William Davies at The Ideas Letter:
The recently published OECD PISA scores (from an international test for 15-year-olds) included troubling evidence of a collapse in reading ability across the OECD, with scores peaking around 2012, and then falling off a cliff since—a drop equivalent to 1.5 years of learning.
Reading for pleasure is also cratering, especially among boys and men, with major consequences for the nonfiction book market. Commentators are now writing darkly about a new era of “post-literacy” or a return to one of “orality,” in which video replaces text as the central medium of knowledge-sharing, individual expression, and public argument.
Two technologies loom large in this cultural panic. The first is the smartphone, whose mass adoption in the early 2010s is often blamed, by Jonathan Haidt among others, for destroying attention spans and threatening young people’s mental health – a charge that intensified in the early 2020s as algorithmically curated short-form video became ubiquitous, following the rise of TikTok. Second, Large Language Models (LLMs) became an everyday technology following the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. The impact on the humanities is twofold: Not only can text be generated almost automatically, but so too can its comprehension.
More here.
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