On a personal level I have become more anxious and it has become more difficult to deal with my tendency to procrastinate the more screen time I have and the more I am exposed to social media. I have in essence deleted the vast majority of my social media accounts years ago, but stayed a passive and rather anonymous consumer on Reddit, X and YouTube. A few weeks ago I blocked them too. I would say in totality I read more than I read growing up, but it was usually in the form of short content. Same goes for watching things. Unlimited access to short form content of any form has made my monkey brain feel a resistance to longer form content and that annoys and scares me. It’s like having free hyper palatable but unhealthy food in front of you at all times while you know that there are fresh ingredients for a proper healthy meal in the fridge. And as absurd as it sounds as a 30 something year old, I am now actively working on getting into the habit of reading books again and watching movies in one go to work on that specific problem. And talking ti my friends and family it looks like many of them struggle with similar problems.<p>I am less worried about the classics or the depth of wisdom that I miss. I am worried about the addiction that is dangled in front of my face and normalised completely now.
As for society, I think this is an uphill battle that I don’t see a real and lasting solution for it - and by “it” I mean us fellow humans in aggregate escaping this vortex of what I feel is ultimately self-harming behaviour. I hope for better regulation. I hope for better education. I hope for people realizing how harming it all is and turning around but my sense is that the shape of the world right now will make that so difficult in practice that it won’t happen.
> I have in essence deleted the vast majority of my social media accounts years ago, but stayed a passive and rather anonymous consumer on Reddit, X and YouTube<p>Most of the people I’ve known who struggled with doomscrolling had established a similar set of social media sites at their worst point.<p>I think we’ve seen so many articles about how social media is bad that reference mainstream sites like Facebook and Instagram that it feels safer to retreat to sites like Reddit<p>Yet the most doomer, anxious, and cynical people I’ve known who got stuck in social media doom spirals were getting it primarily from Reddit, often with a helping of YouTube, X, or Twitch streamers on the side.<p>They would be convinced that they were “off of social media” because they didn’t consider those sites among the bad ones, but they’d open their phones or laptops and feed streams of doom straight into their brains for hours every day.<p>Cutting the cord on those sites was a good move if you realized you were having problems with social media. They’re not typically grouped into “social media” by people who create narrow definitions of what that means (profile picture, real names, etc) but those distinctions mean nothing for doom scrolling. When it comes to the doom part of doom scrolling, Reddit especially can be even worse than traditional social media. The content popular on that site is almost designed to fill you with dread and doom and depression.
I'm a frequent Reddit user. Recently they have been bringing some of the more poisonous elements of social media over to their platform. Pushing a "for you" feed, and prioritizing a "Best" sorting algorithm over "new" or "hot".
> When it comes to the doom part of doom scrolling, Reddit especially can be even worse than traditional social media.<p>It <i>can</i> be, but it can also (still) be sanitized.<p>I typically visit old.reddit.com once every day or two on a desktop browser without ads to check the subreddit for the city I live in. No doomscrolling is really possible.<p>There's no way to consume meta/tiktok content in a comparable way.
I have a predisposition for that, and Reddit is indeed poison for some of us. I blocked it with pihole, along with most other social media sites, years ago.<p>Just the friction of a dns record (that yes, I can easily override) was enough to keep myself away from all of it.<p>And when I need the rare bit of practical information from one of them, I can hit the 5m override from a widget on the phone.<p>It’s ultimately self control, but that’s easy for me when there’s just a tiny bit of hassle in the loop.
PiHole was my solution as well, and then Reddit decided to help. The "new" Reddit interface is still horrible and unusable, so old.reddit.com was always my go to. I don't have or want a Reddit account, I just wanted to follow a few sub-reddits. Now old.reddit.com is blocked for users without an account and they appear to be rolling out something similar to the site in general. You can see a few posts, and the a pop-up appears and requires you to sign in.<p>Maybe I'm just getting old, but I used to enjoy Imgur and Reddit, but both "communities" have become increasingly hostile and less inclusive. So now I avoid both and I mentally feel much more positive about people in general.
X is honestly among the worst of the worst. People give purposefully bad takes just for the engagement and it's overall super toxic<p>Reddit is awful too, completely accurate things can get downvoted to oblivion because of the hive mind<p>YouTube is still overall decent but mostly brainrot I habitually watch/listen to in the background to such a high degree it's hard to even imagine completely cutting it out of my life
I'm mostly passive on reddit these days but really struggle to leave it as I do enjoy seeing things like cool projects people are making on /r/selfhosting and such. Every time I think of leaving it I just think well I cant because where will i find out about cool new projects now.
I know it’s not the same but I watch stuff like hackaday and others with an rss reader, now. Old school approach. It helps jail the types of content I passively consume. I blocked reddit and most other social media with the pihole I was using anyway.<p>After having been away from Reddit for a couple years now, I think it was a good trade. But obviously that’s a very personal thing.
I’m on X for tech interest, new hardware, robotics, coding. If X didn’t allow blocking words/phrases, I could not use it! And yes, my blocklist is huge..
X also actively mocks you. I'm strongly anti-AI, and it would fill my whole feed with AI evangelist crap and viral AI PR ragebait.<p>But it's good, it made me quit the motherfucker.<p>Still hanging on to HN, its weaker doppelganger, though :)
> downvoted to oblivion because of the hive mind<p>Not just the hivemind, Reddit has been thoroughly astroturfed for a long time now. The vast majority of large subreddits have at least 1-2 mods who stifle/amplify discourse in the service of companies, think tanks, and certain Levantine pariah nations.
LinkedIn is up there too, the reality distortion and appearance of everyone being a self made trillionaire can make the strongest of minds feel like they’re utter failures. It’s of course not true and 90% seem to be pure bullshit, but who has time to investigate ever thought leader post they get shoved in their face
[dead]
One of my problems with blocking things like YouTube is that there’s so much outstanding long form content that’s not always available elsewhere. I love watching semi popularized physics lectures like from Sean Carroll but I can’t help but click on the mindless content next to it after, or even during, my wholesome viewing.
It’s quite infuriating that all those sites you mention have gone with the race to the bottom to just hook in users with garbage content.<p>Just last week, Youtube took even more steps in hiding your subscriptions homepage on iOS, and on desktop the shorts (content made for phones in portrait mode) is front and centre.
