{"id":191621,"date":"2025-06-17T12:08:10","date_gmt":"2025-06-17T12:08:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/191621\/"},"modified":"2025-06-17T12:08:10","modified_gmt":"2025-06-17T12:08:10","slug":"whats-happening-to-reading-the-new-yorker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/191621\/","title":{"rendered":"What\u2019s Happening to Reading? | The New Yorker"},"content":{"rendered":"

What do you read, and why? A few decades ago, these weren\u2019t urgent questions. Reading was an unremarkable activity, essentially unchanged since the advent of the modern publishing industry, in the nineteenth century. In a 2017 Shouts & Murmurs titled \u201cBefore the Internet<\/a>,\u201d the writer Emma Rathbone captured the spirit of reading as it used to be: \u201cBefore the Internet, you could laze around on a park bench in Chicago reading some Dean Koontz, and that would be a legit thing to do and no one would ever know you had done it unless you told them.\u201d Reading was just reading, and no matter what you chose to read\u2014the paper, Proust, \u201cThe Power Broker<\/a>\u201d\u2014you basically did it by moving your eyes across a page, in silence, at your own pace and on your own schedule.<\/p>\n

Today, the nature of reading has shifted. Plenty of people still enjoy traditional books and periodicals, and there are even readers for whom the networked age has enabled a kind of hyper-literacy; for them, a smartphone is a library in their pocket. For others, however, the old-fashioned, ideal sort of reading\u2014intense, extended, beginning-to-end encounters with carefully crafted texts\u2014has become almost anachronistic. These readers might start a book on an e-reader and then continue it on the go, via audio narration. Or they might forgo books entirely, spending evenings browsing Apple News and Substack before drifting down Reddit\u2019s lazy river. There\u2019s something both diffuse and concentrated about reading now; it involves a lot of random words flowing across a screen, while the lurking presence of YouTube, Fortnite, Netflix, and the like insures that, once we\u2019ve begun to read, we must continually choose not to stop.<\/p>\n

This shift has taken decades, and it\u2019s been driven by technologies that have been disproportionately adopted by the young. Perhaps for these reasons, its momentousness has been obscured. In 2023, the National Endowment for the Arts reported<\/a> that, over the preceding decade, the proportion of adults who read at least one book a year had fallen from fifty-five per cent to forty-eight per cent. That\u2019s a striking change, but modest compared to what\u2019s happened among teen-agers: the National Center for Education Statistics\u2014which has recently been gutted by the Trump Administration\u2014found<\/a> that, over roughly the same period, the number of thirteen-year-olds who read for fun \u201calmost every day\u201d fell from twenty-seven per cent to fourteen per cent. Predictably, college professors have been complaining<\/a> with more than usual urgency about phone-addled students who struggle to read anything of substantial length or complexity.<\/p>\n

Some of the evidence for the drop in literacy is thin. One widely discussed study<\/a>, for instance, judges students on their ability to parse the muddy and semantically tortuous opening of \u201cBleak House\u201d; this is a little like assessing swimmers on their ability to cross fifty yards of molasses. And there are other reasons to be sanguine about the slide away from books, given what so many of us actually like to read. If we binge \u201cStranger Things\u201d instead of reading Stephen King, or listen to self-help podcasts instead of buying self-help books, is that the end of civilization? On some level, declines in traditional reading are connected to the efflorescence of information in the digital age. Do we really want to return to a time when there was less to read, watch, hear, and learn?<\/p>\n

