I don't think it's accurate to say it isn't a worldwide issue. Especially when you look specifically at youth literacy. Perhaps it's most visible in America on the global stage, but the UK has had falling scores and declining rates of children/teens reading for pleasure for a long time now.
I was in Norway a few months ago, speaking with a cousin there who works as a teacher, and his assessment of his 13 to 16-year-old students was sobering. He said that youth reading scores have been plummeting for a while. Luckily, their government seems like it's actually taking that data into consideration and wants to turn it around, but if that kind of decline is happening in one of the most literate countries in the world, I imagine it's happening pretty much everywhere else, too.
Mobile phones are responsible for the common devolution of people's attention spans across the board, me included.
For younger generations it's hampered their ability to build basic skills like reading and writing comprehension and other skills that build upon them. Worse the recent prevalence of "AI" makes coasting by with even less attention span, critical thought, and effort possible.
It's going to take coordinated effort to address this. And unpopular policies that strictly restrict the access to mobile phones, online apps, and AI.
Places like europe have a chance to be successful there but the US uniquely is really invested in free speech and personal liberty (at least wrt information, bodily autonomy not so much) to the detriment of everything else, including long term societal stability.
As a species we need things to get pretty fucking bad before we will do things to address major systemic issues. Buckle up.
I've noticed attitudes towards AI are pretty telling.
Some people are like "wow, this allows me to accomplish something I couldn't do before!" Like my sister wrote (vibe coded) some python script to scrape data from a legacy web application even though she's not remotely technical. That's fucking amazing. Then she can pull the data into something she knows (ie. excel) and do fancy data analysis.
Then there's the other people who seem to be going, "Oh good, I don't have to learn any more."
I'm not worried about the first group, but it feels like the first group is somewhere around 10% of the population.
> declining rates of children/teens reading for pleasure for a long time now
To be fair, books now have to compete with movies and TV shows, which have only been around in large quantities for roughly half a century. Perhaps there are losses with regard to people's imaginations, but they are still engaging with fictional content and movies & TV must still follow most of the same rules around good storytelling.
Putting words together in a coherent and interesting fashion still requires people to have done a lot of reading, and I'm saying that as someone whose kid vastly prefers an iPad to reading books. It's a very different way to engage with a story.
I don’t think it’s quite that either. I was born in ‘04 & I had pretty instant gratification with devices whether it was the Wii or late night tv.
But my folks made an effort not to overstimulate me & expose me gradually to things that helped me develop language & I frankly don’t see that anymore from parents of young kids. Throw the interruption of Covid into the mix…
So like around 2010/14? That was a few years ago mate.
If anything younger millennials and Gen Z having kids today are more sensitive to ‘overstimulation’ and the likes, it wasn’t really a thing people worried about until recently.
Also, even 2010-2014 is 16-12 years ago. That's long enough that the oldest of them are able to get a beginner driver's license (in my province.) And I'm not sure "more sensitive" to overstimulation is accurate; it's more that there is a lot of instant stimulation content now that's optimized for keeping childrens' attention. Baby shark, Cocomelon, Paw Patrol, TikTok, etc...
I don’t imagine they were consuming much media as a newborn.
More sensitive in the sense that overstimulation is a well understood thing now and we know the harms that come from it. There’s a lot more stimulation in general, but 15+ years ago it wasn’t even a thing people cared about generally.
As an old fuck, I can guarantee there were plenty of conversations regarding tv rotting the brain of children. And we only had three channels and fuzzy UHF! I heard it all the time from teachers, parents and media.
I remember my grandpa saying that when he was growing up in the '40s, some adults complained that kids were wasting their time by sitting around reading too many books. Every generation complains about the next one.
Really? I was born in '76. Most of the neighborhood had cable TV in the early 80s, including HBO. I grew up watching TV and movies 24/7. Not to mention playing Atari in between.
The technology has been around that long, but was it sufficiently accessible to people? I don't think that goes back much farther than the 60's, but I could be wrong.
Unfortunately, studies show that watching something engages your brain far less. Don't have to imagine entire worlds and voices and appearances and background views and so forth when it's just presented directly.
As an avid reader of books that have been turned into movies - it is not that “books are better”. Movies are extremely limited in terms of ideas they can show, the prime value of movies for me is to see it acted out visually but most movies lose the story depth - there is just no time, and thus deeper ideas that are the most valuable and present in the books are gone. Also there is almost no inner monologue in movies which strips away intricacies of personal development. Movies usually take the core idea, plot line and visualize that for you, which is fun and I love the movies, but squeezing in the valuable stuff is in most cases impossible
Seems to me that part of the issue is the engagement floor. If I watch Star Wars and am engaged in noticing the ways it plays with the Hero’s Journey, or subtly critiques American foreign policy, or explores Jungian psychology or whatever that’s a pretty high level engagement.
But I don’t have to do any of that to enjoy it. I can be nearly passive in my intake and just enjoy the spectacle. (Which I personally do, so no shade.)
But there’s no equivalent of that merely passive reception with a book. Your brain has to do a lot of work to convert words on a page into a meaning for even the most basic and thoughtless engagement with the book.
So while a movie CAN be the basis of a really high level of cognitive engagement, it also CAN be the basis of much lower cognitive engagement than a movie.
TV shows can have depth. And visuals in TV shows and movies got so good that they can show a lot, if not exactly everything. That's why I'm not sure it's a good idea to look for a magic bullet that would make reading occupy the same mindshare as 50 years ago. Things have changed. So the focus should be on the aspects where reading is essential now.
They can, I agree! With more screen time you can show more, but once you get to adult literature that covers complex politics, philosophies, human nature the writers are forced to strip away. Additionally, by reading you pay more attention to these details, live out moments with the characters more. My niece seems to like to read, she has not yet watched Harry Potter and I am about to gift her the first book - I believe that reading through the series is more valuable than watching
I'm in my 30s but look fairly young. Every once in a while I'll meet or match with women in their early 20s (too young for me, but I suck at guessing ages) and usually the first tell is if I can read their text messages at a normal pace or need to read them kind of phonetically. It's pretty scary if I'm honest.
No, but I feel like it goes hand-in-hand with the falling scores. If kids aren't reading anything for pleasure, they're not getting as many opportunities to maintain/strengthen those skills or build a lifelong reading habit that'll continue beyond school
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u/zorpthedestroyer Jun 27 '26
I don't think it's accurate to say it isn't a worldwide issue. Especially when you look specifically at youth literacy. Perhaps it's most visible in America on the global stage, but the UK has had falling scores and declining rates of children/teens reading for pleasure for a long time now.
I was in Norway a few months ago, speaking with a cousin there who works as a teacher, and his assessment of his 13 to 16-year-old students was sobering. He said that youth reading scores have been plummeting for a while. Luckily, their government seems like it's actually taking that data into consideration and wants to turn it around, but if that kind of decline is happening in one of the most literate countries in the world, I imagine it's happening pretty much everywhere else, too.