Comment by etempleton | Hacker News Reader

Comment by etempleton | Hacker News Reader

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.

Not only that, printed word used to be expensive! There's a remark made by George Orwell somewhere in which he addresses the claim made in the early 20th century that the working class don't read because they can't afford books. He counters that assertion by calculating that, based on the cost of going to the pictures, and the number of times a year a working-class person is likely to go, they could afford to buy enough second-hand books to read for several hours a week.

On the other hand, for anyone with a smartphone (something like 90% of adults in the developed world), there is zero marginal cost to accessing unlimited written word. I think, on the contrary, we've never as a society been more literate. Never before has such a large proportion of our communication been through text. The "deep reading" complaint might be re-characterised (and in fairness the article hints at it) as the fact that the internet makes many-to-many communication by written word as cheap as one-to-many. When the economic barriers to reaching an audience are removed, the written word more closely represents the average reader, which has never been closer than today to the average person.

The cost of reading may be lower than ever, but people read less than before. And there's no need to compare current figures to the 1850s: the 1970s will do fine.

Actually 1850s is a perfect time period to look at, since it's when compulsory education starting taking hold in the U.S.

> This article took a very large amount of my time to read in proportion

I read it, and I felt that I would have learned more, been more entertained, and had more insight into creators' direction and meaning, if I had instead used that time flicking through TikToks.

The author's "you do not cultivate a capacity to think, imagine, and create" - seems very wrong and itself unimaginative.

I'm not even particularly convinced that academia is consistent with such a notion of "deep literacy." On day 1 of grad school in the humanities/social sciences, one is handed a reading list of far more books than one can ever hope to "deep" read, and one very quickly learns to skim them and get the meat of it. Advice for beginning academics is filled with blog posts with titles like "how to gut a book."

This continues even post tenure. There are dozens to hundreds of important works on anything about which one might write; unless one wishes to publish one paper per five years, one continues one's grad school habit of reading at breakneck speed and with a sense of panic about the possibility that more works on one's subject are actually being published at the very moment that one is reading the previous literature.

>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?

As if our politicians are some highly educated bunch anyway.

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