People read less than they used to. There are other ways to spend time, like scrolling social media feeds. Are we going back to an oral culture? Is digital orality eating literacy, as a recent book review on Astral Codex Ten puts it? And if so, how much of a problem is this? Is there anything we should do about it? Is there anything we can do about it?
Broad questions like this conflate different applications of literacy. For some of them, a return to an oral culture may be a problem, while for others, it may be an advantage. Here is my attempt at categorizing those applications, and a first attempt at analyzing if a return to orality would be welcome or not.
| Format | Purpose | Value of literacy |
|---|---|---|
| Novels | Reading for pleasure | I read novels because I like it, irrespective of it having any other benefits. Others don’t read novels and they’re missing out, but I don’t think that’s a problem for society. |
| Textbooks | Reading for learning | Some textbooks are tolerable, most are bad, and none of them are effective at teaching new skills. An hour with an AI tutor is worth at least two hours with a textbook. If they don’t survive, nobody is going to mind. |
| Papers, essays, blogs | Reading and writing for information | Reading a few scientific articles every week, and having authored 30 of them, they’re a format I’m familiar with. There are better ways of publishing papers than the current peer-reviewed journals, and the classical introduction-methods-results-discussion structure isn’t always appropriate, but there’s no substitute for scientific writing. |
| Non-fiction books | Reading for understanding | Non-fiction books are different from textbooks in that they go deep, rather than wide, and introduce new ways of seeing the world. Bad non-fiction books can be condensed (“could’ve been a blog post”), but good ones provide context and weave ideas together into a coherent fabric. There may be no better way to get a “mind download” from an expert than reading a book they wrote. |
| Papers, essays, blogs, books | Writing for understanding | For me, there are two ways to understand something: Writing about it, or building a quantitative model of it. Modeling is only possible for some things, but writing is possible for almost everything. Talking can also be helpful for understanding, but typically doesn’t result in the same depth of understanding. |
| Letters | Reading and writing for keeping in touch | Recently, I haven’t written any letters or long emails to friends and family. It’s all messages and calls on WhatsApp and Signal. I don’t know if that’s a loss and I wonder how older people who used to write and receive letters feel about this. |
| Laws and contracts | Reading and writing for regulating our affairs | Surely, there is a better way to come to an agreement than legal documents? However, I lack any insight into what that could look like. |
This table is incomplete, but I hope it illustrates my point that the value of literacy differs from application to application.
