Text is king
Created: 2026-03-12
We have a much lower standard of evidence for “bad thing go up” than we do for “bad thing go down”.
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Created: 2026-03-12
Apparently, lots of people see these numbers and perceive an emergency. But we should submit every aspiring crisis to this hypothetical: how would we describe the size of the effect if we were measuring a heartening trend instead instead of a concerning one?
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Created: 2026-03-12
do you expect these trends to continue, plateau, or even reverse? The obvious expectation is that technology will get more distracting every year. And the decline in reading seems to be greater among college students, so we should expect the numbers to continue ticking downward as older bookworms are replaced by younger phoneworms. Those are both reasonable predictions, but two facts make me a little more doubtful.
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Created: 2026-03-12
there are signs that the digital invasion of our attention is beginning to stall. We seem to have passed peak social media—time spent on the apps has started to slide.
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Created: 2026-03-12
reading has already survived several major incursions, which suggests it’s more appealing than we thought
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Created: 2026-03-13
Thoughts that can survive being written into words are on average truer than thoughts that never leave the mind. You know how you can find a leak in a tire by squirting dish soap on it and then looking for where the bubbles form? Writing is like squirting dish soap on an idea: it makes the holes obvious.
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Created: 2026-03-13
A somewhat diminished readership can somewhat diminish the power of text in culture, but it’s a mistake to think that words only exercise influence over you when you behold those words firsthand.
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Created: 2026-03-13
Being ignorant of the forces shaping society does not exempt you from their influence—it places you at their mercy.
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Created: 2026-03-13
Most of the differences between oral and literate cultures are actually differences between non-recorded and recorded cultures. And even if our culture has become slightly less literate, it has become far more recorded.
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Created: 2026-03-13
in an oral culture, the only way for information to pass from one generation to another is for someone to remember and repeat it.4 This is bit like trying to maintain a music collection with nothing but a first-generation iPod: you can’t store that much, so you have to make tradeoffs. Oral traditions are chock full of repetition, archetypal characters, and intuitive ideas, because that’s what it takes to make something memorable.
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Created: 2026-03-13
Writing is one way of solving the storage problem, but it’s not the only way, and we use those other ways now more than ever
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Created: 2026-03-13
But having more methods of storage makes us better at transmitting knowledge, not worse, and they allow us to surpass the cognitive limits that so strongly shape oral culture.
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Created: 2026-03-13
Even if people spend less time reading, it is impossible to return to a world where every fact that isn’t memorized is simply lost. I don’t believe we are nearly as close to a post-literate society as the critics think, but I also don’t believe that a post-literate society is going to bear much resemblance to a pre-literate society.
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Created: 2026-03-13
The screen is ubiquitous. While my high school does have a no phones policy we also are a 1:1 Chromebook school. “Put away the IPhone screens. Those are not educational. Now, open up your Chromebook and complete the assignments on Canvas on a screen.” It’s lunacy.
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Created: 2026-03-13
Today? The resilience and focus is gone for the vast majority of my students. I have to break the reading sections down to 5 pages at a time to keep an even pace with what they can comprehend and complete