Still, whatever we think of these changes, they seem likely to accelerate. Over the past few decades, many scholars have seen the decline in reading as the closing of the \u201cGutenberg Parenthesis<\/a>\u201d\u2014a period of history, inaugurated by the invention of the printing press, during which a structured ecosystem of published print ruled. The internet, the theory went, closed the parenthesis by returning us to a more free-flowing, decentralized, and conversational mode of communication. Instead of reading books, we can argue in the comments. Some theorists have even proposed that we\u2019re returning to a kind of oral culture\u2014what the historian Walter Ong described as a \u201csecondary orality,\u201d in which gab and give-and-take are enhanced by the presence of text. The ascendance of podcasts, newsletters, and memes has lent credence to this view. \u201cThe Joe Rogan Experience\u201d could be understood as a couple of guys around a campfire, passing on knowledge through conversation, like the ancient Greeks.<\/p>\n

In retrospect, though, there\u2019s something almost quaint about the oral-culture hypothesis. We might say that it was largely developed during the Zuckerberg Parenthesis\u2014a period of history, inaugurated by the invention of Facebook, in which social media ruled. No one inside this parenthesis imagined how much of a threat artificial intelligence would soon pose to the conversational internet. We have already entered a world in which the people you encounter online are sometimes not actually people<\/a>; instead, they are conjured<\/a> using A.I. that\u2019s been trained on unimaginably vast quantities of text. It\u2019s as though the books have come to life, and are getting revenge by creating something new\u2014a marriage of text, thought, and conversation that will revise the utility and value of the written word.<\/p>\n

In January, the economist and blogger Tyler Cowen announced<\/a> that he\u2019d begun \u201cwriting for the AIs.\u201d It was now reasonable to assume, he suggested, that everything he published was being \u201cread\u201d not just by people but also by A.I. systems\u2014and he\u2019d come to regard this second kind of readership as important. \u201cWith very few exceptions, even thinkers and writers who are famous in their lifetimes are eventually forgotten,\u201d Cowen noted. But A.I.s might not forget; in fact, if you furnished them with enough of your text, they might extract from it \u201ca model of how you think,\u201d with which future readers could interact. \u201cYour descendants, or maybe future fans, won\u2019t have to page through a lot of dusty old books to get an inkling of your ideas,\u201d Cowen wrote. Around this time, he began<\/a> posting on his blog about mostly unremarkable periods of his life\u2014ages four to seven, say. His human readers might not care about such posts, but the entries could make it possible \u201cfor the advanced A.I.s of the near future to write a very good Tyler Cowen biography.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cowen can think this way because large language models, such as OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT or Anthropic\u2019s Claude, are, among other things, reading machines. It\u2019s not exactly right to say that they \u201cread,\u201d in the human sense: an L.L.M. can\u2019t be moved by what it reads, because it has no emotions, and its heart can\u2019t race in suspense. But it\u2019s also undeniable that there are aspects of reading at which A.I.s excel at a superhuman level. During its training, an L.L.M. will \u201cread\u201d and \u201cunderstand\u201d an unimaginably large quantity of text. Later, it will be able to recall the substance of that text instantaneously (if not always perfectly), and to draw connections, make comparisons, and extract insights, which it can bring to bear on new pieces of text, on which it hasn\u2019t been trained, at outrageous speed. The systems are like college graduates who, while they were at school, literally did all the reading. And they can read more, if you give them assignments.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve known a few people who seem to have read everything, and learning from them has been life-changing. A.I. can\u2019t substitute for those individuals because it\u2019s essentially generic and consensus-driven; you won\u2019t look to ChatGPT as a role model for the life of the mind, or thrill to Gemini\u2019s grand theories or idiosyncratic insights. But A.I. has readerly strengths that lie precisely in its impersonality. On David Perell\u2019s \u201cHow I Write\u201d podcast, Cowen explains that, as he reads, he peppers a chatbot with questions about whatever he doesn\u2019t understand; the A.I. never tires of such questions and, in answering them, draws on a range of knowledge that no human being could access so quickly. This turns any text into a kind of springboard or syllabus. But A.I. can also simplify: if you\u2019re struggling with the opening of \u201cBleak House,\u201d you can ask for it to be rewritten using easier, more modern English. \u201cGas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy,\u201d Dickens wrote. Claude takes a more direct path: \u201cGas lamps glow dimly through the fog at various spots throughout the streets, much like how the sun might appear to farmers working in misty fields.\u201d<\/p>\n

