Are we becoming a post-literate society?

Cultural critic Neil Postman once said, “The human intellect is one of the most fragile things in nature. It doesn’t take much to distract, suppress, or even destroy it.

In the year It was 1988, a former Hollywood actor was in the White House, and Postman was concerned about the rise of images over words in American media, culture and politics. Television, he argued in an essay in the book, “makes us think of the world in fragmented images and forces other media to move in that direction.” Conscientious objections. “Culture should not force elites to flee to make them weak. A culture should not burn books to ensure that it is not read. . . There are other ways to get stupid.”

In the year What seems like only 1988 reads like a prophecy in 2024. This month, the OECD released Results Extensive exercise: 160,000 adults aged 16-65 in 31 different countries and economies are assessed in person on their reading, numeracy and problem-solving skills. Compared to the last set of assessments a decade ago, the trends in writing skills were striking. Efficiency improved significantly in only two countries (Finland and Denmark), remained stable in 14 and declined significantly in 11, with the biggest declines in Korea, Lithuania, New Zealand and Poland.

Among adults with third degree Education (such as university graduates), while literacy has declined in 13 countries and increased only in Finland, almost all countries and economies have seen declines in literacy among adults below secondary level. Singapore and the US had huge disparities in both literacy and numeracy.

“Thirty percent of Americans read at the level you’d expect a 10-year-old to read,” Andreas Schleicher, director of education and skills at the OECD, told me — referring to the number of people who scored in the US. At reading level 1 or below. It’s hard to imagine that every third person you meet on the street has trouble reading even simple things.

In some countries, the decline is partly explained by aging populations and immigration levels, but Schleicher says these factors alone are not entirely to blame. His own hypothesis comes as little surprise to Postman: This technology has changed the way many of us consume information from long, complex texts such as books and newspaper articles to short ones. social media Posts and video clips.

At the same time, social media has made it “more likely to read things that confirm your point of view than to engage with different points of view, and that’s what you should be getting at in the (OECD literacy) assessment.” “You need to separate fact from opinion, navigate ambiguity, manage complexity,” Schlecker explained.

The implications for politics and the quality of public debate are already evident. These have already been seen. In the year In 2007, writer Caleb Crain one Text What a possible post-literary culture might look like in New York magazine’s so-called “twilight of books.” In oral culture, clichés and stereotypes are celebrated, conflict and name-calling are remembered, and speakers are reluctant to correct themselves, because “past inadequacies are to be blamed only in literate culture.” He said. Does this sound familiar?

These trends are not inevitable or irreversible. Finland has demonstrated its ability to maintain a highly literate population with high-quality education and strong social norms, even in a tiktok world. England shows the difference that improved education can make, where literacy among 16-24 year olds is higher than it was a decade ago.

The question of whether AI can alleviate or exacerbate the problem is more difficult. Systems like ChatGPT perform well in many reading and writing tasks: they can analyze data and reduce it to summaries.

According to several studies, when deployed in the workplace, these tools can significantly increase the performance of low-skilled workers. in A studyResearchers have tracked the impact of AI tools on customer service agents who provide technical support through text chat boxes. An AI tool trained on the speech patterns of top performers gave agents real-time text suggestions on how to respond to customers. The study found that low-skilled workers were more productive and their communication styles were similar to those of high-skilled workers.

David Autor, an economics professor at MIT, has argued that AI tools will enable more workers to do the work. Highly skilled roles And help restore the “middle-skill and middle-class heart of the American labor market.”

But, according to Autor, to use a tool well to “develop” your skills, you need a good foundation to start with. Without this, Schleicher worries that people with poor reading skills will become “naïve consumers of pre-made content.”

In other words, if you don’t have strong skills of your own, it’s only a few short steps from being dependent on the machine, to finding yourself dependent on it, or subject to it.

sarah.oconnor@ft.com