​Reading in crisis?

​As AI feeds us summaries and headlines, deep reading fades. But without sustained attention and nuance, we risk eroding the very foundations of democratic thought, says Yeşim Topuz. ‘Some practices cannot be replaced by a swipe.’

Every decade needs its cultural bogeyman. In the 1920s, it was jazz, ‘corrupting the youth and dismantling morals’. Today, it seems to be… the decline in reading. We see headlines about falling comprehension scores, shorter attention spans, and the ‘death’ of the book. But, does it even matter?

Currently, we are living through a ‘Great Bifurcation‘ of literacy. On one side, we have AI-generated summaries, threads, or fragmented reading. This can be efficient for information gathering, but it doesn’t train the ‘cognitive patience’ required for deep work and sustained reading. Reading a 600-page novel is different from scrolling captions.

This is also a question of competence. As AI takes over routine cognitive tasks, the value of human work moves upward. What remains valuable is judgment, ethical nuance, and, above all , attention. I believe this will be one of the key factors making the humanities crucial for what’s to come. The humanities teach capacities that cannot be automated: interpretation, contextualization, the ability to sit with ambiguity.

Societies that give up on sustained reading risk giving up on sustained thinking. And, democracy needs nuance, and nuance requires patience. A society of headline leaders and summary scanners is vulnerable to simplification, and democracy depends on citizens who can follow complex arguments, weigh contradictions, and resist simplistic narratives. Otherwise, public discourse flattens.

For example, movements like the ‘red pill‘ gain traction not necessarily because people have ill intent,  but rather because they offer clear, emotionally satisfying explanations for complex social realities. Combined with a decreasing attention span or Reading comprehension, these narratives become easier to absorb.

Maybe we shouldn’t ask whether we are still reading. The question is: what kinds of reading do we value, and why? If we only mourn the loss of the canon, we repeat the fears of every previous generation. But if we ignore the measurable drop in comprehension, we endanger the very skills democracy depends on.

I’d say, reading today is both a jazz-like moral panic and a genuine issue. We need to take the new forms of reading seriously, but also protect the deep, patient practices that cannot be replaced by a swipe.

_Advertentie.