Are we becoming a post-literate society? | Hacker News Reader

Are we becoming a post-literate society?

ft.com

37 pointsbelter48 comments

If you think of reading as one means of consumption of information then the ability to read may just be outdated, and people are moving to new forms of information consumption. Reading was never particularly exciting for me even though I wanted to discover what was hidden (often buried) in texts and if you can get the information in a more engaging and streamlined way so be it. Maybe the issue is really the content people are streaming and the lack of critical thinking and not that they are streaming at all.

> If you think of reading as one means of consumption of information then the ability to read may just be outdated, and people are moving to new forms of information consumption.

Im not sure that this is an accurate observation -- at least wholly accurate.

The implication being, "other forms of consuming information are equal to the desired end goal." Or perhaps more strongly, "other forms of consuming information are better at achieving the desired end goal."

For which, you'd have to define an end goal. If it's pure entertainment, I think I'd agree with the above.

But there are other important reasons to consume information, and I'm unconvinced that there is anything better than reading. Things such as synthesizing complex ideas and retention of information come to mind.

I realize this is unsubstantiated, there may be research into it. To me if feels self evident, but i can only offer anecdotal evidence to support it.

The written word offers a precision not found in many other media.

Yet there be clickbait headlines. Novels are written for people to imagine the scenes described by the author, requiring your own 'filling in' to be immersed in the story.

There are many topics that really can only be discussed with at book-length and with text, since the reader needs to think critically and be able to quickly reference other parts of the text in order to understand.

"Get the information" is too passive, learning is not just about amassing a collection of facts. People amassing a collection of facts without having (or even wanting) holistic understanding is one of the dangers of a post-literate society, "apprehend[ing] the world through fragmented pictures."

> be able to quickly reference other parts of the text in order to understand

That implies a nonlinearity that non-books may handle better. Books (tomes) are better at that than scrolls because of flippy pages and indices, but hypertext was built for deep references, as just one example of better than books.

That is the theory, but not the practice.

In practice, I always prefer a PDF manual with thousands of pages to the same information provided in HTML format.

At big book sizes, it is much easier to navigate through a PDF, even when it does not have chapter bookmarks and you navigate only by searching, than through any HTML that I have ever seen. The HTML may have extra links, but those only infrequently match the pattern in which I want to navigate the document.

The fixed, immutable formatting of the PDF is of great help when navigating randomly through a document, in contrast with the unpredictable formatting of HTML, where you may find the same elements in different positions when you revisit some part of the text.

One of the reasons why links are much less useful than searching for navigating through a document is that very frequently I want to go through all sections of the document that mention something, not to a single place. This feature has already been provided for centuries by all well made printed books, using indices, but on computers much more complex searches are possible than with the traditional word indices.

Footnotes and references are the equivalent and imo often lead to more robust sources.

Is that the politically correct term for illiterate?

America's illiterati idiocracy went mainstream.

I'd answer, but I didn't read the article

I don't believe that entirely captures where we have been going. The danger is more that people now read only what they already believe in. They don't read to question, update, or correct their beliefs, mostly only to reinforce them. This can be done with bad books just the same. The open-mindedness is unidirectional rather than omnidirectional. It moves people into extreme orientations.

It is more likely to be akin to the development described in Stephenson's Anathem where textual writing eventually is displaced by something called kinograms which seem to resemble animated emoji. Only scholars locked in in walled institutions of learning from which they rarely venture still read script, outside those walls it is only in some religious orders where textual writing is still practised. Kinograms seem to be mostly used to convey commercial and practical information like user manuals, not for storytelling which is done through some form of video. In a way this is 'post-literate' since it adds an extra dimension to illiteracy: relatively complex information is still conveyed by standardised symbolic means, just not through text.

Having said all this it does seem like society is dumbing down, partly due to the way information is distributed.

Having said that I think this sentiment was common in previous generations as well.

Thanks for timely reminder that Anathem was more than just a much needed upgrade of The Glass Bead Game (besides getting rid of the neuroses while covering roughly the same themes, Neal also shipped his signature thought-provoking gimmicks, more effectively helping to stem the dumbdown than Hesse)

> textual writing eventually is displaced by something called kinograms

> I think this sentiment was common in previous generations as well

you're the man now, dog

A post-literate society is a hypothetical society in which multimedia technology has advanced to the point where literacy, the ability to read or write, is no longer necessary or common....

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-literate_society>

Interesting use of 'advanced'.

It follows in a similar sense that mechanisation makes the need for physical strength an stamina redundant; that transport networks make walking, draft wagons, and sailing ships redundant; and that digital computers make arithmetic and pen-and-paper information management redundant.

Given that high levels of literacy are typically limited to less than a quarter of the population, and low-to-nil levels may be the fate of a third to half (I've addressed this in several previous HN submissions and comments on US adult literacy, searches for posts <https://hn.algolia.com/?q=by%3Adredmorbius%20adult%20literac...> and comments <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>), as well as the tremendous number of people who have to interact in societies in what is not their own mother tongue, there's some merit to this view.

