Have We Reached the End of Reading?

Reading used to be the main way Americans got information, but most of us now turn to our phones, the internet, social media or television for news and entertainment. The share of Americans reading an article daily has plunged by about 40 percent, and according to the National Endowment for the Arts, fewer than half of all adults read a book in 2022. In a new article from The Atlantic, staff writer Rose Horowitch considers the consequences of our shortened attention spans and asks whether the age of reading will ultimately prove a short anomaly in human history. She joins us to talk about the “end of reading.”

Guests:

• Rose Horowitch, staff writer at The Atlantic
• Benjamin Powers, director of Yale and the University of Connecticut’s Haskins Global Literacy Hub

This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Mina Kim: Welcome to Forum. I’m Mina Kim.

Have you noticed a change in your reading habits — that you’re less likely these days to read a book cover to cover or a long-form news piece? Or maybe you’ve heard teachers say their students aren’t reading books anymore or feel they aren’t necessary when online summaries are readily available.

The Atlantic staff writer Rose Horowitch has documented America’s steady decline in reading for this month’s Atlantic cover story: how less than half of adults read a book of any kind in 2022, or that reading for pleasure dropped from near 30% in 2004 to 16% today. And Rose asks what this decline in reading means.

Her piece is “The End of Reading Is Here,” and Rose joins me now. Welcome to Forum.

Rose Horowitch: Thank you so much for having me.

Mina Kim: Well, thank you so much for being here.

So, Rose, have you noticed a change in your own reading habits?

Rose Horowitch: Yes. So I talk in the piece about how I was raised in a family of readers. My parents read to me when I was a child. They passed down their favorite books. My sisters were always so excited to share their favorite books, The Boxcar Children and everything.

And as I got older, I really felt almost a responsibility and a desire to sort of understand books by reading my teachers’ favorite books that they would talk about, and books that it just felt like so many people in my life had read.

And what I noticed in recent years is that, kind of almost without me being aware of it, I had started to read less and less. I was scrolling on my phone before bed. I was busier with work. I felt like I got distracted and checked my notifications every few pages.

And so I really noticed that reading had started to slip away from me, and that was something that really made me sad.

Mina Kim: Yeah. And your level of reading was actually more than typical of your generation, right? You’re in your 20s.

Rose Horowitch: I am in my 20s, yes. I’m 25. And so I wanted to share my experience because I think that it’s something that resonates with a lot of people, as we’ve kind of noticed that it feels much harder to focus on a book.

Mina Kim: Yeah. Actually, this listener on Discord writes, “I used to be able to read anywhere, anytime, but it’s harder now to concentrate. Maybe it’s from getting older. I now have to find a quiet place to read, but once I do read under those conditions, it’s much easier.”

But you found, Rose, that it wasn’t just your generation, right? The decline in reading cut across generations, gender, education levels, too?

Rose Horowitch: Yes, exactly. So historically, we’ve really seen that college graduates, women, and people who are around retirement age are really the ones that read the most.

And it was so interesting to me because they’ve seen a collapse as well. This really cuts across gender, age group, and education level.

In some ways, it would almost be comforting if it was confined to a smaller segment of society, but it’s really across the board.

Mina Kim: Well, let me invite listeners to share at 866-733-6786 or on our social channels — Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram — or by emailing [email protected], whether you’ve noticed America’s decline in reading or a change in your own reading habits, and if the decline worries you. Or do you think we’re overreacting? We’re just getting information differently these days.

Rose, one of the things that you notice is that there are signs that this decline in reading is also leading to a documented decline in our reading skills, right? Talk about some of the things you uncovered there.

Rose Horowitch: Yes. So something that was interesting in my reporting: I looked at national and international surveys of adult skills, and we found that 30% of American adults cannot paraphrase or make inferences from a multi-page text.

A decade ago, that was just about 20%, so that’s been a real change in the last 10 years that we’ve seen.

And so I think that we have seen a sort of decline in literacy, but at the same time, I think the bigger problem that I point out is not that people can’t read, but that there’s a change in the ability or willingness to persist through a rich and complex work.

And that was why I talked about it as a crisis of post-literacy rather than a straightforward literacy issue.

Mina Kim: Yeah. You noted that last year’s top-selling novel was Sunrise on the Reaping, which was a young adult novel. And people were sharing with you that it wasn’t just young adults who were buying that book for themselves, I guess.

Rose Horowitch: Yes, exactly. I spoke with the head of the New York Public Library, and he was talking about how young adult fiction has become one of their most popular offerings, even among people who are not young adults.

And so I think what we’re seeing is a change where it’s not only that people are reading less than they used to. When they do read, the works are shorter and simpler than they used to be.

Another survey found that New York Times bestsellers have sentences that are about a third shorter than they were a century ago.

So it is really a change not only in the amount of reading but also in the content and style.

