When I started out writing for network TV news decades ago, the directive was to write with the assumption that audience members had no more than an 8th grade reading comprehension level. In the intervening years that estimate has likely been downgraded by at least a couple of grades.
I’ve also noticed in my own experience that many adults have more difficulty following simple written instructions than was previously the case.
Digital obsolecense has gotten obsolete, too. It used to be based on document size and technology: I can’t transfer these photos because I don’t have a floppy disk drive; or my serial cable is too slow; or I don’t want to transfer these photos because they’re from the 1990s and were taken with a 320x240 phone camera and look like crap. Then we have compatibility issues: this document can only be read with Word 2.0 macros enabled; this document can only be read by Adobe 8.6 compatible readers. And then we have DRM: my Plays For Sure Zune no longer plays anything I bought for it, and I have no way of decrypting that music, or those pictures.
These are distractions from the real problem.
The real problem is volume. I have thousands of actual printed-on-paper photos taken over the last 50 years. They’re in albums occupying the bottom of a few bookcases. When I pass, my heirs might bother to crack open a volume or two, say “hey, this is Great Aunt Karen!”, then squabble over who will have to drag all those pictures home and scan a few for Facebook’s sake. This is a problem as old as home photography, but it’s solved.
The real issue will be “hey, dead Grandpa’s got a storage array with about 20PB of pictures on it. Bet you the old man filled it with downloaded porn.” Who will dig through some weird folder structure to see if they can find ancient photos of people they probably were too young to remember? People barely care about the paper photos when there’s only a thousand of them, and they’re in easy-to-find and easy-to-view albums. Nobody will want to connect up a disk drive and wade through the hundreds of thousands of images each person seems to be generating.
And before you tell me that Google auto-tags photos so all you have to do is type a name, I don’t care. I’m not going to type the names of all of Grandma’s friends and family to figure out who she was interested in and maybe look at a few of them. No, I’m going to format that sweet 20PB drive and have a place to store all my photos. I have a stunning one of a cat in a cradle somewhere around here …
i dunno. i suspect that people are reading and writing more now than at any point in history.
even excluding texting, i write at least a small bit every day. i suspect that’s roughly true of many people who are on the internet.
while people aren’t probably saying much that’s deep, they are communicating the ins and outs of their daily lives. it’s win some, lose some. daily writing vs dictionary level vocabularies. not all good, nor all bad.
handwriting? now that gets worse daily. i don’t even know if people know what pencils are for. nor how to sharpen them
I’m not sure about elsewhere, but UK book sales have been gradually increasing over the last decade or so. There’s been a shift to ebooks over dead tree of course, but reading is reading.
I see lots of people using the 'Net by talking into their phones or another device. They’re not typing, and when they do it tends to be full of misspellings and typos - because writing is not their primary way of communicating.
In the early days of the Internet, I believed that it would encourage people to read and write more. Those hopes were dashed when graphical interfaces became popular. People didn’t need to write, just point and click.
It’s gotten easier to avoid reading and writing as tech “improves” every year. Now travel apps can translate signs. Once they audibly tell users what signs say, many believe there’s no need to learn how to read them for themselves.
Those of us who grew up without tech in our early years notice how silent younger people have become. We learned how to converse and write at length. They rely on texts and tweets, so anything more than a few words is TL. I wouldn’t be surprised if a generation comes along that only speaks in emojis. At that point, I’ll be the one needing a translator.
But WHAT are they reading? Tweets written by semiliterates and transcripts of sound bytes originally spoken by uneducated knuckle draggers. They sure as hell aren’t reading Mark Twain or the Constitution.
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