The Erosion of Deep Literacy

This article makes far reaching societal claims with essentially no evidence. The evidence presented is in the form of "feelings" of various writers concerned of their own decline in literaryfocus.

An unvoiced assumption that people were historically more literate pervades the entire article. As a former lit. major I used to buy into this kind of thing. But I now think this belief is the product of profound selection bias. Literature and history libraries are full of the very best diaries and letters of the very best diary and letter writers because those are enjoyable to read and being more detailed are more useful. History is not written by the victors but by the literate.

People of letters that write this kind of article are obviously inclined towards letters and therefore inclined to sample history through literate means and therefore greatly overestimate the literacy of the past.

But let us pair anecdote to anecdote. There is a podcast network called "The New Books Network". It examines weekly the release of new academic works. It began as "New Books in History" covering one new history book each week. Now it features dozens of podcasts each covering a new book every week. Engage these podcasts for six months and at the end, tell where your biases lie. You will probably suddenly believe we live in the most literate age of all.

This article mourns the loss of something that only has ever existed among a very small minority of any population in recorded history. Deep Literacy, as the author defines it, relies on the luxury of time that most individuals around the world do not have. It is the great disconnect between academia and the rest of society. This article took a very large amount of my time to read in proportion and relation to the point it was trying to make. It could have easily been 500-1000 words, but it was written in the scholarly tradition of more is more. It did not value the readers time.

Are there more distractions now? Certainly, but it is an elitist view to act as if this impacts the amount of deep reading your average citizen of any given country partakes in. If anything, the proliferation of smart phones will increase base level literacy among the masses globally allowing more individuals from more diverse backgrounds the opportunity to one day have the opportunity to engage in deep literacy.

What we are seeing now is more people engaging in conversations and debates that were previously relegated to the elites—academics, politicians, aristocrats. Are their opinions impacted by their lack of deep literacy? Certainly, but their opinions always have been, their voices just weren’t heard quite so loudly before.

Educational attainment has been increasing steadily since at least 1940 (as far back as the chart on Wikipedia shows): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...

I am skeptical that this "deep literacy" is in fact eroding, since it's what lets you learn a topic well enough to get a degree. It's also hard work; I'll put in the effort on topics that matter -- as in topics that usefully inform my future actions, rather than topics that have abstract moral weight or whatever -- or sometimes for entertainment, but it's not a casual "all the time" thing and there seems to be a limit to how much I can do in a given day.

I learned growing up that TV rots your brain. Modern social media works the same way, except that sometimes you can actually engage with it and maybe it rots your brain a bit less in that case. This is called "mindless entertainment", and various forms of it have always been fairly popular. When I use shallow reading for mindless entertainment, it displaces whatever else I'd be doing for mindless entertainment. Which is different from displacing serious reading, or even from displacing learning things for entertainment / mental exercise.

This is a really interesting piece. I've been wanting to rage against illiteracy lately but I'm not too active in public discourse (even this).

That said, I don't think it's some secret key to improving humanity. I think this because literacy is ultimately a luxury, even in modernity. The literate may be able to form more nuanced opinions, but that matters less if they can't increase literacy consistently across populations.

There's an irony here that assumes deep literacy is productive and essential but doesn't use it to explain the proposed lack of deep literacy itself.

I like to read books. I do not like to read long-form articles.

Why?

Because the vast majority of long-form articles are written by people who are lacking a quality editor. They are virtually always a superfluous, stream-of-consciousness verbal vomit that beats the reader over the head with information that is tangentially related to the purpose of the article, and they are usually 4-5x as long as they really need to be to get their point across.

This article is no exception.

LOOK AT THE MEDIUM.

I pick up a book, it has HEFT. I FEEL satisfied with my selection in hand, that I have acquired a goodly amount of reading material on a subject or by an author who I feel is worthy of my time.

I open the book and skim the contents page, a worthy array of subjects that pique my interest entice me on but the MEDIUM prevents me from an indulgent glance. I understand inherently that I am expected to progress through the material with the author, at their pace before I can uncover the gold within.

I open the article 'The Erosion of Deep Literacy' in my browser. A PROGRESS METER appears on the right-hand side known as the scroll-bar telling me this article is longer than a three minute read, and that I have a LONG WAIT ahead before my progress is complete.

Immediately I want to know if the article is worth my time and without a CONTENTS PAGE to assure me I flick the oh-so convenient mouse wheel or thumb across my screen and scroll to the bottom with happy abandon!

JUDGEMENT BEGINS as I scan for hints of life; highlighted text, INFO BOXES.. PICTURES!? my guide-posts of worthiness are lacking and emotions set in.. Do I really WANT to spend fifteen whole minutes here?

Long-form is dead on the web of my heart, flicked away like a tik-tok meme that took too long to load... oh look, a butterfly!

One thing that is interesting that the medium matters. For me, I am much more likely to read a programming physical book cover to cover in a short time, than an ebook. Sometimes, I have had an ebook for months, reading just snippets of it, but when I get the same book in physical form, I finish it in a few days. Anybody else have that experience?