One problem for me about leaving social media is that it limits my chances of getting updates about jobs, and if I start a business, social media is a good way of promoting the business.<p>I wish I was in a financial position where I didn't have to bother about this.<p>I've been limiting my use of social media (aside Reddit and HN) for almost two weeks now and I've been reading books and doing other things with my time rather than consuming content that isn't beneficial to me.<p>Check out the Wikipedia article - The Shallows<p>"""<p>The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. The book claims research shows "online reading" yields lower comprehension than reading a printed page. The Shallows was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction.<p>"""<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shallows_(book)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shallows_(book)</a>
> if I start a business, social media is a good way of promoting the business.<p>I've had the thought that if I were to start a business, social media manager (or a comparable outsourced gig) would be one of my first hires.<p>Like I'd far rather deal with tax minutia and skip on hiring an accountant in favour of being able to outsource social media use.
Yeah, I have stopped basically all consumption except from youtube, which itself also has a tendency to expand to fill all available time. I dont use shorts that much, but there is just much good content being released as well.
One of the most insidious realities of the introduction of AI is that we've taken our eye off of tech's original sin - the algorithmic feed forensically designed to hijack the brain. I don't see how it's any different than opium and why the regulations should be any different. Even the problem of "AI slop" is mostly that it invades the algorithms, weaponizing them even more.<p>I'm not a huge fan of heavy-handed regulation, but some clinical regulation like making "Explore" tabs or feeds irrelevant to your social networks, opt-in by default would have such a Pareto improvement to all our brains.<p>Instead we are getting endless whinging over water usage in data centers ironically flooding our algorithmic feeds.
> I don't see how it's any different than opium<p>During the marijuana prohibition days the resounding chorus in the discourse was that marijuana was not physically addictive like other drugs, and therefore we must treat it differently. There were problems with that argument if you got into the details, but it did establish the idea that not all drugs are equally harmful and therefore treating them all equally was not logical.<p>It’s funny now to see these equivalencies where we’re supposed to believe that social media is no different than extremely powerful drugs that have severe withdrawal syndromes and wreak havoc on their user’s bodies. The equivalence is obviously false to anyone who has been in the sad position of knowing an opioid addict.<p>It’s possible to make arguments about social media that don’t depend on obviously false equivalence to powerful drugs.
A long time ago on the forum I hang out with, I said something like "this is amazing, this is like heroin!" about whatever (not even a substance, probably something silly like a song or a video game). A guy who I knew as nothing but laid back and gracious scolded me in a way I remember to this day... not the exact words, but part of it was that he knew a couple who just handed off their new born baby for adoption to get their next shot. And I could tell there was a lot unsaid, too. Sorry for the tangent, but I guess, fuck heroin etc., and all the power to anyone struggling with it, things like it, or has loved ones or friends that do.
I'm comparing to Opium not for exact chemical effect equivalence but for the level of Government urgency required. There's been a fair bit of work down now to identify clear physiological withdrawal symptoms too[1]. The main damage though is on cognitive strengths (far more pronounced than Marijuana).<p>[1]: <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10339588/" rel="nofollow">https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10339588/</a>
There was a time, not that long ago, when cocaine was 100% normalized. It was a regular ingredient used in everything from basic OTC remedies to, most famously Coca Cola which was Cocaine + Kola nut. And Coca Cola itself was based on Vin Mariani, a wine mixed with cocaine that was drunk or endorsed by everybody from Popes to Thomas Edison and Ulysses S Grant. It was also regularly offered for free to laborers by employers because it was seen to observe productivity, and all other sorts of stuff.<p>So we were pretty much a nation of coke heads. It's probably <i>much</i> more difficult to see the harm in things when its so normalized. But of course people did and so the tide gradually shifted against it. We're already seeing the exact same process play out with social media and, more generally, digital addictions. But it's a relatively unprecedented technology in that it's essentially a digital drug that can't be especially well defined. But I expect these things are well on there way out. The age restrictions will likely come with broader prohibitions if they are positive outcomes from such, and we're already seeing exactly that in places like Australia.<p>Government and intelligence agencies desire to use it for mind control or whatever will probably quickly fade once they realize the same concept (which I think is quite frankly absurd - hence my sardonic term) could just as well be used against them, were it possible.
> most famously Coca Cola which was Cocaine + Kola nut.<p>That's a common misleading myth.<p>Early coca cola was coca leaves and kola nut. Yes, the former contained cocaine alkaloids. But it's different from saying you take a soda and mix it with cocaine. The dosage wasn't comparable to a snorted line today.
You can actually see this phenomenon happening now with alcohol consumption, which is in a long decline .. replaced by social media addiction.
[dead]
> I quit all social media!<p>> No for real! Even YouTube!<p>And yet here you are
Might be nit-picking but forum != social media (to me).
Aye, but it's also possible to waste an incredible amount of time on HN. I'd call it my main internet vice after lichess. Both are outwardly better than say, TikTok or Reddit, but if you're spending hours a day flitting unstructured between content, you're subject to both the fragmentation and time sink problems. Same as someone who spends the same amount of time caning TikTok. A little healthier (maybe not lichess) and less intense, but I'd argue also damaging.
lichess and HN are definitely on my "wasting time online" list. HN totally is social media. It has an "algorithm" it has gamification (upvotes/downvotes/flag/vouch/karma). It feeds you endless content which is mostly of questionable quality. It interacts with the same systems giving you dopamine highs and lows and chasing the next little boost.<p>When I'm traveling and I'm less online I don't miss either. Life feels simpler.<p>One thing I try to do more on lichess is to just do puzzles so I don't really get the same dopamine hit of games. I guess very long time controls might be better as well. I do make the excuse that it's at least using my brain and I have gotten much better at chess.<p>YouTube is really the other big problem. There is a lot of actually great content and then there's a lot of garbage. I don't do Reddit or TikTok at all.
It’s my most used website according to Apple Screentime. So you’re probably right (daily average around 30 min).
I did not claim I quit it all, just the majority and said I was struggling with this topic. Not sure if you are trying to help or are just mean.
Scrolling through the comments here, let's be honest about having actually read the entire article. Have you? Be honest.<p>At first I had not, only the first 3-4 paragraphs. And it just read like another one of those articles where somebody is sad about their own and their kids' habits. I then found that most comments here are about that too.<p>But I realized that not actually reading a lengthy article like this one is part of the problem, so I went back.<p>I have read it fully now and noticed two things. First, it's a very lengthy way to say few things. The author could surely have made the point much more crisp. But second, it's not just about the personal situation and some abstract form of person in society. It's also about those "in charge". And that's frightening.
