The Demise of Reading?

“Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information. ” That’s a bit from “The End of Reading Is Here” by Rose Horowitch, recently published in The Atlantic. The article chronicles the general decrease in reading (of books, articles), the general decrease in sophistication of what people are reading, and the general decrease in literacy skills. People are “losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis” and in her view, “things are about to get worse, and fast.” Kids watch more and more videos, and read less and less. While “video contains more information than text,” watching videos is “a more passive form of engagement than reading” and generally “does not…