The End of Reading?

I’m reading a book relating to my history. It’s 500+ pages long, demands at least a freshman-college reading vocabulary and proceeds with an assumption that the reader already has a basic grasp of the people and culture being elaborated upon. In other words, it’s tough going: I find I need to reread passages, compare what’s being said to what others have said, and I have to manage distractions if I’m to concentrate and comprehend.

Reading and writing fluency brought us out of the dark ages. It opened the door to a civilization in which new ideas could be shared; invention, innovation, social sciences, health science, and the philosophies and theologies were all opened to the literate public. It wasn’t always pretty, mind you, since literacy is on a more/less, not a yes/no axis. Literacy that allows individuals to engage in complex issues like mathematics, physics, chemistry, as well as theology, philosophy, and related social disciplines results from hard work and disciplined engagement.

You’d think that general literacy would be both cumulative and progressive, but that’s not a given. Various studies have concluded that literacy in the USA, for instance, has been waning in recent generations, and that when artificial intelligence reaches its inevitable maturity, it will no longer be knowledge supported by literacy that will guide our decisions and opinions. Picking and choosing among expedient, quick, undemanding alternatives will replace judgments made in the light of human compassion, empathy, love, the qualities that make the human experience of living worthwhile.

I’ve been struck by research into the pleasure/reward science that demonstrates how stimulation of the pleasure circuits in the brain so easily becomes super addictive in very little time. Rats were given a pleasure stimulus via electrodes every time they pressed a lever. Pressing that lever repeatedly displaced everything else: sex, drink, food. Had they not been removed from the experiment, the rats would have starved to death. Similar experiments with human volunteers have produced similar results.

We have a foretaste of AI as a “Skinner Box” in the social media’s ability to keep us scrolling, chasing that pleasure reward that can only be found by endlessly flipping through posts. Like the experimental rat, what is missed—while the focus is on chasing pleasure—can be critical. No young person is likely to read and study A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking if it competes for time with the effortless browsing on Tik-Tok.

The internet is full of ads for software that turns text into speech, so that reading is no longer necessary; you can listen to the text being read aloud while you cook dinner, drive to work, assemble whatzits in a factory. But understanding the text requires the same level of literacy whether it’s read by you, or to you. That plus the obvious problem of no opportunity to underline, reread, check with references renders the text to speech idea absurd… while adding another chapter to the decline-of-literacy story.

Mennonite Preacher Anslo and Wife - Rembrandt van Rijn

To read T.D. Regehr’s Mennonites in Canada: 1939-1970 cover to cover will require about 15 hours of concentrated reading. (I read material like this at about 250 words-per-minute on average.) I’ve already learned something about my heritage after reading the first 30 pages; could I have done without these few epiphanies? Of course. We have choices galore, and I could possibly have chosen to read, read, read about astronomy. Or I could have spent the 15 hours watching sports and sports commentary on streaming  TV or feeding toonie after toonie into the VLT at the local bar. Not much literacy required there.

NAICA

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