I don't read less, but I do read fewer books. It is hard to find a book that is the best source for what I want know about, and that changes too frequently now to outlive the time it takes to read a book. This is what you'd expect in a world where the sheer volume of things that are important to know about has grown beyond a sustainable capacity.<p>What has taken their place, for better or for worse, are various information feeds with blog posts, news articles, and projects relevant to my interests and the moment. I've come to prefer a more raw exposition of other people's thoughts. It seems partly in the interest of credibility; more spontaneous writing offers a richer surface area to judge the quality of thought. And finding it in a place where other people are free to critique and engage with those thoughts means that I'm not locked into just one voice. I also have the opportunity to engage myself which fundamentally changes how actively I think about it.<p>I'm open to the idea that the shift has come at a cost. There is value to reading something that someone has put a lot of work into and in large quantities. But the days when I felt it was enough to just passively let information flow over me seem to be over; it is a luxury I can't afford.
AI has come for those blog posts and news articles. There's very little incentive for people to invest in quality content anymore - I'm seeing things like this more with many others just quietly stopping: <a href="https://exploringjs.com/" rel="nofollow">https://exploringjs.com/</a>
I can understand how this makes sense for javascript frameworks and linux distributions but as an advid reader of non-fiction, I can't think of how this applies to almost anything else as it relates to books.<p>For most subjects, the deeper you go means you need to read more books if you are really learning something new.<p>Even arvix papers eventually lead me to a book I am not familiar with.
If something changes frequently, is it important to know? is the change inevitable or artificial?<p>I’ve learned to appreciate lasting things and ideas.
Fiction doesn’t age in the same way.
What is a book? I mean, I spent some time over the last couple of days reading parts of the PostgreSQL manual — if you printed it it would be a gigantic book but it's online and linked. Does that make it not a book? Half a book? Still a book?<p>A blog post can be a few hundred words or a hundred thousand. It can even be a series of blog posts. Is that now a book?
This is an article about declining literacy in the West. But this is notably a Western decline problem. In some other parts of the world, literacy is improving.<p>One of the first things I noticed when I moved to Ukraine in 2020 was that even the political jokes that you see on television have real highbrow wit and humor, which assume a high degree of literacy to understand. Even talking to some kids who were 14 years old, I was surprised at how they had memorized poetry in multiple languages and could write beautifully in cursive. You don't find that anymore in the West.<p>Sure, kids over here doomscroll themselves on TikTok as well, but they are not illiterate.
I can tell, usually within a few minutes of meeting them, who’s really into social media.<p>There’s a little bit of frenetic emotional dysregulation, and then they say the weirdest stuff to me.<p>I don’t think you could have made a similar argument about heavy trash tv watchers. They may have had less to talk about, you may have found them less interesting, but it didn’t literally alter their personalities.<p>We have a big problem.
The easiest way to tell in Europe is that a woman who has never visited USA speaks in phrases or uses slang words that an African-American woman from Atlanta would use. African-American men and women probably have the largest global cultural effect based on the relative size of the community to the population of the world.
I feel called out as one of them. I definitely overextend in terms of internet references if I'm anxious to try to catch something the other person is interested in. Among many "online" people, memes are basically a form of in-group signaling at this point to indicate you have a similar shape of humor, quirks, shared fandoms, and values (albeit often surface level). I'm reminded of the quote about fandoms by Roger Ebert [0]. I would say it's a similar tendency to use online references as a way to skirt social awkwardness and establish some commonality.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1192222-a-lot-of-fans-are-basically-fans-of-fandom-itself" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1192222-a-lot-of-fans-are-b...</a>
Before social media I remember people who had entire conversations just quoting tv shows, movies, and commercials. Which shows they quoted was their personality.<p>I think it is much worse with social media, the content is a lot more niche and the algorithms a lot more addictive.<p>It's not so much the weird stuff they say, I think that is fairly normal, especially the younger you go. It's the inability to do anything in person without talking constant phone breaks that I find most worrying.
> It's the inability to do anything in person without talking constant phone breaks that I find most worrying.<p>So weird/eerie to go into an In-N-Out Burger or something, and see a table full of teenagers just sitting there silently scrolling their phones. Feels like we're in an episode of the Twilight Zone sometimes.<p>Not just teenagers, too. You'll see grown ass adults sitting there, technically together but totally absorbed into their phones.
Everyone gets their own echo chamber now.<p>I want a TikTok-era <i>Bowling Along</i> examining the impact modern single feed social media has had on group participation in the new generations...
Do you have examples of what weird stuff they would say? Im having a hard time imagining what you mean exactly.
I would also add that having this kind of detection superpower probably requires the observer to be a social media addict too <i>(low-key)</i>.
Do you have examples? Asking for a friend.
ok boomer
Hm, comparing developments spanning from the 12th century up to now with stuff that is happening in the last decade. Just give social media about 5 or 6 centuries to develop, and then check back to see if the arguments of this article are sound.<p>Edit: sorry for being so dismissive, but I just can't stand rhetoric that says something about "us" and "we". There were seriously stupid people back when we supposedly had larger attention spans. There are still stupid people now.
I used to think the same way, that people have always overreacted to new technology.<p>But over time I’ve started to feel there’s at least a bit of truth to some of those moral panics, and it's not correct to dismiss all. I remember laughing at an old article about “calcu-holism,” basically the idea of becoming too dependent on calculators. At the time it sounded ridiculous, but looking back, the point wasn’t that bad. Reaching for a calculator to do basic math is a silly habit, a sign of extreme mental laziness. And it's inefficient too.<p>I’ve noticed something similar in myself with attention. I remember reading <i>The Power Broker</i>, a 1,000+ pages tome, in under a month. Now I struggle to finish books that are a fraction of that length. And if it feels this way for me, I can only imagine what it’s like for teenagers who’ve grown up with smartphones their entire lives. Possibly, being completely engrossed in a book would be an alien experience to them.
That is also true for me on struggling to complete books, but don't forget when books first become cheap there were letters to the newspapers deploring that young people were reading rather than 'living' by talking with friends or going to the theatre.<p>I remember for a history project at secondary school reading the notes from a parish meeting in the 1600s from my local church, where the elders were complaining about young people meeting in the porch of the church at night to drink and socialise. Which is pretty much what my friends and I were doing at as a teen (though local park over the church).
Re: books<p>Most books are useless and boring. Some books have good concept but drags things needlessly.<p>I still read a good amount everyday but not a 300 page book where the core content is 2 page.<p>However, a great book is still interesting and being "completely engrossed" is still possible.<p>It is the book content quality (compared to other things in society) that dropped.
