How harmful is the decline in long-form reading?

That is the theme of my latest Free Press column, here is one excerpt:

Oral culture, in contrast, tends to be more fluid, harder to evaluate and verify, more prone to rumor, and it has fewer gatekeepers. Those features have their advantages, as a good stand-up comedian will get louder laughs than a witty author. Or an explanation from YouTube, with moving visuals, may stick in our minds more than a turgid passage from a textbook. We also just love talking, and listening, as those modes of communication reach back into human history much further than reading and writing do. Speech is part of how we bond with each other. Still, if any gross generalization can be made, it is that oral culture makes objectivity and analytic thought harder to establish and maintain.

Given this background, both the good and the bad news is that the dominance of print culture has been in decline for a long time. Radio and cinema both became major communications media in the 1920s, and television spread in the 1950s. Those major technological advances have commanded the regular attention of billions, and still do so. Earlier in the 20th century, it suddenly became a question whether you take your ideas from a book or from the radio. And this was not always a welcome development, as Hitler’s radio speeches persuaded more Germans than did his poorly constructed, unreadable Mein Kampf.

The fact that books, newspapers, and reading still are so important reflects just how powerful print has been. How many other institutions can be in relative decline for over a hundred years, and still have such a hold over our hearts and minds?

The optimistic interpretation of our situation is that reading longer works has been in decline for a long time, and overall our civilization has managed the transition fairly well. Across history we have had various balances of written and oral cultures, and if some further rebalancing is required in the direction of the oral, we should be able to make that work, just as we have done in the past. The rise of television, whatever you may think of it, did not do us in.

A second and more pessimistic diagnosis is that print and reading culture has been hanging by a thread, and current and pending technological advances are about to give that thread its final cut. The intellectual and cultural apocalypse is near. Even if your family thinks of itself as well-educated, your kids will grow up unable to work their way through a classic novel. They will watch the Lord of the Rings movies, but never pick up the books. As a result, they are likely to have less scientific and analytic objectivity, and they will embody some of the worst and most volatile aspects of TikTok culture. They will, however, be able to sample large numbers of small bits of information, or sometimes misinformation, in a short period of time.

There is much more at the link.