What happens to a society when the way in which it consumes and processes information suddenly changes? That is the question that should be posed after an essay in The Atlantic recently set out some startling facts which, the essayist argues, demonstrate the coming extinction of reading as a means of understanding the world around us.
Those facts, as laid out by Rose Horowitch, are stark: fewer than half of all Americans read a single book last year. Only 16% of Americans now report reading for pleasure, or as a pastime, daily. Fewer than 10% read a newspaper.
Of those who do read, the material they are consuming has changed: in a statistic that would undoubtedly please the Party from Orwell’s 1984, sentence length has collapsed, with the average sentence in a novel now one-third shorter than it was a century ago. Doubleplusgood, indeed.
The Age of the Algorithm
In the meantime, alternative modes of consuming information have surged. College professors now routinely report that students, assigned books, will simply ask AI tools to summarize them rather than consuming them patiently. Young Americans spend more than four hours a day, on average, on social media – consuming bite-sized chunks of information in TikTok videos and Instagram reels, often played at 2x speed for efficiency.
Or, in short: the age of the book is over; the age of the algorithm has begun.
The right has a tendency to lament such changes and argue that they should be reversed. And indeed, on this occasion, the case for lamentation is strong. As Horowitch argues for The Atlantic, people who lack the patience or the intellectual resources to analyze complex thoughts and spend a large amount of time consuming information on a single topic are likely, in the long run, to be less intellectually equipped than their forebears.
Parents who wish to give their children a good start in life, then, are well advised to focus heavily on imbuing their offspring with a love of books and reading: where once that may simply have imparted a lifelong and fulfilling hobby, increasingly it may impart a rare and valuable skill that meaningfully advantages a person’s prospects compared to their TikTok-addled peers.
This is perhaps the most important practical point in Horowitch’s essay: reading is becoming an elite skill again. For much of the 20th century, mass literacy was one of the defining achievements of Western civilization. The ordinary citizen could read the newspaper, follow an argument, absorb a book and engage with a political claim in some degree of depth. Increasingly, that capacity may become confined to those whose parents, schools or sheer stubbornness protected them from the addictive convenience of summary, clip and feed.
A World of Less Complexity
However, while parents can seek to resist these societal changes at family-unit level, it is simply inconceivable that the trend Horowitch identifies can be reversed globally. We are, inexorably, moving toward a world where thoughts and ideas are less complex and one in which relentlessly fewer human minds have the ability to apply themselves to abstract concepts or detailed knowledge of history or the classics.
One immediate consequence of this can be seen, this writer would argue, in Western politics, where there is a relentless trend – not coincidentally, more pronounced among the young – toward extreme politics on the left and on the right.
Commentators have sought various explanations for this and for sub-trends such as the increased polarization of the sexes along political lines. In reality, the simplest sociological explanation may be that in a world where it is more challenging for young people to understand complex and contradictory sets of facts, fertile ground has been created for those who provide the most black-and-white answers. Fewer young conservative men are grounding themselves in the works of Adam Smith and Thomas Sowell, but a great many more are grounding themselves in the TikTok output of Sneako and Tucker Carlson. A similar trend emerges on the left.
A world in which ideas are merely summarized is a world in which ideas are, inevitably, less well understood and in which the capacity to interrogate ideas will necessarily atrophy. The summary may tell you what a book says. It cannot reproduce the experience of following an argument, testing a claim, becoming irritated by a contradiction or realizing slowly that the author may have a point. Those things require time. And time, in the modern information economy, is the one thing every platform is designed to steal.
So, what is to be done?
Reverse Educational Trends – Before It Is Too Late
The first thing to say is that the state and society have one tool at their disposal which they simply must use: there must be a reversal in the Western trend of dumbing down educational standards to meet the new intellectual limitations of students. In fact, the solution is to do the reverse: to make educational standards far more exacting and demanding than they currently are. To make advancement in life conditional, from quite a young age, on measurable intellectual development and engagement with ideas.
This will not be popular. It will produce failure, complaint and accusations of cruelty. It will mean telling some students that they have not reached the required standard, rather than adjusting the standard until everyone has passed. But the alternative is worse: a system that responds to declining attention spans by making every task shorter, every text simpler and every intellectual demand easier, until the school itself becomes an accomplice to the decline it is supposed to resist.
This is a vital task, and there is a limited window in which to accomplish it, for within a matter of one or two decades, today’s TikTok generation will be tomorrow’s teachers. When that happens – when a generation whose own intellectual capacity has atrophied becomes the very people responsible for educating the next – it will be vastly too late, and a cycle of decline will have been baked in.
Addressing this today should be one of the priorities of politicians who profess to be ideologically driven by a desire to protect and conserve Western civilization.
This does not mean banning TikTok or Instagram, slowing the march of technology or denying the endless benefits of the AI revolution. But it does mean revising curricula and exam standards – even over howls of protest and a round of failing students – to ensure that children emerging into adulthood today are given the same intellectual tools that their parents and grandparents were equipped with.
Those now of pension age, and those who came before them, were among the first generations to live in a true era of mass literacy, with widespread public libraries, broad access to books from an early age and a culture in which reading was still treated as a normal part of adult life. It is probably not surprising, then, that the post-war era of Western history was unusually peaceful, prosperous and laden with scientific and societal advancement. A literate civilization is not automatically a wise one, but it at least has the tools with which wisdom can be pursued.
That accomplishment – mass literacy – is vanishing before our eyes, with consequences that cannot be fully predicted but stand at least a reasonable chance of precipitating a new era of extremism and alienation. The future elite may not be those with the best devices, the fastest connections or the cleverest AI assistant. It may simply be those who can still sit alone with a difficult book, follow a complicated argument and understand what they have read.
It is the duty of all those in power to tackle this emergency before it is much too late to do so.