What has changed is that most everyone now has the ability to contribute to civil discussion on social media. That means even very ignorant people. This must have some kind of effect on the public discourse I would think

The article has been posted on HN half a dozen times since it was published earlier this year. It’s no surprise people feel it’s worth bringing up here. I wonder why it happens to be getting traction this time.

I printed it out on actual paper after following one of the links from several weeks ago, but only got around to reading it last week. Since then I have forwarded it to several colleagues and friends.

It may be the scariest thing I’ve ever read. It’s struck a gong of inexorable doom resonating through the largest fragments of my lifetime collection of existential worry. The bad things that happen; the good things that don’t. The forces that didn’t make sense; now they sort of do. Not happy.

Long and nice read.

Ten years ago, there was still heated debates about whether Nicolas Carr was right.

Now we kind of know he somehow was right, so parts of the debate are over, while others, still relevant parts, leave us speachless. Or maybe that's just me.

>Deep reading has in large part informed our development as humans

As a statistic, reading is only significant in the past 200 years or so. Given that there was a similar kerfuffle a couple thousand years ago when we shifted from memorizing to writing things down, I doubt that this is too significant.

Literacy is also shifting. Growing up with memes and Instagram and Tiktok has produced a generation that is vastly more literate in design, photography and film.

If abstractness and departure from orality is the ultimate goal, you'd want highly technical writing, mathematical notation and so forth. The type of reading the author encourages - long-form societal discourse, is still relatively oral.

There are many contradictory ideas in this piece. Speed-reading is cited as a sign of poor literacy but then so is vocalization. The two are pretty much opposites.

“If you do not deep read, you do not cultivate a capacity to think, imagine, and create; you therefore may not realize that anything more satisfying than a video game even exists.”

Hence universal public education. The author, though, is talking about making additional effort, as though schooling alone didn’t achieve these basic ends. Glad I didn’t go to his high school.

Given a finite amount of time (albeit a near-infinite amount of easily accessible material to read), there must be a trade off between deep reading and broad reading. No explicit mention of “broad reading” as the alternative in the text, assumedly because having a broad reading experience is viewed as a fine thing.

And for good reason. Consider the most deeply read (non religious) texts in the 20th C....Little Red Book, Communist Manifesto, Ayn Rand, Mein Kampf. Throw in religious cult classics of your choosing. One could argue less deep reading of those texts would have been a very good thing, and millions of lives could have been saved.

Silent sustained reading of political and economics texts, if you don’t swallow the arguments made book, line and thinker, can be a good thing. Cliff Notes and simply reading summaries/critiques of those classic works instead are better, and allow a breadth of reading in limited time that provides context and perspective.

Losing one’s self in a deep read is an act of trust and faith, an act that too often in the 20th Century led to betrayal, abuse and death via the distorted view of reality that resulted. Even in non-political texts, the assumptions underlying popular novels, from Bellows and Mailer to bodice rippers, can have profound renormalizing consequences in the lives of these who lost themselves in these alternative realities.

Sometimes having the attention span of an over-caffeinated golden retriever puppy is a good thing.

> Thus, we have a writer privately squeezing into an artificial, decontextualized "space" in order to convey something, fictive or not, to unknown readers in unknown but theoretically very distant times who are similarly situated, so to speak, in an artificial, decontextualized space.

Good grief.

Edit: This whole article could use a furious edit.

Unrelated to the content of the article -- it appears that the font used in the article has (some) letters "dipping down" below others; for example, the "t" and "i" in "noticing" don't have their bottoms at quite the same level. I don't know if this is just an illusion caused by font thickness or if this is stylistic choice, but I've seen a few of these styles floating around (usually in these "serious" longform articles).

Since this doesn't technically have anything to do with the spacing between letters, is it accurate to call this a feature of kerning? If not, what is the term here? Is it mean to be evocative of typewritten text? While I don't necessarily dislike it, it did prove to be mildly distracting, hence the questions.

Trying to take an optimistic view on this: what if creators simply haven't mastered new media technologies (video, audio, etc.) well enough yet? It's easy to forget, but the earliest forms of language were probably used in extremely mundane circumstances ("Me hungry, food there, etc.") Writing itself was used primarily for imperial accounting purposes for thousands of years before anyone bothered to use it and create art.

I hope that we're merely "illiterate" because we're in between two technological eras.

I think it's an effect of replacing literature with communication and other types of entertainment, paired with a lack of free time.

When the telegraph came out we also lamented the thought that the end of face-to-face social communication was nigh.

This article was way too dense and long so I couldn’t focus long enough to actually finish reading it.

Is this AI-generated? And that's why it's called "Deep Literacy"?

Add it to the list: https://xkcd.com/1227/

And I think Aristotle was complaining about that as well.

Another good article to drill down the point: https://aeon.co/essays/why-working-class-britons-loved-readi...

There are over 4 million of people with PhD only in the US, whopping 14% of the population, that’s more than the percentage of people with a comparable level education in any other period of history in any part of the world. This makes the whole premise of this article seem very dubious.