AILSA CHANG, HOST:
All right, it's time now for some cultural insights with Brittany Luse, the host of NPR's It's Been A Minute. The podcast unpack some of the biggest cultural happenings bubbling up right now and why these trends matter. So hi, Brittany.
BRITTANY LUSE, BYLINE: (Laughter) Hi, Ailsa. Thanks for having me.
CHANG: Oh, my God. Thanks for being with us. What trend are you bringing us today?
LUSE: Well, today, we're going to talk about something that's actually trending down. And I'm talking about reading.
CHANG: Reading as in reading books?
LUSE: You got it.
CHANG: It's going down. See, I totally suspected this.
LUSE: Yes, no, you were absolutely right. According to a Gallup survey from 2022, Americans are reading fewer books per year than ever before. And according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Time Use Survey, the time people spend reading has dropped steadily over the past 20 years too.
CHANG: I feel like this is tracking my own life. But anyway, keep going.
LUSE: (Laughter) I feel you. I feel you. And the thing is, people are noticing this and talking about it. I'm going to guess you read that popular article from The Atlantic a few months back about how college kids are struggling to read longer texts.
CHANG: Oh, my God, yes. And I remember this one professor who was saying that some of his students had trouble even concentrating on a sonnet.
LUSE: Yes, yes, yes, a very short poem. They were struggling with that. But people who aren't in college or don't have to read in the same way are thinking about this too. There's this super-viral post from January by X user Emma Weaver. And it set off a big online discussion about reading when she said this - quote, "I miss having a sharper brain. I don't know how to fix it. My attention span sucks. It's hard for me to read books. My memory is horrible, and it's hard to retain information."
CHANG: I mean, yes, I get it. For me, it's like a patience and time thing. Like, a book has to be really, really good now for me to want to sit with it for that long. because...
LUSE: I feel that.
CHANG: ...I mean, honestly, there is so much other content in this world. So now books are competing against all of that content.
LUSE: Oh, same. I love to read, but I feel like I've had to really work to be able to enjoy books like I used to. And I don't think it's unrelated that Oxford's 2024 word of the year was brain rot.
CHANG: (Laughter).
LUSE: I think a lot of us are feeling (laughter) like our brains are rotting.
CHANG: I mean, my brain is probably rotting too.
LUSE: (Laughter).
CHANG: So what did you find out about what is causing this overall decline in reading books?
LUSE: OK. Well, first, I talked to Elaine Castillo. She's the author of the book "How To Read Now." And she said she's actually got a problem with how we talk about this decline as an individual issue.
ELAINE CASTILLO: Massive corporations have essentially captured the capacities in us for reading.
LUSE: She's talking about social media companies here.
CASTILLO: Our attention, our capacity for critical thinking, imaginative thinking, all of which are things that are baked into our code, into our evolutionary selves, the desire to information forage - but that innate code in us has essentially been captured. Doom scrolling and the algorithms that go with it essentially put some of us in a kind of active addiction because it offers a kind of momentary dopamine hit or momentary pleasure, essentially for the enrichment of the wealthiest people in the world. I'm saying this - hopefully, it's coming across with compassion 'cause I'm also speaking about myself.
CHANG: I mean, she's also speaking about myself. Absolutely. If people are spending more time on social media, which exercises our muscles to scan and scroll really quickly...
LUSE: Right.
CHANG: ...I guess it makes sense that other more time-consuming activities like reading books would take a hit, right? But let me ask you this, Brittany. A lot of scrolling through social media is about reading. So talk about how, like, reading stuff posted on social media maybe hits the brain differently than reading books.
LUSE: I am so glad you are asking that question 'cause this actually came up in another conversation I had. I talked to Abdullah Shihipar about this. He's a research associate at the People, Place and Health Collective at Brown University. And he said that studies have shown that when people read on screens, their comprehension just isn't as good.
CHANG: I knew it.
LUSE: Right (laughter)?
CHANG: Yeah.
LUSE: Pretty much.
CHANG: I need everything printed out for me to really retain.
LUSE: I understand. I totally understand. But, you know, one hypothesis is that people are used to skimming text on screens. You know, think about how you might read an email that you get in your inbox or a social media post. Your eyes kind of...
CHANG: Totally.
LUSE: ...Glaze over the screen. So that's one reason why people might feel like they're not as good at retaining information if they're reading more on screens. But there is another emerging factor here.
ABDULLAH SHIHIPAR: I was looking up this study from Duke. And they actually gave people three tasks - reading tasks, writing tasks. They then presented them with reading comprehension questions later. They found that when they were using an AI tool to do the reading task - when they used AI, there was, like, a 12% decline in people's comprehension. It was even more dramatic with writing.
So that's what I worry about. When people get used to not writing their emails or using it to, like, summarize certain, like, large pieces of information, I worry that, like, we're entering a phase where we have even less comprehension - even in terms of, like, forget reading books, but just, like, not engaging with the written word at all.
LUSE: I also need to mention that 21% of U.S. adults are illiterate or functionally illiterate. So, you know, it's not always an issue of whether or not people want to read, but rather if they can at all.
CHANG: Right, totally. Well, you can hear more about the implications of that and more about how to get our reading groove back on in the full episode of It's Been A Minute. Brittany, thank you so much for bringing this to the show. This was super fascinating.
LUSE: Oh, thank you for having me.
CHANG: That was Brittany Luse. She's host of It's Been A Minute from NPR. And you can listen to It's Been A Minute every Monday, Wednesday and Friday wherever you get your podcasts. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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