In this way, readers who are armed with A.I. may find themselves blurring the line between primary and secondary sources\u2014especially if they read material for which they believe it\u2019s possible to separate form from content. Many people are already comfortable doing this: since 2012, the Berlin-based company Blinkist, which touts itself as \u201cthe future of reading,\u201d has been offering fifteen-minute summaries of popular nonfiction books, in both text and audio format. (In a \u201cblink\u201d lasting a quarter of an hour, you may be able to come to grips with Ryan Holiday\u2019s exploration of Stoic and Buddhist philosophy, \u201cStillness is the Key<\/a>.\u201d) Or consider Reader\u2019s Digest Condensed Books, a subscription-based anthology which published, on a seasonal basis, handsome hardcover volumes containing four or five novels that had been trimmed to roughly half their original size. The books were popular\u2014in 1987, the Times reported<\/a> that one and a half million readers bought ten million volumes annually\u2014and, when I was growing up, my parents kept a shelf of them in our house; without really thinking about it, I read a few \u201ccondensed\u201d thrillers by Dick Francis and Nora Roberts. (The series is still offered today, as Reader\u2019s Digest Fiction Favorites.) If I were writing an academic paper on Francis\u2019s novel \u201cWhip Hand,\u201d from 1979, I\u2019d get in big trouble for relying on the condensed version. But if what I\u2019m after is the story, the vibe, the suspense, I might be justified in feeling that I\u2019d \u201cread\u201d the book. Certainly, I\u2019d be unlikely to seek out the unabridged version.<\/p>\n

In our current reading regime, summarized or altered texts are the exception, not the rule. But over the next decade or so, that polarity may well reverse: we may routinely start with alternative texts and only later decide to seek out originals, in roughly the same way that we now download samples of new books to our Kindles before committing to them. Because A.I. can generate abridgments, summaries, and other condensed editions on demand, we may even switch between versions as circumstances dictate\u2014the way that, today, you might decide to listen to a podcast at \u201c2x\u201d speed, or quit a boring TV show and turn to Wikipedia to find out how it ended. Pop songs often come in different edits\u2014the clean edit, and various E.D.M. remixes. As a writer, I may not want to see my text refracted in this way. But the power of refraction won\u2019t be mine to control; it will lay with readers and their A.I.s. Together, they will collapse the space between reading and editing.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s reasonable to argue that some kinds of writing shouldn\u2019t, or perhaps can\u2019t, be summarized. If you read a summary of Elena Ferrante\u2019s Neapolitan novels<\/a>\u2014Lila did this, Len\u00f9 did that\u2014you cheat yourself. Perhaps Douglas R. Hofstadter\u2019s \u201cG\u00f6del, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid<\/a>\u201d could be boiled down to its key concepts, and maybe a chatbot could explain them to you more clearly than Hofstadter does\u2014but length and difficulty are part of the point of that book. And surely readers will continue to value the authentic voices of their fellow human beings. Recently, I\u2019ve been reading Tolstoy\u2019s \u201cChildhood, Boyhood, Youth<\/a>.\u201d It\u2019s full of German phrases, odd historical details, and Russian cultural nuances that I don\u2019t understand. Even so, I like to skip the footnotes; I want to stay in the flow of the story, and under Tolstoy\u2019s spell. The proportion of people who simply love old-fashioned reading may be shrinking, but it won\u2019t shrink to zero, or anywhere near it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What do you read, and why? A few decades ago, these weren\u2019t urgent questions. Reading was an unremarkable…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":191622,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3163],"tags":[323,1942,28039,3082,28606,53,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-191621","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence-a-i","11":"tag-internet","12":"tag-reading","13":"tag-technology","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114698630134902585","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191621"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191621\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/191622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}