The Age of Reading Is Over - The Atlantic

[applegrove]

The advent of reading transformed society, and its decline will bring about changes of the same magnitude, @rosehorowitch.bsky.social writes. Can America—and civilization—survive the postliterate era?

— The Atlantic (@theatlantic.com) 2026-07-09T23:16:10.970Z

[Prairie Gates]

1. Atlantic just printing goofy ragebait now?

A fart of a story that could have been printed in any decade in the last 200 years.

[applegrove]

3. I think it is important that we know what the effects are

of spending more time online and less reading. I think it is a call to arms. I am planning on looking into a literacy group I have given to in the past and give more. Reading is the enemy of the GOP after all.

[senseandsensibility]

4. I know what you mean

but people read online, don't they? We just renewed our subscription to our local paper online. I know I read quite a bit online .

[Mad_Machine76]

6. Yeah

I mean, what are we all doing here?

[Mad_Machine76]

5. It would seem bookstores are still in business

and libraries are still seeing lots of people daily.

[orthoclad]

13. Damn few bookstores these days

I remember a lot of small quirky stores, which morphed into the big box stores with coffee shops and live music. All gone now. I think there's a tiny Barnes and Noble around, and a few punk-ish new-wavish stores.

I make it a point to support my local library. I make them search for rare stuff from interlibrary loan, both books and movies. I make suggestions for purchases. They love the challenge. I never stream, I check out dvd's for entertainment. Make snacks and drinks for movie night.

[Mad_Machine76]

14. There's also Half-Price Books

which is a thrifty way to find older books and physical media.

[sinkingfeeling]

7. Nothing will ever replace a good, printed book. I'm old school and love books, bookstores, and libraries.

[applegrove]

8. The big box bookstore in Canada pivoted to home decor 20 years ago.

Then moved to a smaller venue. Of course that could have been competition with Amazon.

[anciano]

9. Interesting OP....

It could be argued that new technologies like the Internet and AI are actually changing the definition of "literacy" for our era since they are changing the ways we acquire, process, and manage information. So it seems logical to me to look for ways to integrate the appropriate and responsible use of these technologies into classroom settings.

[applegrove]

10. There is good and bad. My dad had a health care worker who told me her

family (Nova Scotia disapora of black Canadians treated horribly over generations) were all asking her how to spell certain words since they were texting and had found use for writing in that way.

[orthoclad]

11. YES, indeed!

We are turning into screen people, staring at videos all day. I posted something the other day asking if we were going post-literate.

Several people who post here prolifically post NOTHING but videos, not one line of descriptive text. One post said fifty minutes for a video. Who the hell has a life where you can spend 50 minutes staring at a phone?

Video is inimical in what it does to the brain. Like tv, it induces a semi-hypnotic state of receptive suggestableness. Reading text exercises the brain; it's an active medium.

There are a few occasions where video or visual is appropriate. The picture of the napalm girl in the Vietnam war was worth many thousand words. But in general, video is information-poor. The vast majority of the bits and pixels are just noise, no information content, just a LOT of data. In general, I can get the gist of a piece of text in a matter of seconds, compared to 5 to 10 minutes of Hi-my-name-is-George-and-I'm-here-to-tell-you... blather.

I remember an sf novel from the 50s with a theme of post-literate society. In that book it was a good thing, signalling a change of consciousness, a gestalt-type, nonlinear way of perceiving the world. In real life, video is more like Ozzie and Harriet.

Text is information. Video is noise.

[Takket]

12. love how just because MAGA does something that it must mean that that action represents the entire global population

[applegrove]

16. From the link:

"Things are about to get worse, and fast. The next generation reads much less than today’s adults did when they were kids. Kindergarten teachers say that many of their students don’t know nursery rhymes or fairy tales, Benjamin Powers, the director of Yale and the University of Connecticut’s Haskins Global Literacy Hub, told me. (In the study of 236,000 American adults, only 2 percent read to a child on a given day.) From 1984 to 2025, the percentage of 13-year-olds who said they rarely or never read for fun rose from 8 to 29 percent. Every year older a child gets, the less they like to read. Robert Townsend, a program director at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, recently ran focus groups asking high-school students how they felt about reading for pleasure. He told me that most thought of it as an alien practice."

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-postliterate-age/687618/?link_source=ta_bluesky_link&taid=6a502bbae96d9800016ea13a&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_content=edit-promo&utm_medium=social&utm_source=bluesky

[Tree Lady]

15. I read all the time both my daughters in mid 40's read also

But my grandkids in 20's I don't hear of them reading.