Digital reading appears to be destroying habits of "deep reading". Astonishing numbers of people with years of schooling are in effect illiterate. This month's Ljubljana Manifesto (宣言) explains: "The digital field may promote more reading than ever in history, but it also offers many temptations to read in a superficial and scattered (零散的) manner — or even not to read at all. This increasingly endangers higher-level reading."
That's frightening, because "higher-level reading" has been essential to civilization. It enabled the enlightenment and an international increase in empathy. Without it, we would suffer a lot. As the Ljubljana Manifesto notes, "as much as one-third of Europeans struggle even with lower-level reading skills." More than one-fifth of adults in the US "fall into the illiterate/functionally illiterate category". Separately, post-pandemic reading scores for American 13-year-olds are the lowest in decades. And the Washington-based Center for Global Development recently estimated that literacy in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa among those with five years of schooling has decreased by 10% this past half century.
Experts in the Ljubljana Manifesto record the demerits of digital reading: "Recent studies of various kinds indicate a decline of critical and conscious reading, slow reading, non-strategic reading and long-form reading." When you read a book on paper, you can be entirely inside the experience, absorb hundreds of pages of details thoroughly and begin to capture the world's complexity. Online, says Maryanne Wolf of UCLA, we are "skimming, scanning, scrolling". The medium is the message: doing deep reading on your phone is as hard as playing tennis with your phone. Recently, a bright 11-year-old told me I was wasting time on books: he absorbed more information faster from Wikipedia. He had a point. But digital readers also absorb more misinformation and seldom absorb fine perspectives.
In short, as professors from Northwestern University foresaw in 2005, we are returning to the days when only an elite (精英) "reading class" consumes long texts, which is worrying.
