by John Ambrosio
In The End of Reading is Here, an essay recently published in the Atlantic, Rose Horowitch argues that the U.S. has become a post-literate society, one in which people still read, but are increasingly unable to think logically, abstractly, and analytically. That is, while people are able to decode words, they lack the higher order thinking skills needed to comprehend and synthesize complex texts. She claims this is largely due to a growing reliance on digital technologies as primary sources of news and information.
In a partial rejoinder, David Wallace-Wells argues that despite the mass adoption of the smartphone around 2010, the amount of time U.S. adults spend reading has not changed significantly over the past few decades, except for older people, who read less, and that U.S. adults have never been avid readers. But the issue here is less a question of how much time U.S. adults spend reading, than of what and how they read: does their reading time consist mostly of scrolling social media on their smartphones or reading complex text?
According to the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, a survey conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics in 2023, 28 percent of U.S. adults (16-65) scored below level two, and 57 percent scored below level three, on a five level typology of literacy proficiency.
The PIAAC measures reading competencies, what people can do, like fill out a job application. When the competencies are translated into grade level reading skills they indicate that 21 percent of U.S. adults, more than one in five, read below a fifth grade level and are classified as functionally illiterate, while 54 percent function below a sixth grade reading level. This is not primarily due to immigrants with low levels of literacy proficiency: two-thirds of functionally illiterate adults in the U.S. are native born.
The study also found that adult literacy scores in the U.S. dropped significantly between 2017 and 2023, which may be due, in part, to the effects of the pandemic. While literacy proficiency among U.S. adults is slightly below the average for all OECD countries that participated in the survey, the U.S. had the highest level of inequality in the distribution of scores, the biggest gap between the lowest and highest scores of any nation.
There are some ostensible paradoxes in the data. For instance, based on survey data from the National Endowment for the Arts discussed by Horowitch, “fewer than half of adults reported reading a book of any kind in 2022,” and the “proportion of Americans who read for pleasure” declined by more than half (28 to 16 percent) from 2004 to 2023. One might conclude that U.S. adults have little interest in reading. But this is not borne out by other data, which indicates that people are buying more books than ever, that both chain and independent bookstores are thriving, and that the number of bookstores has increased significantly.
Part of the answer lies in the fact that “just 20 percent of adults accounted for more than 80 percent of all books read last year,” that a relatively small portion of the U.S. adult population are avid readers of books, and presumably other long-form text. Of course, many popular books today, including those for younger readers, do not necessarily require higher order thinking skills to comprehend, so the overall number of books sold is an imperfect measure of adult literacy proficiency.
Horowitch argues that the decline of literacy proficiency in the U.S. is largely due to the mass adoption of digital technologies and the shift on social media platforms from mostly text-based content to short-form video. She claims this has contributed to a decline in the length and complexity of what U.S. adults read, in their capacity for sustained attention, and their ability to understand abstract arguments and think analytically.
The lack of higher order thinking skills among U.S. adults is more widespread than one might think, even among college students, some of whom attend elite universities. For this reason, the common distinction between college-educated and non-college educated voters is less useful to understanding extreme political polarization in the U.S. than the difference between literate and post-literate adults, especially since institutions of higher education in the U.S. typically function as job training centers rather than places of intellectual inquiry and development.
I experienced this firsthand as a university teacher. Students entered my classroom with the ability to decode words, but usually without the cognitive skills needed to comprehend, analyze, and synthesize complex text. As a result, I had to re-conceptualize my role as a teacher, so that the course material became a means to a different end: teaching students how to think. That is, how to distinguish between personal opinion and evidence-based arguments, how to critically assess truth claims on the basis of credible sources, verifiable evidence, and logical and coherent reasoning. I still assigned books rather than resorting to excerpts, but I also provided students with shorter and easier to understand texts to try to meet them where they were, while still challenging them to do more.
We should not be surprised by this unfortunate reality when students at every grade level are provided with tablets and other digital devices in schools, when they are evaluated on their ability to select the one right answer on high-stakes standardized tests, and when educators are expected to integrate all learning opportunities and experiences with some aspect of digital technology. Are we not, in effect, conditioning students to become post-literate adults?
Horowitch argues that media critics Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman were prescient in predicting that the mass adoption of TV in the 1960s was already “supplanting the written word,” that television “had hijacked Americans’ attention and turned politics into cheap entertainment.” Of course, Trump is the ultimate entertainer, a kind of borscht belt comedian who generates a continuous stream of video content, of vulgar, grotesque, lurid, and sensational images to feed the racial animus and economic grievances of his cult of followers.
Trump exploits the fact that many people have become easily distracted in the digital age, constantly changing his position, then claiming that he never said what he clearly did, even when there is unambiguous evidence that contradicts his claims. But in a society dominated by digital technologies, in which images can be easily produced and manipulated, especially with the widespread use of generative A.I., video evidence can be dismissed as a fabrication.
A person’s level of literacy proficiency is typically associated, not only with the sources of information they consume, but with the ways in which they consume it. Those with lower levels of literacy proficiency tend to consume information mostly from digital technologies and social media platforms, while those with higher levels of literacy proficiency tend to rely more on printed text. As a result, the notion of post-literacy loosely maps onto the partisan divide in the U.S. in which most non-college-educated voters support the Republican Party while most college-educated voters are affiliated with the Democratic Party.
