What we mean by 'literacy' changes over time
I'm going to dive straight in.
Let's just take this paragraph from about half-way through a hand-wringing, moralistic article about reading by Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic:
Reading books is a workout for the attention span. The more you read, the easier it is to read, and the more you’re rewarded with new understanding. Eventually the process is more pleasurable than it is challenging. But as with physical exercise, the converse is true as well: The less you read, the more difficult it is to read, and the rockier the path to acquiring knowledge.
This would be true if reading books was the only way of "acquiring knowledge". But, of course, it isn't. Despite citing all of the 'correct' sources for this kind of article (Ong, McLuhan, even Socrates) Horowitch is still on a moral crusade:
Could the generations growing up with their brains hooked to endless video feeds be developing some kind of novel, as-yet-undetectable cognitive brilliance? Perhaps. But for now, the decline of reading seems to be ushering in a less rational, analytical, and sophisticated mode of thinking. It’s difficult to see any advantages in that.
It's an extended example of victim-blaming. There's no discussion of Big Tech business models, no critique of capitalism, no understanding that, as the world changes, so institutions like universities need to change as well. Instead, it's a reactionary diatribe harkening back to some non-existent golden ages of literacy.
And then, of course, there's a switch to AI destroying people's ability to write, itself a lazy trope:
The skill of deep thinking will likely become rarer and rarer in a world where much of the population uses AI to avoid writing. It will also become more and more important. AI is creating a superabundance of text. It has led to a threefold increase in the number of books released on Amazon each month since 2022, when ChatGPT was launched. Over the same period, scientific-journal submissions have also surged. Many were written at least in part by artificial intelligence.
I'm sure Horowitch would like to see this as an example of a well-researched, well-written piece. But it's not. It's just long. They could quite easily have spared the reader the ceremony and said "I like reading books and writing without machine-provided assistance, and think that you should do, too." The trite story at the end proves as much.
Look, I read a lot and I write a lot. I sometimes listen to audiobooks, I watch short-form videos, and I use LLMs with text generation. I think that means I'm honing my literacy practices for the current time periods. Articles like this use a jumble of anecdotes, quotations from classic novels, cherry-picked data points, and interviews with learned professors to make what is, at the end of the day, a moralistic point.
I'll end with a quotation from the philosopher David Hume on the is/ought problem which, I think, gets to the nub of the issue:
In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, it's necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend it to the readers; and am persuaded, that this small attention would subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceived by reason.
Source: Original article · Are.na block · Digital Literacies channel · Image: Midjourney