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In the future, we can’t read.

Written by Matthias Rohner

Society | Technology

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November 13, 2020

“By the twentieth century, less than two percent of the people in the so-called industrialized democracies read even one book a year. And that was before the smart machines, dataspheres, and user-friendly environments. By the Hegira, ninety-eight percent of the Hegemony’s population had no reason to read anything. So they didn’t bother learning how to. It’s worse today. There are more than a hundred billion human beings in the Worldweb and less than one percent of them bothers to hardfax any printed material, much less read a book.”

Tyrena Wingreen-Feif to poet Martin Silenus, in Dan Simmons award-winning science fiction novel “Hyperion” from 1989, page 108.

We just started to read

On a historical scale, it’s only recently that people like you and me have started to read. Literacy is as a heritage of the enlightenment area, and only climbed in the middle of the 20th century. Today, of the world population older than 15 years 86% are literate. That’s a big achievement, considering that the ability to read might be the single most important door opener to achieve Goal 4 of the 17 UN development goals: “Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.” So: All good?

We’re not getting better

While in a historical context literacy might be on an all time height, it seems students in developed countries hit a limit in their ability to read. Consider the PISA results of the last 10 years. PISA (OECD’s Program for International Student Assessments) “generally compare student (15 year olds) academic performance across countries.” In the PISA tests, the reading performance declines or remains flat in the largest “so-called industrialized democracies” (see the entry quote from Hyperion).

According to PISA, reading performance is the ability to “understand, use and reflect on written texts in order to achieve goals, develop knowledge and potential, and participate in society“. The key phrase in this definition is ‘in order to’. Following the definition, reading is a foundational precondition to become an educated, critical and participating citizen. Looking at the PISA results on reading performance, the large industrialized nations are not getting better at this crucial skills. They are getting worse or remain flat. Why, and what does that mean?

Are we still ‘reading’ ?

NN/g Nielson Norman Group, a UX consulting firm, researches how users interact with digital content. They state one truth that hasn’t changed since their research started in 1997: “People rarely read online — they’re far more likely to scan than read word for word. That’s one fundamental truth of online information-seeking behavior (…) People still primarily scan, rather than read. (…) They still jump around pages, skipping some content, backtracking to scan what they skipped, and re scanning content they’ve already scanned.” That sounds quite messy, right? Such an online behavior is not even ‘reading’ in the sense of PISA. Neuroscientist Manfred Spitzer from the University of Ulm, Germany, criticizes this way of consuming digital media: “It’s highly problematic [for your reading ability] if only short notices are read on small screens.” To summarize: The typical behavior when consuming written, digital content is not reading – it’s scanning. And that’s hurting your ability to read.

A look into the far future

If we take a step back and look at the entry quote from the science-fiction novel “Hyperion”, the future of reading might just get worse with more technology:

By the twentieth century, less than two percent of the people in the so-called industrialized democracies read even one book a year. And that was before the smart machines, dataspheres, and user-friendly environments

Tyrena Wingreen-Feif to poet Martin Silenus, in Dan Simmons award-winning science fiction novel “Hyperion” from 1989, page 108.

Written in 1989, where nothing like Social Media, Blogs, or News feeds were present, it’s at least interesting to note the prediction of technology erasing the ability to read. Dan Simmons imaginative future of “smart machines, dataspheres and user-friendly environments” might dawn at the horizon of our time as smartphones, AI-generated texts and polished digital content. In the world of Hyperion, ‘the population had no reason to read anything’. In the world of digital content, we have no reason to ‘read’ (in the sense of PISA), too.

While Hyperion is a book with countless layers and threads running through it, none of it suggests that humans have developed in a positive sense from a moral standpoint. Throughout the book, the human race described as the collective of the ‘Hegemony’ seems to resemble the worst ‘human’ qualities: A selfish, superficial species that only loves itself and eliminates everything that stands in its way: “As the Web expanded, if a species attempted serious competition with humanity’s intellect, that species would be extinct before the first farcaster opened in-system.” (Hyperion, page 463).

Looking back from the far future of ‘Hyperion’, humanity has come a long way of being illiterate, then developing literacy through focus on education, and losing it again through too much and too convenient technology. With no good outcome.

Now what?

I’ve stated in another article my suspicion that the large consumption of small digital snippets of content is not creating knowledge. Scanning through online stuff rather resembles the hunt for pieces of information, not the calm work of building a relation between them – which is the key to true understanding. “Reading” – in the sense of the PISA-definition – requires focus, time, attention. Stop scanning. Start to read. And then let’s hope that the illiterate world of Hyperion is really only one of the potential futures, not the likely one.

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