I feel like the authors of many non-fiction books (e.g. business, self-help) are told that they must write a 320 page book, even if the core is, at most twenty, pages. I guess it needs to look plump on the shelf at the airport or something. Dale Carnegie got a lot across in a small number of pages. Today he’d have to do 320 pages or maybe even two books one on making friends and one influencing people. I wouldn’t mind paying for the book if there was a way to get the wheat without the chaff. I’ve seen various book summary apps but I’d rather get it straight from the author minus 300 pages of filler.
This is basically the conclusion of the "If Books Could Kill" podcast. After reviewing hundreds of bad nonfiction and self help books, excepting the ones that are deliberate scams through-and-through, they tend to be one good idea, or interesting observation the author had, that could fit in a blog post, but which had to be expanded to become an all-encompassing explanation for all of society and history and the universe in order to be publishable.
I was reading this book "Why Greatness Can't be Planned". Very interesting concept. From some startup SWE as well. Contains quite a few topics I wanted to read about but even for a "thin" 130 pages book, it is still needlessly padded; could have been half the pages and not miss anything.
Yeah. Like I’m already here bro, you don’t need to spend 50% of the book trying to convince me your ideas are worth considering
It's always surprising how many HN readers seem to read only non-fiction, sometimes only self-help style books about business and startups. Some are even proud of that.
This became me, somewhere along the last 5-10 years. Not the being proud of it part, just the realization that my breadth of book reading has taken a nosedive. Unfortunately I haven’t read a single book of any kind in the last few years. Having kids didn’t help, but I am planning to change that finally.
I’m equally surprised how many people read extremely low quality pop fiction nowadays. Especially those romantic/erotic books. Those were the kind of book you’d be laughed at for reading back in the day.<p>Reading non-fiction about some current topic isn’t that bad in comparison.
I'm kinda dumping my thoughts in this reply to a bunch of the parent/sibling comments - but to me non-fiction isn't the problem, it's <i>specifically</i> the self-help genre that by and large seems incredibly intellectually shallow, e.g. the fast food of non-fiction.
Things are coming so much faster now.<p>Writing has been around for thousands of years. But it caught on extremely slowly. It took thousands of years to spread across the globe. For thousands of years being literate was rare. The printing press changed things a lot, but books and the education needed to use them remained uncommon. Until pretty recently, a person’s daily life looked a lot like their grandparents’ did.<p>Things started picking up. Electricity went from zero to ubiquitous in a few generations. So did mechanized transport, radio, TV, and telephones.<p>It’s faster than that today. Most people today communicate using systems that didn’t exist at all when I was a child. At work, we’re all using tools that didn’t exist just a few years ago.<p>The “check back in a few centuries” doesn’t work, because we’re not going to be using the same stuff in a few centuries. We’re probably not going to be using the same stuff in a few <i>decades</i>. We didn’t have time to figure out the ramifications of doomscrolling before it became ubiquitous, and we’ll probably have even less time to figure out the next thing.
Agreed.<p>As a society, we have this silly habit of dismissing criticisms of incoming societal shifts because previous ones “turned out fine”. We grab the most extreme of the bad contrarian takes of the time and use it to ridicule the position as a whole. We often ignore those previous shifts were influenced by the criticisms of the time (not all of them bad) and that how it turned out was a result of the push and pull.<p>In other words, <i>we need</i> to have the people pointing out the bad parts of the change, to have any chance that it’ll actually turn out good.<p>Another thing often ignored is that shifts are happening more frequently and at larger scales, and we’ve seen them become out of control. All the more reason to take a breather a move slower.
> Hm, comparing developments spanning from the 12th century up to now with stuff that is happening in the last decade. Just give social media about 5 or 6 centuries to develop, and then check back to see if the arguments of this article are sound.<p>For most of time, until the industrial revolution, technology didn't really advance that quickly. The world you were born into would be technologically near identical to the one you died in.<p>Technology is now advancing at such a rate that most if not all of humanity is in a permanent state of future shock, and it's only going to get worse. Nobody really seems to have a clue how to deal with that.
>Future shock<p>Looked up this phrase and found the book of the same name, not sure if you were making a reference to the book but from the short synopsis I saw it seems like a very prophetic book for being written 50 years ago and I can see how many of his predictions are coming true, I will order a copy for sure now.<p>Your post and this book describe a phenomenon that I have always felt but never seen described before, thanks
While I agree with your sentiment, I doubt that we can really judge that properly without some objective distance in time. The invention of the printing press, canals, gunpowder, sailing, may have changed lives quite a bit.
Consider also the people who were "discovered" by the Europeans [1].<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_epidemics" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_ep...</a>
You just listed "inventions" that emerged across a 6,000 year timeframe.
All of those things changed some individual lives I the short term, and changed societies in the long term. But they did not change societies in the short term. The average life in the decades before the printing press was pretty much the same as in the decades after. Inventions that massively altered entire societies within a human lifespan of their invention are pretty new. Maybe somebody more familiar with the history of technology can correct me, but I can’t think of anything like that before the steam engine.
If there were stupid people back then and there are still stupid people now, wouldn't the interesting thing be to look at what's different?
There are more people now, and all else being equal, there would likely be more stupid people as well, in absolute numbers. That might give someone the impression that things are going downhill.<p>Also, the article and book claim that people have read less classics than some time ago. But the same argument is even worse in reverse: people from some time ago had no clue about climate change, computers, women's rights, or AI. With all their smarts, they let this happen. How does that suggest that reading the classics is useful?
> There are more people now, and all else being equal, there would likely be more stupid people as well, in absolute numbers. That might give someone the impression that things are going downhill.<p>Can you point to a specific observation or claim that this is relevant to? I don't see any argument that's sensitive to the absolute number of stupid people in the world. This is a non-sequitur at best.<p>> Also, the article and book claim that people have read less classics than some time ago. But the same argument is even worse in reverse: people from some time ago had no clue about climate change, computers, women's rights, or AI. With all their smarts, they let this happen. How does that suggest that reading the classics is useful?<p>Your argument here is implicitly that if reading the classics were useful, then we should've invented computers sooner than we did? Do you find that compelling?
It will be kind of surprising if neither global warming nor AI nor nuclear weapons knocks us back to a pre-industrial society in the next 200 years.
