Reading is an old technology, a friend told me, just a different way of doing the same thing we do now, which is to seek out information. We have the ability to boil down ideas and present them in more interesting ways with quick videos, so of course people use them, he continued.
She documents what we intuit. Fewer than half of adults read any book in 2022; only 38 percent read fiction. Daily pleasure reading fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. I’m sure it is vastly worse now. I feel it daily. I let days and weeks go by before I suddenly realize: I’m not feeding my brain; I’m merely consuming. We all do this.
Among young people, it is far worse. Gen Z is just not interested in reading, assuring themselves that it is old technology whereas they are young and adopters of the new thing. As a result, I can easily detect a massive gap in understanding that appears in conversation with a Gen Z person. History? Not much knowledge. Literature? Forget it. Cultural references? There is a misfire.
Much of this comes down to a loss of reading time and its replacement with absolute brainless junk on social media. This is generation lockdown, when the adults forced the kids into a weird isolation and digital addiction. They had formative years stolen from them, and it shows.
I don’t need to rehearse the empirical evidence that old-fashioned reading is dying or dead because we all know that. But what does it mean for us?
Horowitch quotes Benjamin Franklin on how important reading was for the American Revolution. In the ancient world, only a few could hear the orations of statesmen and philosophers but with books and newspapers, everyone has access.
“These libraries have improved the general conversation of the Americans,” he wrote in his autobiography, and “made the common tradesmen and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries.” This is how Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” became a bestseller and solidified national resolve to throw off British rule.
I was an early innovator in getting large texts online. The year was 1995 and the web browser was invented, and, with it, the power to distribute books to billions for free. I took every advantage and mastered the tools of the time to put up at least a thousand books in several formats. The experience filled me with hope.
We have now a dream come true: universal distribution of all the great ideas at zero cost for everyone. Surely, I believed, we were headed for universal literacy like we’ve never seen before.
Plus new technologies were saving us all vast time. Databases were doing calculations that used to take days in minutes. Letters could be sent instantly rather than waiting for mails. People could communicate over vast distances without the mails, sending documents and videos, speeding the pace of everything.
All this innovation created more of that precious resource necessary for deep reading, namely time. We had new amounts of time in abundance, as never before, while access to the great books had never been more democratic and inexpensive. Then we obtained electronic readers to make it all even easier.
Everything was set up for the creation of a renaissance in literacy.
Then something went dreadfully wrong. The time-saving devices ended up not creating more time but rather just shortening attention spans. We wanted all things instantly, whereas reading takes patience, concentration, and focus. Focus was the last thing created by the tech revolution.
In other words, all the new technologies did the opposite of what we had expected. They retrained the human mind toward instant gratification and gradually crowded out anything and everything that involved undistracted focus. We became addicted to the dopamine release that comes with breaking news, quick access, and constant thrills.
The mistake I had made was in assuming that the old ways would be preserved even as new technology made them more accessible. I had not considered the possibility that the new technologies would shred the old culture into nothingness and replace it all with gibberish and nonsense.
Looking back, I should have anticipated this given what happened with television. Early predictions were that it would be filled with college-style lectures and symphonic performances. That prediction was disproven after only a few years of programming.
I spent years writing essays that begged people to take advantage of all the access they had to literature but gradually came to realize that all my sermons were rather useless. I was fighting an uphill battle because the new technologies had not only made books more accessible; it also created a million alternatives to books that are more engaging.
Literacy was being squeezed out. Why read a book when you can just look at and share a meme? I felt this happening daily as I posted more and more. They were not being read; they were being crowded out by nonsense.
My work to put texts online lasted 15 years from 1995 to 2010. Here we are 16 years later and I’ve been mostly disappointed at the results. The habit of “looking things up” has become merely searching for first answers or letting AI generate them for you, rather than actually examining original sources of anything.
Not to put too fine a point on it but let me just say what I sense. The young generation seems to know almost nothing about anything that matters. In saying that, if I come across like an old fogey cursing the habits of the young, so be it.
The widespread ignorance has spread into a shocking loss of vocabulary—a good test of any civilization—and basic erudition. It’s so offensive that I can hardly listen to podcasts these days. The language habits of most people under the age of 40 are shockingly bad and offensive.
Horowitch offers a helpful look at the case for reading real books and not dismissing them as merely old-fashioned. I’m persuaded by every point she makes here.
Reading is unnatural, she says, just like excellent health. But as exercise is to our bodies, reading is to the mind. It rewires the brain for sustained attention, logical/abstract thinking, reflection, and complex analysis. It enables linear reasoning, inner concentration, and synthesis. Illiterate vs. literate differences show gains in syllogistic logic and detachment from the immediate.
Brains “master what they practice” while replacing books with short videos atrophies focus, imagination, and executive function.
Reading fosters deeper engagement vs. passive consumption. This is because books demand active work (imagination, inference, holding ideas across text), rewarding with insight and pleasure. Video is more passive/information-dense but overwhelms without cultivating reflection; people comprehend less on screens. Reading builds “stamina” and background knowledge.
Writing and reading were an important shift in history because it detached ideas from speakers, enabled dispassionate analysis, and created enduring records in philosophy, science, history, and every discipline. It supported informed citizenship (e.g., Founders’ vision of a reading public). Literacy’s spread promoted rational, evidence-based discourse.
Horowitch argues that postliteracy favors emotional, repetitive, epithet-driven, contradictory styles over nuance. It boosts disjointed irrationality, simplistic content, and a kind of nihilism that is the default position of a disorganized brain.
All of this, she says, gets worse with AI. It erodes the thinking process (figuring out ideas, spotting flaws, gaining insights). It floods us with mediocre text, demanding more discernment just as skills weaken. Overreliance risks losing independent thought.
Can real literacy be regained? I’m not sure because we’ve never really been here before. The cultural pull of postliteracy is absolutely overwhelming. There is something each of us can do in our own lives.
