this trend.

I don't think I learned this skill from the sat.

Doing well on the SAT used to require some measure of reading stamina. It no longer does, so some students who would have been prompted to increase their stamina in order to do well on the SAT will no longer feel that pressure.

Re: It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history

#50

Post by vlucas »

lp4v4n wrote: post #23

It's been my impression that classic literature is going the same way as painting and other forms of high art. It was certainly a great display of human intellectual prowess and artistic capacity in bygone times when the world moved at a much slower pace, but who has the time and the energy to read a long novel today? Even cinema is dying and nobody seems to care that much.

> Even cinema is dying and nobody seems to care that much.

Cinema is dying from mostly self-inflicted wounds though. They keep making movies (or re-making movies) with bad writing, bad stories, and unrealistic character development arcs that not many people want to watch.

Good movies have been rewarded in theatres. Top Gun: Maverick, Obsession, Project Hail Mary, etc. all had great box office sales when other movies around them flopped.

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