We've Reached the End of the Age of Reading

A few days ago, I read an article titled The Age of Reading is Over by Rose Horowitch in the August issue of the Atlantic magazine.

I perused it with great interest, as the subject of reading is a fascinating one for me, especially as it relates to the phenomenon that people are reading significantly less than before and the kind of impact it has on our intelligence, discourse, and ability to think logically. As it turned out, it exceeded my expectations: I found it very well written and informative, not to mention highly relevant in this age dominated by smartphones and artificial intelligence.

Back in 1995, when I was studying English in Seattle during my gap year from college, I was fortunate enough to come across Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death as a reading assignment for my media communications class.

Written in 1985, right in the midst of the golden era of television, the book’s overarching message was “the medium is the metaphor,” arguing that the medium used to convey ideas and information determined the quality—and by extension, the seriousness—of their contents. 

Postman warned that the transition from the print media to television as the most prevalent means of consuming entertainment and gathering information would eventually rob people of their ability to engage in calm, levelheaded thinking based on facts; instead, they would start making decisions largely dictated by their visceral reactions to visual and auditory sensations.

More than four decades later, we can now see how prescient Postman was, as evidenced by people’s decisions in numerous countries to vote into office rabble-rousers running populist campaigns with empty promises and demagoguery.

Coming back to this Atlantic article, the journalist Rose Horowitch succeeds in reinforcing and expanding on Postman’s arguments by presenting intriguing and convincing data related to Americans’ reading habits, or the lack thereof.

For example, according to a recent survey, more than half of all American adults read less than one book in a given year. This is hardly surprising: in fact, the statistics are largely in line with those in Japan, where about 60 percent of adults reported reading less than one book per month, according to the Japanese journalist Toyoshi Inada’s latest book, People Who Can No Longer Read.

The article also mentions that bestselling books nowadays are written in sentences about one third shorter than those in books from a century ago, attesting to people’s inability to comprehend and digest complex sentence structures. People nowadays have a smaller vocabulary, perpetuating a vicious circle in which they face more challenges in understanding text, causing them to read less and have less opportunity to enrich their vocabulary.

Most alarmingly, Horowitch mentions that the Flynn effect, whereby the IQ of Americans had been rising steadily since the 1930s, started to reverse about 20 years ago, dropping about three points per decade. Diminution of reading has evidently made Americans less intelligent.

Another interesting perspective presented in this article is concerning the impact that artificial intelligence will have on people’s ability to think in the coming years—something that Neil Postman couldn’t have written about back in 1985.

Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude have made the act of writing significantly easier than before. It’s undeniable that this development has brought immense benefits to society, provided that information and messages conveyed are accurate and based on facts. 

According to the article, the number of books released on Amazon has increased threefold since 2022, when ChatGPT was introduced to the public. Barnes & Noble launched 60 new stores last year—something unimaginable a few years ago, when the financial performance of this storied bookseller was at its nadir—definitely a welcome development for book-lovers like me.

However, the obviation of the grind of writing made possible by generative AI also means that people no longer need to expend that much energy on thinking, which is the most effective exercise to develop our intelligence.

Interestingly, recent technological advances didn’t just make the proportion of non-readers grow; they have also made it possible for a small segment of the population to enjoy more books than ever before.

I, for one, have grown to love books more in the age of smartphones and AI. With convenient gadgets like the Google search engine and dictionary apps, I can now easily look up unfamiliar words or concepts that I come across in a book, making reading more effortless and pleasurable. 30 years ago, I would have had to lug around a bulky dictionary to do all that. Evidently, technology cuts both ways, so it’s important to consciously place yourself in a position where you can benefit from its development.

As the title of this article aptly suggests, the age of reading as we know it may indeed be over, but as long as we educate ourselves and take appropriate measures to protect our intelligence, there is still hope that we can continue to enjoy the inexhaustible cultural richness bequeathed by our ancestors.