<
https://aeon.co/essays/what-we-think-is-a-decline-in-literacy-is-a-design-problem>
"Everyone is panicking about the death of reading. The statistics look damning:
the share of Americans who read for pleasure on an average day has fallen by
more than 40 per cent over the past 20 years, according to research published
in
iScience this year. The OECD calls the 2022 decline in educational
outcomes ‘unprecedented’ across developed nations. In the OECD’s latest
adult-skills survey, Denmark and Finland were the only participating countries
where average literacy proficiency improved over the past decade. Your nephew
speaks in TikTok references. Democracy itself apparently hangs by the thread of
our collective attention span.
This narrative has a seductive simplicity. Screens are destroying civilisation.
Children can no longer think. We are witnessing the twilight of the literate
mind. A recent Substack essay by James Marriott proclaimed the arrival of a
‘post-literate society’ and invited us to accept this as a fait accompli.
(Marriott does also write for
The Times.) The diagnosis is familiar:
technology has fundamentally degraded our capacity for sustained thought, and
there’s nothing to be done except write elegiac essays from a comfortable
distance.
I spend my working life in a university library, watching how people actually
engage with information. What I observe doesn’t match this narrative. Not
because the problems aren’t real, but because the diagnosis is wrong."
Via Kenny Chaffin.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