Mina Kim: Yeah. The other story you shared that I was struck by was from someone who engages with America’s students at elite universities, and they encountered a lot of students viewing reading as, quote, “an unnecessarily burdensome way of acquiring knowledge,” and that by asking them to read, professors were arbitrarily withholding information from students by forcing them to get it through a more difficult medium. They preferred summaries and things like that because they were so readily available.

Rose Horowitch: Yes. So I think that was really a shift.

I spoke with an administrative staff member at Harvard who was talking about how students find older language much less familiar, much more foreign to them, and that there’s a shift in attitude where it feels very uncomfortable and unnecessarily burdensome to have to harvest information from a complicated primary-source text.

It feels like you should be able to get it through a summary, through bullet points, through your professor telling you exactly what you need to know.

And so that was a real difference. There’s less recognition that the author wrote things in a very specific way for a particular reason, and that it’s worth it to persist through and uncover that. It’s more just, “How do I get the information?”

So I found that attitude shift very interesting.

Mina Kim: Yeah. This listener writes on Discord, “Not having a BART commute anymore cut my reading time way back. It’s hard to devote the same time for reading when you work from home.”

So yeah, not being able to sit on a commuter train.

But one of the key reasons that you say this decline in reading is happening is distraction from our devices.

Rose Horowitch: Yes. So I really trace this decline happening at first with the rise of television, crowding out time that people might previously have spent reading.

And then, as we saw smartphones and broadband internet, it just became much, much easier to spend time on electronic devices and digital devices and not reading.

I spoke with a researcher who described social media as kind of like you’re a rat pushing a button and getting a hit of cocaine.

So it’s just difficult for reading to compete in that environment, where it doesn’t offer as much instant gratification. It takes longer to get through and is more of a slow buildup.

Mina Kim: Yeah, but you’re also quick to point out that we are reading a lot more words. So is it just that we’re reading a lot more in fragments, like text messages and social media posts?

Rose Horowitch: Yes, exactly.

So people often say, “Oh, we’re not reading. It’s a literacy crisis.”

And I think that, as you say, between emails and text messages and social media posts, we might be reading more words than historically we ever have before.

But what’s changed is that we’re reading all of these small fragments, and they crowd out the time and almost make it feel more difficult to focus on something that’s extended, something that’s more challenging or complex.

You’re constantly getting pulled into different things and reading different snippets of text. You don’t really ever make it through a book.

Mina Kim: And then you also warn us that even that may be declining with the rise of short-form video.

Rose Horowitch: Right. So that was what I thought was so interesting.

For a long time, social media really was predominantly a text-based form. People would write Facebook status updates and tweets and post on Reddit and everything.

There obviously is still some of that, but we’re also seeing the rise of social media platforms that are really predominantly short-form video, like TikTok and Instagram Reels.

So I think that’s a shift where, in recent years, we’ve been reading small fragments, but at least we’ve been reading words. Now it’s going to be much more video that’s how we spend our time.

And we know that the average eighth grader is spending about four and a half hours on social media a day. A lot of that time you can expect to be video, potentially played at two-times speed.

So that is just a real shift in the way that we take in information.

Mina Kim: This listener writes, “I’m listening to audiobooks this summer. Is that considered reading?”

I think the 16% who are reading for pleasure now did include audiobooks, right? They counted that?

Rose Horowitch: Yes. So I think audiobooks have become a billion-dollar industry. They’ve become incredibly popular.

And I think that’s a really positive sign that people still are interested in stories. They still want to read.

But one of the challenges that was coming up as I was speaking to researchers is that a lot of times the reason people might prefer audiobooks is so that they can multitask. You’re driving, you’re doing the dishes.

If you were solely focusing on the audiobook, studies have suggested that it has a similar cognitive effect to reading.

I think if you’re splitting your attention between two things, though, it might be harder to focus and take in quite as much as you would if you were just reading off a page, where you really don’t have to be focusing on anything else.

Mina Kim: Yeah, exactly.

You know, I posed to listeners, though, whether there’s a chance we’re overreacting to all this. And I loved how you documented that we have feared or lamented every new technology for centuries, like how Socrates argued that writing things down would create forgetfulness because we wouldn’t use our memories as much, and things like that.

But where do you land on that with this? Do you think this is potentially different, that this is a very significant shift that could lead to very significant consequences?

Rose Horowitch: Yeah. So you’re right. In this piece, I really wanted to be cognizant that people are always worried about the rise of new technologies and the loss of old ways of communicating.

The Atlantic published a piece 126 years ago where the author was really concerned about the rise of the daily newspaper and how that would stop people from reading. And now we laugh at that, and it seems so silly.

So I definitely wanted to leave open the possibility that 126 years from now this essay will look exactly the same.

But at the same time, with what you’re saying about Socrates and Plato having Socrates really concerned about the rise of—

Mina Kim: We’ll get right back to it after the break. Stay with us. This is Forum.

You’re listening to Forum. I’m Mina Kim.