It is slightly dismissive, since we see degradation of literacy <i>within</i> the past 20 years.<p><a href="https://literacytrust.org.uk/research-services/research-reports/children-and-young-peoples-reading-in-2026/" rel="nofollow">https://literacytrust.org.uk/research-services/research-repo...</a><p>We also know from colleges and schools that students coming in are having difficulty doing the reading needed for classes, even in literature classes.<p>AI is making this worse, since it’s unleashed an epidemic of cheating and the tool itself is inimical to learning. (Learning <i>is</i> friction. The tool to remove friction also removes learning)<p>The issue isn’t that we have stupid people then and now. The issue is that trends of literacy and development now are changing direction.
> AI is making this worse, since it’s unleashed an epidemic of cheating and the tool itself is inimical to learning. (Learning is friction. The tool to remove friction also removes learning)<p>I disagree with this take so strongly. Yes, in practice people are lazy and they're just going to ask for the answer. But the potential for AIs to give targeted answers to specific questions about academic topics is so far ahead of anything I had going through undergrad or my master's program that it would be an epic missed opportunity not to leverage it in the educational process. I really disagree with you that the technology itself is inimical to learning.
Very few people have the discipline to use it in that way rather than as a way to remove friction, just as practically no one with a smartphone doesn’t, at least occasionally, find themselves “sucked in”.
> a way to remove friction<p>Hell yeah. Trudging a mile through the snow and ice from West Campus to the Engineering Quad to sit in my TA's office hours so I could hope to ask a question about problem 19 because I don't understand the second half of it is a <i>vastly</i> worse use of time than firing up Gemini and saying "I'm taking partial differential equations, and I'm seeing a problem where I have to..."<p>I would <i>kill</i> to go back through undergrad with an AI by my side as I study, or even in class, so when the professor loses me 10 minutes into an 80-minute lecture, I have a <i>hope</i> of getting back on the train and not having the lecture be a waste.
> I disagree with this take so strongly<p>You are free to disagree, and you are free to have an opinion. I would prefer your position to be the one that dominates, however the data on the ground doesn’t support the position.<p>If I can make a guess, the issue is that you are looking at the potential for individual learning improvement but I am referring to what is currently happening at scale.<p>If you remember school, most students didn’t want to be there. Homework exercises are something you would rather avoid.<p>America and the west, as class mobility became increasingly dependent on education, repeated the patterns in China and India. People went to college not because they wanted to study the subject, but because it got you a decent income when you got out.<p>In all these situations, you have people who aren’t there for the journey, but there for the outcome. (For that matter, even people who want to study, will take the easy way out.)<p>Having seen people use AI to study, it can be useful, especially if the underlying text books and notes are bad. However there are already many YouTube videos made by experts covering those topics, so the uplift here isn’t magical.<p>> I really disagree with you that the technology itself is inimical to learning.<p>This is a matter of belief, and in a vacuum it’s something most people would agree with. The issue is what the outcomes actually are.
My point is exactly that comparing some variation within 20 years with to a 1000 year period makes little sense. Sure, our collective literacy might be decreasing now, but perhaps it was a bit too high to begin with? Leaders of a country are not the majority. The article makes quite a few of these categorical mistakes.<p>AI also allows for a lot more learning. Using ChatGPT to read and better understand Moby Dick works wonders for me.
AI seems to be a good tool for people who are already good at learning and critical thinking to use to accelerate their learning. Research on broader populations so far is not so hopeful, with most people using it to avoid learning. This is unsurprising to me, since people are often quite resistant to learning.<p>As to your point, literacy rates have been declining since the 80s. 40, going on 50 years is plenty of time to study a trend and draw conclusions.<p>Can you point me to any time in history where low literacy led to better outcomes for the average person than high literacy? Or even a study that looks solely at modern times and doesn’t manage to correlate literacy with positive social achievement?<p>But even if you can’t accept a historical argument due to the spans of time being incomparable, I personally believe from a more normative perspective that literacy is a foundational and fundamental good for humanity. But, if you can’t accept that argument either, consider how much of our ability to interact with and understand our own society requires literacy: imagine trying to sign up for healthcare, understand your taxes, weigh the risks of a surgical procedure, or figure out who to vote for if you either can’t read, can’t understand nuance, or are constantly missing words due to a lacking vocabulary.<p>And of course, being less literate means you are more likely to be convinced by people whose rhetoric is convincing, whether or not their ideas are correct and whether or not they are actually trying to fleece you.<p>Do you speak more than one language? I think that is also a telling experience. It would be extraordinarily <i>difficult</i> for me to live in a country where my second language is the only one. Sure, I can follow along with a conversation well enough, but dealing with government bureaucracy, forms, healthcare, and politics without the ability to be <i>certain</i> in my interpretation of the text would be a nightmare.<p>The irony of people sitting here on this all-text discussion site, responding to a textual article about the effect of technology on literacy, responding with “well, maybe literacy is actually not so important,” is so utterly ridiculous that I hope it’s satire and I’m just missing the joke.
I was attacking the <i>arguments</i> used to substantiate the idea that literacy is a good thing. I personally think literacy is great.
> This is unsurprising to me, since people are often quite resistant to learning.<p>This is an attitude I had when I was 19 and had spent a bunch of time and money going to school. I had a life event that made me leave school and take on a huge debt that had to be paid. Most people learn - they just learn in context of their necessity and their own passions. For other things, they lean on the community around them (doctors, lawyers, accountants, software engineers etc...)<p>> AI seems to be a good tool for people who are already good at learning and critical thinking to use to accelerate their learning.<p>I'm watching the huddled masses start to figure it out. AI is going to be to arrogant intellectualism what the gun was to the knight. Now anyone who can operate a mobile phone (and literacy is not required) has access to a shocking level of expertise and contextualized knowledge. And as AI improves this will be more and more the case.<p>> constantly missing words due to a lacking vocabulary<p>First prompts of non developer employees were "what does ___ mean?". Real time vocabulary is a thing now.<p>> “well, maybe literacy is actually not so important,” is so utterly ridiculous that I hope it’s satire and I’m just missing the joke.<p>It's not a joke. AI is going to reshape society. It's just started. Back to the gun analogy - the knights are just now starting to realize that proficiency with a sword and 70kg of armor are no match for a peasant with a pistol. Likewise, I suspect that Joe six-pack with AI in his pocket can do knowledge work at a "way good enough" level. I don't want to accept it, but that seems to be reality.
The history of Opium is likely more relevant.
