The decline of reading is a business decision

Opinion mediasocial media The decline of reading is a business decision 2023 02 15t110612z 2126555975 Rc2mbz9kk7d5 Rtrmadp 3 Turkey Quake Socialmedia Arrests Relevant News The decline of reading is a business decision 12 August 2026 Motorcyclist, 22, dies four days after Lythrodontas crash 12 August 2026 Two face Larnaca court over Kornos forest fire started by fireworks 12 August 2026 Stelios Marathovouniotis 12 August 2026 FacebookXWhatsAppEmailPrintViber We are consuming more information than any generation in history and understanding less of it. The OECD’s second Survey of Adult Skills, published in December 2024, tested adults across 31 countries. Literacy and numeracy had largely declined or stagnated over the previous decade; average literacy improved in only two, Denmark and Finland. Writing in The Atlantic, Rose Horowitch argues in “The End of Reading Is Here” that we are becoming not illiterate but postliterate: still surrounded by text, but losing the habit and the capacity for sustained reading. What replaced the reading is now being studied: a systematic review and meta-analysis pooling 71 studies and 98,299 participants found that heavier short-form video use was associated with poorer cognitive performance, with the strongest associations in attention and inhibitory control, and that the pattern held across both young people and adults and across every platform examined. This decline is the output of a business model, and the decisions that built the model are now a matter of public record. Consider what is known about TikTok. Internal company material showed that the company had quantified habit formation precisely: 260 videos. Reporters who examined the unredacted material found executives who understood the potential harm to teenagers and appeared untroubled by it. One doesn’t need to argue that executives at TikTok decided to make anyone stupider. The claim is narrower: a company measured the point at which use becomes compulsive, built for what it measured, and carried on knowing what the design did to the young people using it. Multiply that decision across an industry and the result is not some sort of mysterious conspiracy. Sustained attention is expensive to earn; reflexive attention is cheap to trigger. Where engagement and wellbeing point different ways, and they point different ways constantly, the incentive resolves it the same way every time. An objection to this claim could be that this alarm is very old. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates relays a myth in which the Egyptian king Thamus rejects the gift of writing: it will produce forgetfulness in those who learn it, and offer them “the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom”. The complaint sounds modern. It is also an argument that survives only because Plato wrote it down. Eighteenth-century critics warned that novels would corrupt the morals and rot the concentration of the women and young people reading them. In 1954, the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham published Seduction of the Innocent, which argued that comic books were a direct cause of juvenile delinquency. It was a bestseller which produced an industry censorship code that closed publishers within months. His evidence was later found to be largely anecdotal, and in places falsified. Television inherited the same charge, and so did radio and video games before it. What is different this time is that earlier media did not adapt. A book did not measure your behaviour in real time and rearrange itself to hold you longer. It could not be fine-tuned, against your own inclination to stop. I am not writing from outside this. I read fewer books than I did five years ago. I know precisely why, I can name the mechanism, and the knowing has changed nothing at all. If awareness were sufficient, the best-informed would be the least affected, but they’re not. Which is why the standard remedies are aimed at the wrong target. The digital detox, the screen-time limit, the resolution to read more, all of them ask individuals to out-will an industry that has been perfecting its products to keep you hooked to them. This is not a fair contest. Structural remedies, however, have been shown to work. After Texas introduced a statewide school phone ban, Dallas Independent School District, with more than 130,000 students, recorded over 200,000 additional library checkouts by the end of March, a rise of roughly a quarter. Nevertheless, a phone ban alone cannot be a cure for a problem created by an economic system that rewards and reproduces this. What is presently on offer are repairs, and the alternative to making them is not a better solution but no solution. That is the encouraging part of a discouraging argument. If this decline were a natural process, nothing could be done about it. But it was chosen, repeatedly, in rooms where the alternative was available and cost more. Anything chosen can be chosen differently. Not, as it seems, by the people currently doing the choosing. 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