Reading longer texts fostered our empathy for others. How will we cope without it? Financial Times' Simon Kuper weighs in.
New: You can now listen to articles.LONDON: Any monk still producing calligraphy after 1492 probably sensed he was working in an outdated medium. I write texts of more than 30 words, so I now feel the same.appears to be destroying habits of “deep reading”. Stunning numbers of people with years of schooling are in effect illiterate. Admittedly, nostalgics have been whining about new media since 1492, but today’s whines have an evidential basis.
But digital literacy has changed reading. When you read a book on paper, you can be entirely inside the experience, absorbing hundreds of pages of nuance that begin to capture the world’s complexity. Online, says Maryanne Wolf of UCLA, we are “skimming, scanning, scrolling”. In the 2021 international Programme for International Student Assessment survey, 49 per cent of students agreed that “I read only if I have to”, 13 percentage points higher than in 2000. The paper continues: “As much as one-third of struggle even with lower-level reading skills.”
Simplists use conspiracy theories to simplify unintelligible reality. No wonder they disbelieve experts: Simplists have no conception of the quantity or depth of reading that experts have done.
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