Like I said in another comment, this famous article by the Atlantic [1] has pretty convincing testimony that kids studying the humanities at elite universities can't read either.<p>I agree with the sentiment that we tend to misrepresent the culture of mass societies, as if at one point in time there were droves of people reading Aristotle. But the ability to read and our transition to an oral or post-literate culture is very much affecting elites too. There is pretty good evidence when you compare contemporary histories. Or if you live in a bourgeois milieu, you just need to ask around.<p>I don't think that reading necessarily makes you a better person. I've met a good amount of people of the highest moral dignity who do not read. But on the whole, reading helps build competence - moral and technical - and create a sense of shared culture. Going back to an "oral culture" is nothing but a regression.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-eli...</a>
I just can't agree with this. Social media has a noticeable, damaging effect on those who consume it constantly.<p>If you haven't had the distinct displeasure of being around an iPad kid, I envy you.<p>There's anecdote that aligns with experience, that aligns with studies. And frankly, it seems silly to me that we need science to empirically prove something we can all witness with our own brains. That said, whichever method you submit to: they all bear witness to the same conclusion:<p>Social media (especially the brainless forms like TikTok) is incredibly damaging.
> There are still stupid people now.<p>Some even equate attention discipline to intelligence of all things.
I agree with you and could say the same thing about 90s/00s TV as he does with YouTube.<p>"Celeb takes a bath in baked beans for charity"
This is in fact one of the primary points of TFA and the book it recommends: that the degradation of literacy, public discourse, and general intelligence that started with the television (and was well-described in Amusing Ourselves to Death, referenced in TFA, and which the title pays homage to) has only continued and, if anything, accelerated with the introduction of the smartphone and modern social media.
The average children's cartoon from the early 2000s has several orders of magnitude more value than the average tiktok feed.<p>The existence of slop in the 90s doesn't prove that slop is not more prominent in the 2020s.
Killer line: "Having written extensively about how no one reads books anymore, he decided to turn the subject into a book"
Yeah, I think the elitist part of the book being reviewed is that it elevates books per se. I have a degree in literature and a home full of books, so I’m as sad as the next guy about no one reading anymore, but I think the argument (such as it is reconstructed by the reviewer) is better when focused on the types on things one could be doing, and the self-reflection and self-improvement that comes from doing them, rather than bemoaning the specific works not read.<p>“No one reads Shakespeare anymore” is probably true, but it’s just as sad that families talk at dinner less, kids spend less time outside, watercolors and paint brushes gifted by grandparents are tossed aside, and kids don’t ride bikes, go camping, explore the woods behind school, bake brownies (that aren’t viral recipes), and so on. Instead of measuring IQ in correlation to technology, you could probably measure VO2 Max.<p>I would be willing to bet that it turns out that the algorithmic feed, and especially TikTok, are specifically correlated to some of these deleterious things, and have outsized effects on kids, teens, and the neurodiverse. Not everyone possesses the self-control to put the phone away after a 15-minute scroll break the way grandpa would shut off the tv as soon as the 6 o’clock news was over, and the algorithm is designed to prevent that and ultimately probably wears down native willpower over time.<p>“Let’s ban TikTok” sounds stupid and reactionary, but what to do about it is a discussion we ought to be having.
Here's my n of 2 story, but my young kids read all the time and it's likely for two reasons. My wife and I read, and still read to them every night, and second, they both have Kobo Clara Colour e-readers. They love graphic novels and the colour screen keeps them engaged (we had black and white e-readers before and it just wasn't the same). We get 100% of our books from the public library and they probably read 5-20 graphic novels a week. Best $120 investment we've made.
This is why I still browse 4chan and of course HN - because the feed is entirely time based with zero recommendations and no infinite content.<p>I've also added userscripts to remove shorts and recs from YouTube as well as uninstalling absolutely all social apps and only using web<p>Ironically 4chan /pol/ now has higher quality debates and more diverse opinions than Reddit, and a faster website that doesn't constantly push nag screens or hang rendering.<p>What I'm getting at is the internet is too common and we need to retreat to extremely niche and selective platforms with limited content that you can't just binge for 2 hours.
The idea that society was always going to be literate—as in a book-reading people—is sort of absurd, especially when the practice is treated like a means to an end and the medium of the book itself is rivaled by digital media that affects its audience quicker, requiring less effort from them in return.<p>Now force all of culture and the most basic forms of social interactions through this digitally mediated funnel. You get the worst aspects of pre-literate and literate civilizations.
I just started reading Infinite Jest and unsurprisingly it seems shockingly relevant to the doomscrolling problem. I’m aware of its flaws, but I’ve heard it recommended a number of times related to our modern problem of amusing ourselves to death. So far it’s surprisingly enjoyable, eerily relatable, and not nearly as difficult to follow as I was warned.
I encourage those who want to read more to start a book club with their friends. My club has read 6 books now and it gets at two things the article mentions, isolation and illiteracy.<p>I’ve recently also subscribed to a few in print magazines to address the desire for up to date recent information we get from social media.<p>HN is still hard to quit, the amount of useful information here is still high. digg.com summarizes X which I’ve found to be useful for not feeling like I am missing out on discussions there.
Could this post been equally effective without the history literacy since the early middle age? I recognize the irony of complaining about this post's length.
It’s not just kids at risk, I also struggle with it as a millennial. I love skimming HN, comments, blogs but I almost never read a full article. I wanted to read the Bible recently, and it was such a challenge that instead I generated an app to doomscroll it called ScrollMyBible.com (plugging because it’s 100% free/ad free and has actually been helping me read more) - maybe this idea could be used for other applications where we redirect this tendency that is weaponized against us towards something constructive
After a long period of reading very little fiction (and even less on deadtree), I’ve been rereading some SF in my bookshelf (the Culture series in particular) and I’ve been positively surprised how easy it has been to reach the "zone" where you aren’t constantly losing your focus or trying to fight the instinct to reach for an electronic device. Starting is the hardest part. It helps, of course, when the author’s prose is as compelling as Banks’s (RIP).
I've abandoned all forms of media outside of HN, GitHub, Steam, Spotify and the occasional visit to a pirate streaming site.
‘… many tech titans, Steve Jobs in particular, limit the amount of technology their children access…‘<p>Is he not aware that Mr. Jobs has been dead for over a decade?
Wondering if hn ever considered doomscrolling and why they did not do it
I'd honestly be interested to know what kind of argument HN would accept to acknowledge there IS a problem.
Currently reprogramming myself on this. I’ve started doing more stuff on paper and using single-use devices as there’s not an immediate attention demand from something else then.
This may sound old-fashioned, but parents can say no. Deciding what our children may do and what they have access to is part of being a parent. We don’t have to let them do whatever they want and then lament the results.<p>I recognise that it’s easier to establish these habits early. Our children are still toddlers, so we haven’t yet faced the challenges of parenting teenagers, but they rarely have access to screens because we deliberately restrict it. Even Steve Jobs limited his children’s use of technology at home. Recognising the problem ought to lead to setting and enforcing limits, not treating our children’s access to these devices as inevitable.