There are of course counterarguments, and I'm highly aware of those as well.

https://archive.is/Kp4ZV

> “Thirty per cent of Americans read at a level that you would expect from a 10-year-old child... It is actually hard to imagine — that every third person you meet on the street has difficulties reading even simple things.”

It isn't hard to imagine, if you've spent any time on internet message boards or social media. The level of reading comprehension is astonishingly low. Heck, even the willingness to read short articles is low, let alone to understand them. I'm not by any means excepting places like Hacker News from this.

I wouldn't necessarily link reading comprehension level with willingness to read internet articles.

Personally, I'd like to think I have a reasonably high reading comprehension level, but I have a very low tolerance for long-winded articles, largely because the volume of articles is increasing over time, but the SnR is often extremely low.

I have finite and ever-shrinking time left (as do we all), so I wish more people would get to the point rather than add a bunch of filler to show off their writing skills.

I can relate to what you are talking, but...

1. it depends on my interest in the topic of the article. If I'm interested, I'll read the whole article, and then I'll read copyright like at the bottom of the page, just to be sure I didn't missed anything. If I'm interested then time doesn't matter, or even it matters with a negative sign: the longer I spend reading the more satisfaction I got. So "a bunch of filler" can be bad or good depending on a reader.

2. Articles mostly follow some form, if you are familiar with it you can skip big chunks of text to get to the point quickly. For example, a lot of articles of professional reporters looks like:

  a. Intro that tickles curiosity but says nothing substantive

  b. Jump back in time to tell the biographies of the involved people

  c. The substance

  d. Some form of a conclusion.

(a) is needed to detect the form of the article, (b) can be skipped easily, I scan (c) for direct quotes and read the text around them, (d) I skim to see if there are any non-obvious statements, because it may be a sign I missed something important in (c).

Non-professional writers are less predictable, because they do not follow any rules when composing text, but if you are ready to scroll back and use browser's ability to search on the page, you can extract the core message of the author in no time at all.

s/excepting/exempting/

What other places are like HN? I can't think of a single one, much less multiple others.

I'd say the comment section of the website acoup.blog (which have been linked a few times on HN, that's how I discovered it), the commenters usually give the impression they've read the article. Of course it can also be due to the fact that it's a blog comment section, not those of a link-sharing site.

Slashdot is at least part of the same haplogroup, if not a close cousin.

There are some HN-alikes, such as Lobste.rs, which appears to be ~10% the size but often carries similar article selections. <https://lobste.rs/>

There is Tildes.net, which was inspired by Reddit (founder is an ex-Reddit employee). <https://tildes.net/>

There remains Metafilter, which continues to have exceptionally high S/N: <https://www.metafilter.com/>

Individual blogs and podcasts occasionally have useful discussion.

Mostly the mode seems to be waning in my experience.

I took a college class with a friend about 15 years ago and he was struggling to pick up the material, so I tried to help him through it. In the process, I learned how TERRIBLE his reading skills were.

He was almost 30 years old and could read at probably only 80 words per minute, about the speed many people will type. It was agonizing listening to him try to read something. It's like he was 5 years old and sounding out each word in his head before saying it.

No wonder he was struggling with the material. But the time he's finished reading a sentence, the beginning of the sentence was so long ago that he had forgotten it because all his brain power was being spent merely reading the words that there was nothing left to actually comprehend them.

  I'm very skeptical of books. I don't want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.

- Sam Bankman-Fried

This is how Adderall addiction looks, folks.

So what is he going to do in prison?

I was shocked to discover during my 2024 year in review I had only completed a single book.

Obviously still read loads (internet) but that realization hit kinda hard & don’t think they’re equivalent for mental wellbeing

On the plus side Ive got a good nye resolution line up!

As it relates to book publishing, I can say from personal experience that the mass-published bookshelf is an absolute trash heap. Most genres are shadows of their former selves. All the intellectually and literarily valuable work is either in the past or self-published online due to lack of mass appeal.

Good books are still there (even self-published), but the book scene is absolutely swamped with garbage and "the algorithm" generally does not favor new/unknown authors

By way of Tildes and another comment in this thread:

"The Big Five Publishers Have Killed Literary Fiction"

...Instead of an eye-blackening scrum over who gets to publish the next Tom Wolfe, nobody’s quite sure that his fresh, satirical voice is worth chancing in the first place. As a consequence of this mode of thinking, literary fiction has fallen to only two percent of the fiction market. From the publishers’ perspective literary fiction is just too risky—and that risk has nothing to do with questions of form or taste. It’s much more simple and less political than that....

<https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-big-five-publishers-h...>

$1084542

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[stub for offtopicness]

The irony of this article being hidden by a paywall..

Unpaywalled link has been posted already

I don't understand why people post paywalled content on HN.

Because it's still a good article and can be unpaywalled. I believe we're supposed to link the original source and someone can just comment the sci-hub/archive.ph/whatever. Same reason you'd cite the original in a paper.

Usually someone will come along and post a link that gets around the paywall.

If there's a workaround, it's ok. Users usually post workarounds in the thread.

This is in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and there's more explanation here:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

Reply on news.ycombinator.com