This means that the U.S. electorate is not only deeply divided by levels of literacy proficiency and party identification, but by the ability to comprehend complex information and arguments whatever the source. This does not mean that all non-college-educated adults have lower levels of literacy proficiency or that all college-educated adults have higher levels. These are tendencies within the U.S. adult population, not hard and fast distinctions. But if “the liberal world is literate,” then the shift to a mostly visual and oral culture has significant implications for U.S. society and politics.
As Horowitch points out, the digital age is perfectly suited to the simplistic emotional appeals of authoritarian demagogues like Trump, to a society in which people read, but have not developed the habits of mind and cognitive skills needed to critically assess the veracity of what they see and hear. There is no need for literate people in a world in which thinking is no longer necessary, in which the appeal of candidates is largely based on their manufactured and curated images, celebrity status, and emotional resonance, in which truth is a function of “the identity of the speaker” rather than a correspondence with objective reality.
If information is no longer transmitted primarily through printed text, but moves vertically through orality, then it bypasses the traditional gatekeepers in media organizations, publishers, educational institutions, and elsewhere, who review and critically examine arguments and truth claims. When social media feeds, posts, and short-form video become the primary sources of news and information for the majority of adults, and when podcasters, influencers, and other media personalities, who do their own “research” and often masquerade as journalists, become the main conduits for disseminating information, we can expect that adult literacy proficiency will continue to decline. While gatekeeping can turn into censorship, digital technologies remain largely unaccountable, which makes it difficult for people, especially those with low literacy proficiency, to discern facts and truth.
All is not lost. The reading of long-form complex texts has not died out and will not disappear anytime soon. Books have not gone out of fashion despite the ubiquity of podcasts, short-form video, and A.I. summaries. Like the overwrought claim that e-books would replace paper ones, that brick and mortar bookstores would disappear in the digital age, the sheer pleasure and joy of reading, of immersing oneself in books and other long-form text, will likely persist, but may be limited to a shrinking minority of the U.S. adult population.
There is some debate about precisely when the shift to a more visual and oral culture took place, whether it began with the mass adoption of smartphones and social media in the late 2000s, with the emergence of cable television and personal computers in the 1980s, or with the mass adoption of TV in the 1960s. The important point, as Wallace-Wells notes, is that total screen time on electronic and digital technologies has exceeded reading time by “five or ten times” over the past few decades, a ratio that is likely to increase in the future.
This raises a number of questions. Has sustained exposure to electronic and digital technology, compounded over many decades, conditioned people to be passive consumers of information? Has it eroded their interest in, and capacity for, higher order thinking and made them more susceptible to uncritically absorbing authoritarian propaganda? Has the expectation that “all subject matter be presented as entertainment” made it more difficult for many U.S. adults to distinguish between fact and fiction, reality TV and real life?
I would argue that the U.S. is both a post-literate and a literate society, that it is a society deeply divided by levels of literacy proficiency, sources of information, and the development of higher order thinking skills. While the U.S. has not yet fully become a post-literate society, a significant portion of the population has already become post-literate or is well on the way to becoming so. The decline of newspapers and print journalism, and the mass adoption of digital technologies, did not create the literacy divide in the U.S., but it has greatly exacerbated the problem.
Less than four in ten adults in the U.S. are college educated. Of course, obtaining a college degree is no guarantee that individuals have the inclination to read books and other long-form text or the capacity to understand complex information and arguments. But as college attendance declines in the U.S., and students increasingly use generative A.I. to fulfill course requirements, the proportion of the adult population that does not develop higher order thinking skills is likely to increase. While people can develop these skills in noneducational settings and in a mostly oral culture, they are much less likely to do so. But when the lived experience and material reality of people is inconsistent with the narratives they uncritically absorb, it can lead them to think differently and make different political choices.
While voters with low literacy proficiency may not have an in-depth or complex understanding of politics and economics, they know they are struggling and who is benefitting from the status quo: establishment elites and billionaire oligarchs. While Republicans have had some success in blaming people of color and immigrants for this situation, populist upheaval is the order of the day for most of these voters, the only question is which form of populism they find more persuasive and appealing.
Of course, political polarization in the U.S. is not simply a question of different levels of literacy proficiency, but of real differences in political priorities and economic interests, and how they are communicated to voters. As Jamelle Bouie argues,
ordinary voters don’t actually know that much about either policy or ideology. They don’t really have strong views either. What they have are a set of senses, a set of suppositions, a set of intuitions for which policy stances can either validate those or tell them that the candidate is off base.
In other words, policy positions serve as a kind of proxy that tells voters what the political orientation of a candidate is, what their values and priorities are, what kind of politician they are likely to be. If this is the case, then what a candidate’s policy positions signal to voters, and how they are communicated, is of vital importance in electoral politics.
The efficacy of focusing on a few key issues that signal a broader set of values and priorities to voters was borne out in the recent elections of Zorhan Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed, who ran disciplined campaigns that laser-focused on issues that positioned them as fighters against a corrupt status quo and for economic fairness and a more equitable society. In a populist era, signaling “which side you are on,” and communicating a hopeful vision of a better future, can expand the Democratic Party coalition to include voters with different political views, but common concerns and interests.
Given the ongoing decline in adult literacy proficiency, the future of politics in the U.S. will increasingly depend on the charisma, celebrity status, and entertainment value of candidates, rather than on a critical understanding of their ideology, politics, and rhetoric. While this is not new, the move to an increasingly post-literate society will exacerbate the long-term trend of reducing politics to “cheap entertainment,” to political theater and spectacle, rather than substantive discussion and informed debate, further widening the already existing chasm in literacy proficiency that underlies extreme political polarization in the U.S.
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