Reading is Still Here. But is Agency?
The Atlantic's August cover story raises provocative questions about what we lose if we stop reading. But we can only 'lose' reading if we choose to.
It’s no secret that publications often use different headlines for the print and online versions of the same article. Sometimes, online headlines even change over time as editors attempt to pinpoint the most attractive version of a headline. Occasionally, the difference between the print and online headline feels particularly stark, or particularly telling. Such was the case with the print and online headlines The Atlantic used for its August cover story.
In print, Rose Horowitch’s piece on how the digital age has affected reading is titled, “The Age of Reading is Over.” Online, the article is styled “The End of Reading is Here.”
Those are not the same thing.
In the article itself, Horowitch argues that we are in a “postliterate era” in which people glean information not through reading, but through hearing. That hearing comes in the form of conversation, yes, but also through radio and television and Instagram Reels and TikToks. She quotes Walter J. Ong’s argument that we are entering a phase of “secondary orality,” marked by the use of stock phrases, mnemonics, epithets, and even descriptions of physical violence. Such rhetorical techniques are necessary since those are the sorts of things that stick with a person when things are not written down. Horowitch proceeds to make a convincing case that the “Age of Reading”—that is, the era in which reading is the primary method of knowledge transfer and societal awareness—is over.
Yet, does that translate to the “end of reading?” I don’t think so, and I don’t think Horowitch thinks so, either. Near the end of her piece, she notes that while the overall proportion of people who read is shrinking, those who do read are reading even more. Over the past two decades, she notes, the amount of time readers spend reading has increased; it’s just that the number of people who can be called “readers” is decreasing.
"Now that reading is optional, it can function as an identity marker. When you see someone on the train reading printed matter, it feels like a statement,” Horowitch writes.
Thus, reading is not dead. It’s more like vinyl—something revered by purists, but not necessary to one’s daily life.
The article is thoughtful and interesting and a worthwhile contemplation on how society changes when most people no longer read. What I found most compelling, though, was when Horowitch discussed writing. She notes that while plenty of technologies have yanked our attention away from books, generative artificial intelligence (AI) is the first to, in her words, “threaten the continued existence of writing.”
I don’t agree that it threatens writing’s existence, but I do think she raises some interesting questions about what it might mean if the majority of society no longer has to take time to think out how to convey information in words. Horowitch explains:
“The trouble is that writing is not merely the act of transcribing fully formed thoughts—if it were, it wouldn’t be hard. Writing is the way people figure out what they think, and how to convey those thoughts to someone who doesn’t already share them.”
She goes on to paraphrase Georgetown computer scientist and author Cal Newport’s argument that writing “forces people to think in an orderly, linear fashion.” Not only might such skills atrophy if people stop writing for themselves, they also might lose the ability to critically assess writing.
Horowitch continues:
“If AI writing is pleasing and convincing, however, it is also unoriginal, often inaccurate, or both. People will therefore need their powers of discernment and comprehension more than ever. They will need to know what they think and how to make their own judgments. These are the exact skills that the use of AI threatens to erode.”
Reading and writing thus play complementary roles. Reading is how we obtain information and the process of reading trains us to think critically and assess the information we read. Writing is how we convert the information we read into our own thoughts, but also how we convey our most complex thoughts to other people.
Now that both reading and writing have become somewhat superfluous, the two tasks must be done intentionally.
I began this post by comparing the two different headlines used on Horowitch’s piece. Ultimately, neither is particularly accurate; or at least, neither is necessarily accurate. Because the importance of Horowitch’s story is not so much that she is declaring the end of reading, but rather that she’s making the case for what we will lose if we allow ourselves to move away from reading. And indeed, it is a choice.
We live in an age when we increasingly are being told that if something is possible, it is inevitable. If we can deploy AI for a given use case, then we must. Of course, that’s not true. We still very much have a choice regarding the extent to which we embrace potentially dangerous technologies. We have a choice whether we choose to read or not.
Perhaps some day the robots will completely disempower us, but it hasn’t happened yet.
The End of Agency is not here.
At least not yet.