Trying to get off the internet for me feels like a messy divorce. It's difficult because it was essentially my world growing up, shaped my value system and defined the type of things I should strive towards. Being involved in game dev, electronic music, and CTF communities exposed me to people doing all sorts of cool things and made me aspire to be at their level.<p>There were really two components to it I valued - the inherent interest in the topic itself of course, but also the sense of community and recognition you got as you dove deeper and created cooler things to share with people. At some point the second overtook the first, and I internally started to value the outcome or reaction to something I would create more than the satisfying pursuit of making itself. Doing a thing wasn't valuable unless it would be acknowledged by some group of people. It's been a long process trying to get rid of that mindset and I'm still not done, and has caused a lot of anxiety and questioning my interest in the hobbies I love.<p>A lot of the questioning has been driven by the absolute saturation of my online feeds. The algorithm can so quickly figure out the type of stuff I like and show me so much of it that it begins to start feeling meaningless in 10 minutes of scrolling - deconstructing that value system in real time (and I guess technically helping? hooray for accelerationism). If there is so much out there, what am I supposed to create that could add to the pile in a meaningful way? It really takes a lot of effort to sever yourself from the algorithmic mindset and remind yourself that you got into it because you like <i>doing the thing</i>.<p>Not to mention the second order effects, like the ancillary feelings of guilt that show up because I start questioning why I want to avoid seeing things about topics I supposedly enjoy. Part of it is personal flaw - I find it difficult to see something cool without feeling some imperative to figure out how I could do it myself. When I don't want to feel bothered, I'm driven towards more mindless consumption that doesn't run the risk of reminding me that I should be doing something. I feel I would be much happier engaging in the hobbies I have if I was a bit less aware of everything related to them going on in every part of the world, and the algorithm is a big culprit in that. Detaching from it is not just hard because "phone feels good", but also because it means completely giving up on the value system I grew up on, where you could know if you were doing something meaningful if it got attention from other people in the communities you wanted to be a part of. "Attention" has been too commoditized at this point to use it as a fulfilling indicator of return (but unfortunately, some people <i>have</i> to play this game if they want to support a living off a creative endeavor - at least I can ignore that part because I just make music or do creative coding as a hobby).
off-topic but anyone knows why these medium.com-like website have so many trackers in them? 100+ blocked by ublock origin
"Huxley was right" coin jar is pretty full these days!
In the olden days we read because there was nothing better to do, with no TV until evening. If all you have is books, you read. It is as simple as that.<p>Some people came from houses that had books in them and others did not. Accessibility to books was important, you would just pick things off the parent's shelves out of curiosity, and learn what you liked.<p>Not everyone was culturally rich even if they were financially well-off, you could come from a poor background where the house had books, and reading whilst bored was a form of education not everyone had.<p>If you lived in the countryside and needed to walk miles to see a friend then you tended to read more than those that had friends next door. They had sports and general shenanigans to get up to, and would not be reading as much.<p>I don't see those moaning about kids today downloading The Complete Works of Shakespeare from the Gutenberg library to read it on open source recycled e-screen tablets, whilst eating their quinoa and jackfruit.<p>Leave those kids alone means protecting them from online nonsense but there is no going back to the 1970s or earlier when kids would spend hours immersed in a book purely for the pleasure of it.
I think people still read, but the problem is largely that people read older literature, meaning anything older than 5-10 years at the very least. People are very hesitant to read something recent because it may very well be AI slop.<p>It's a crisis in literature. How do we fix this?
Never heard that this is stopping anyone from reading recent books.<p>Maybe someone whose only method of selecting books is to scroll through Kindle and look at the titles, maybe they need to pay attention to publication dates. But the rest of the world picks books because they get a recommendation, they look at reviews, they know the author, etc.<p>NYTimes said that the new Marlon James book might be the book of the century so far. Hyperbole, I'm sure, but it's now on my reading list and I'm pretty sure it wasn't written by AI.
It is not so unusual to read books that have stood the test of time at least somewhat.<p>Newness is not really a valuable quality when it comes to books, barring some exceptions like books on subjects that change frequently and meaningfully.<p>Diminished quality however is a meaningful signal, and would give most serious readers pause.
None of the most read books of 2026 so far according to Goodreads are significantly older (<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/most_read?category=all&country=all&duration=y" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodreads.com/book/most_read?category=all&countr...</a>). Also not the most sold Amazon books: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/2026/books" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/2026/books</a>
Wait, really?<p>As best I can tell, the problem is contained to kindle self publishing and the like, which were always unfiltered. And we buy plenty of new books.
> People are very hesitant to read something recent because it may very well be AI slop.<p>I cannot imagine this is an actual trend that's preventing people from reading, so please bring a couple citations.<p>Reading has been on the decline for more than a decade, far beyond when AI was invented. I'll go with the 2008 Steve Jobs quote:<p>> In January 2008, Steve Jobs famously claimed that "people don’t read anymore," specifically asserting that 40 percent of Americans read one book or less the previous year.
This is a completely ridiculous statement from someone who obviously does not read much.
AI generated text isn't so hard to detect that people could get away with it. As long as you are reading a well reviewed book the chance of AI slop is very low.
<i>> YouTube, which for any adult briefly glancing at the screen seems to feature an array of thumbnailed gawping imbeciles</i><p>I've basically given up on humanity. YouTube is a cesspit of stupidity - a race to the bottom and right through the other side of how utterly devoid of dignity human beings can be. I feel a physical rage at the mere sight of all the thumbnails of people pulling the stupidest face they can to try to get the stupidest people on the planet to click on their stupid video.
Unfortunately YouTube captures the full set of extremes and everything in between, so I don't think it's fair to label the entire thing a cesspit of stupidity.<p>For every MrBeast there's a 3Blue1Brown. For every recycled clip from a well-known TV series uploaded purely to drive ad revenue for a bot-controlled channel there's a fine art restoration video showing a very niche process with a real, skilled human behind it.<p>And so on.
