DON GONYEA, HOST:
Today's technology means that just about anyone can read just about anything just about anywhere. And yet across the globe, reading is less popular than ever. According to Atlantic staff writer Rose Horowitch, humanity is headed into what she calls a post-literate era. In her recent piece on the end of reading, Horowitch describes a widespread shift back toward the oral cultures that dominated the world before the emergence of the written word. To discuss the social, psychological and political implications of this transition, she joins us now, Hi, Rose.
ROSE HOROWITCH: Hi. Thank you so much for having me.
GONYEA: So the headline of your article is a pretty striking claim - "The End Of Reading Is Here." What is the end of reading? And are we talking about a downturn in literacy or something deeper than that?
HOROWITCH: Just the statistics showing how much of a decline there's been in the share of people who read. In America, the share of people who read a book or even an article on any given day has declined by 40% in the past two decades. And currently, gambling is a more popular leisure activity than reading is. But what I think is, you know, really significant about this is not just the downturn, but what that means. Reading sort of shaped the modern world. It shaped our consciousness. It shaped our politics and our culture. And now, as we see reading decline and kind of reach this tipping point, we're going to see all of those things change again.
GONYEA: You describe the very popular present-day books that people are reading and checking out from the New York Public Library. But you also note that the structure and content and even the length of the sentences is different than decades ago, generations ago.
HOROWITCH: So it's not just that people are reading less than they used to. It's that the books that they do read, the sentences are much shorter, and the prose is much simpler. We know that New York Times bestsellers have sentences that are about a third shorter than they were a century ago. And in reporting this piece, I spoke with the head of the New York Public Library, and he said that the library's most popular offerings are young adult fiction. And that's even among people who are not young adults.
GONYEA: And our brain functions differently depending on what kind of information we're processing. A book is one thing. A film is another thing.
HOROWITCH: Yes. I spoke to a researcher who took images of children's brains as they took in a story first by listening to it and looking at photos and then by watching an animation. What he found was that the children had to use the parts of their brain associated with imagination and with learning much less as they were watching the video because everything was there for them. They didn't have kind of to fill in as much, and they didn't have to think as much.
GONYEA: I want to zoom in on politics for a moment. You call Donald Trump the first post-literate president. Tell us about how his approach to communication is really suited to this age.
HOROWITCH: It is very difficult to imagine Donald Trump being elected in a country where information primarily spreads through text. We see in his style of speaking and writing Truth Social posts, a lot of callbacks to oral culture. You know, he uses these epithets that are almost Homeric saying crooked Hillary, sleepy Joe, and they're really easy to remember and repeat. He, you know, constantly contradicts himself as though there's no record of his prior speech.
GONYEA: This isn't the first time that there's been people sounding the alarm about changes in the public's media habits. Why is this moment different, in your view, from, say, the emergence of radio or TV?
HOROWITCH: I quote an article that came out in The Atlantic 126 years ago where, as you say, they were very concerned about the rise of newspapers and that it would stop people from reading books and they would only focus on, you know, the fluff of the daily news. And so I definitely wanted to leave open the possibility that in 126 years, I will look very silly.
But at the same time, you know, I think what we see when people have kind of worried about this in the past - there's this famous example in Plato's "Phaedrus" where Socrates worries that the advent of writing will destroy people's memories and that they'll no longer, you know, be able to recall anything because they'll write it down. I think we see now that he was right in some ways. Like, who could memorize "The Iliad" or "The Odyssey" today? We don't practice memorization in that way, and so we're just not able to do so. At the same time, I think a lot of people would say that writing has been worth it.
So I think today what we see from just the preponderance of evidence and all the data showing that people are reading less is that we are making real trade-offs as we shift to communication through short-form video, and maybe it will be worth it, but we certainly are losing a lot.
GONYEA: Are there fixes that you have pondered to deal with this, or are these just such massive trends that we're all kind of strapped in as a society?
HOROWITCH: So there are some bright spots and, you know, moments of hope. In the piece, I talk about how, you know, nearly two dozen states have banned cellphones during school hours, and when this school district in Dallas - when they saw that ban come through, they've seen 200,000 more library books checked out this year compared to the prior year before the ban. You know, similarly, I spoke to some teachers who were saying that they're seeing a backlash against excerpts and more emphasis on reading full books in schools. But for a wholesale fix, it would need to take place on a much larger level.
You know, the reason I talked about the Library of Alexandria at the start of the article is that for a long time, historians thought that it was destroyed by some external, you know, act of war. That Julius Caesar burned it was a very popular explanation. But now they actually have come to believe that it's just that people didn't care enough to maintain it and that it disappeared through negligence. And it wasn't that it was burned down and there was nothing they could do and that started the Dark Ages, that, actually, the Dark Ages were already there because nobody cared enough to maintain this library. And so I think for us, it would require us making a very different choice and choosing that what we have with reading and these books that have been passed down to us are just too valuable for us to give up.
GONYEA: I've been talking to Atlantic staff writer Rose Horowitch. Rose, thank you.
HOROWITCH: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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