> Having written extensively about how no one reads books anymore, he decided to turn the subject into a book, The New Dark Ages, published this week.<p>That’ll teach them.<p>Jokes aside, reading something doesn’t mean it’s valuable. I think people read more than ever. Subtitles, captions, social media posts, source code. Most of it is jank.<p>> people in positions of power and influence are now notably ignorant about history and the classics, comfortable only with referencing pop culture<p>Reads like unsourced depressionwave slop. First source that comes to mind: <a href="https://www.ranker.com/list/us-presidents-by-iq/lauren-slocum" rel="nofollow">https://www.ranker.com/list/us-presidents-by-iq/lauren-slocu...</a><p>Assuming memory capacity would yield the best decisions and best leadership ignores charisma, personal life experience, sociopathy, interdependence, society, uncertainty about the future and more.<p>You can’t be too literate and educated: it’s a rat race / status race like any other.<p>Even if the classics and history siphon into modern productions such as Hades.<p>> The cultural elite has abandoned cultural elitism.<p>Cultural accessibility is at an all time high. Next to oceans of entertaining things more optimized for consumption it’s hard to stay relevant.<p>Expertise and being able to rely on others with expertise is more valuable than requiring every leader to have read the classics or being part of some intellectual elite. Knowing things is awesome mainly because it’s fast and helps with survival.<p>Requiring everyone to be an expert on everything is a form of punishment to all.<p>Edit: wrong any/every
> Requiring everyone to be an expert on everything is a form of punishment to all.<p>You are correct and yet it's a straw man. At no point did the author advocate for everyone knowing everything.<p>He IS advocating that everyone know <i>something</i>. A position that is increasingly, comically, tragically untrue.
Interesting article right up until they introduce the right vs left debate. The left doesn’t want to appear “elite” because they are so smart and intelligent they don’t want to offend. Give me a break jagoff.
[dead]
There's another perspective - everyone and his dog today is reading more than ever because of LLMs (which are really LCPs in 2026 considering the machinery embeds all kinds of concepts in tokens). We ingest more information, condensed or not, than the average PHD scholar did mere 20-30 years ago. That is... by all measures - a lot.<p>And while many ppls throughout the centuries would never enter a library (and thus many would never consciously talk to AI), we can assume one cannot use AI atm if they don't read through all (or at least some) of its response. Perhaps we'll reach the Lady's Illustrated Primer* at some point (amazing we're not there yet, but we are actually given all the visual artifacts produced by Gees), but right now - everyone on a computer with AI access reads more than they did back in the 90s. It is just not reading off a book.<p>And there is also a strong argument that reading off the endless (still, sadly) stream of generated text is more beneficial to the person than reading endless nonsense on everyday media. Because media is super biased, and local media even more so.<p>* ref. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age</a>
Ed West’s longstanding intellectual project is fairly conventional reactionary/retvrn/conservative pessimism, and he has no particular technology background of all to speak of.<p>The argument is basically here is what happened to civilisation X when it abandoned virtue/cohesion/tradition; therefore contemporary liberalism, immigration, feminism, secularism, etc. are leading us towards the same fate.<p>No interest really in people whose project it is to launder reactionary opinions through ancient history.
Clicked on some his other posts...and yeah.<p>He essentially advocates for a society that has the attributes that he accuses oral culture of: conservative, repetitive, static, lacking innovation.
> hiding my smartphone from myself. I have shoved my smartphone behind wardrobes and under beds. I have shut it up in cupboards.<p>> One particularly desperate ... strategy I developed was to kick my phone haphazardly across the room so it would lodge under some unknown piece of furniture<p>So over privileged people buy $1500 iphones, only to kick them across room, to hide? I do not think reading yet another master piece would help such person!
Whenever I see people doing this kind of thing, I always think “if they were serious, they would downgrade their internet service plan”. Watch how fast the “addiction” leaves them when they’re paying by the MB
I’ve been looking for an MVNO cell phone plan in the U.S. that offers data at a max speed of 512 kbps (or something similar that is fast enough for most legitimate uses, but a little painful), and I haven’t found anything. Seems like an opportunity. However, I can waste plenty of time on sites like this one, and it is functional on a 16 kbps connection.
Articles like this is what you get when you give mics to mentally unstable people. Have no self control; kicks phones...then blames society and writes doomposts.
Sorry for being pedantic but content like “I took a bath full of Diet Coke and Mentos” is not doom scrolling. Is it low quality use of your time, sure, but it’s not doom scrolling
I've noticed a usage shift in the last few years. In 2020, "doomscrolling" originally meant to be stuck scrolling at all the doom-y posts we were bombarded with as the world fell apart around us. As things "stabilized" in the last few years, I've noticed that everyone and myself still tends to use "doomscrolling" even just for when we're stuck, locked in place, scrolling low quality content.<p>I figure in ten years when someone asks what "doomscrolling" means, we'll probably just shrug and say it means scrolling away to our doom.
The not-reading part is seriously starting to sound like lamenting the death of the epos. Yeah, there is a real loss of an art form there but also most books are padded to death and should have been articles at most, maybe even tweets.<p>The reason we read less long form prose is because we have more information-dense, relevant, and personalized forms of communication and knowledge transfer available to us. If you take a book from world top 100 and compare it to average youtube feed, you will be horrified. But it's not like people in the recent past were primarily reading Conrad and contemplating physical isolation's impact on social norms.
One of the reasons why we read less long-form, according to a bunch of cognitive science studies and to my own anecdotal experience, is because our attention is shot.<p>A viral article in The Atlantic [1] shows evidence and testimony that kids at elite universities simply can't read anymore. I've seen the claim repeated in many other places and looking around me I believe it. Those kids are not replacing Dostoevsky or Aristotle with more compact versions of it.<p>The airport book industry is indeed full of books that could be fit in ten pages. But there's a universe of useful - potentially life-changing - books beyond that, and not only in the humanities. Some modern technical books justify their length. I seriously doubt that something like <i>The Data Warehouse Toolkit</i> can be replaced by reading piecemeal blogposts online.<p>Same goes for history, I sincerely doubt you can properly learn it in depth without reading long-form. In my experience, people who only listen to history podcasts or consume 10-minute videos tend to have a much poorer command of the facts and of the broader motions of history.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-eli...</a>
Why did you use so many words? You could’ve made the same point with at most half the amount of sentences.
This take made me reel back, and shows a disregard for what longform content can do that shorts and tweets can't.<p>Maybe you have only been reading the wrong books.
Op didn't say longform is worse than shorts. I'm sure the opposite. The issue is padding. Most longform are padded to death. That's the issue.<p>30 years ago, that was the only option to read from. So people did it. Now people are not at mercy of these intellectual longform masturbators.
> The reason we read less long form prose is because we have more information-dense, relevant, and personalized forms of communication and knowledge transfer available to us<p>All would be well with the World if this was actually true…