Postliterate: Everyone Is Reading, and No One Reads at Length Anymore
The share of Americans who read a book or an article on a given day has fallen 40% in twenty years; the thing to watch is not a literacy crisis but postliteracy — abstract thought, schooling and political communication are exiting alongside long-form reading.
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We read more than ever, and long-form is what we can no longer finish
Rose separates a literacy crisis from postliteracy. A literacy crisis is a breakdown in the fundamentals — decoding words, following a short sentence. Postliteracy is something else: text stops being the primary channel for information, news, entertainment and cultural connection. The problem, she says, is not that people cannot read; it is that they read so many short fragments every day that the time once reserved for long, complex texts has been squeezed out. Retirees, college graduates, women — the groups that historically read the most — are seeing their reading volume collapse just the same.
— Rose HorowitchLinear argument is not innate; literacy is what handed it to us
In Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong records Soviet researchers testing Uzbek peasants: literate peasants could answer a syllogism about what color polar bears are, while illiterate ones refused to reason at all, on the grounds that ‘I have never been to the Arctic’. Rose notes that experiments of this kind have not always replicated since. But Ong's larger judgment stands: a literate culture prizes linear argument with evidence and counter-argument, and that mode of thinking is not naturally present in a purely oral society.
— Rose HorowitchReading rates fell for twenty years, and reasoning ability fell with them
The mechanism cognitive science offers is that the brain gets good at whatever you practice over time. The less you read, the less background knowledge you carry, and the lower your tolerance for long text — so reading comes to feel harder and more uncomfortable. Rose cites research showing that American adults' ability to solve logic puzzles, analyze patterns and reason through problems has declined over the past twenty years alongside reading rates. The brain is simply adapting to what we have stopped asking it to do.
— Rose HorowitchSchools are accelerating the exit of long-form reading with their own hands
On the education side, surveys of secondary school teachers show they assign between 0 and 4 books a year, and classrooms increasingly use short informational excerpts to prepare for standardized tests; 80% of elementary teachers say their students were issued a school tablet or Chromebook before kindergarten. The effect carries into higher education: professors have to teach students how to read, and how to recognize irony and metaphor, before they can teach the content. Schools are both responding to the trend and actively speeding up the exit of long-form reading.
— Rose HorowitchTrump will not be the last postliterate president
Rose calls Trump the first postliterate president: he speaks, and contradicts himself, as if no historical record existed, leans heavily on repetition and emotionally charged language, and introduces people with near-Homeric fixed labels like ‘Sleepy Joe’ and ‘Crooked Hillary’. Media theorists predicted such a figure would appear long ago — the algorithms of short video and social media reward expression that is simple, inflammatory and easy to remember. Which is why Trump will not be the last.
— Rose HorowitchThe brain is not broken; attention can still be trained back
Neuroscientists told Rose there is no permanent change or damage to the brain here; if you are willing, you can still practice long stretches of focus again. She offers a concrete data point: after the Dallas, Texas school district banned phones on campus, library checkouts ran 200,000 books higher than the year before the ban. She also notes that print books make it easier to reread and remember than most digital devices do, because readers hold a spatial sense of which page a thing was on.
— Rose HorowitchSocrates feared writing would destroy memory, and he was right
Against the objection that every new technology triggers a panic, Rose answers with Plato's Phaedrus: Socrates worried that writing would destroy memory and leave people ‘believing they know’ without truly internalizing anything. Her rereading is that later generations keep citing this example to prove the worry was misplaced — but looking back, Socrates and Plato were right. No one today can recite the Iliad or the Odyssey from memory. Literacy is still worth it, and new media bring real benefits; the point is to be clear about the trade.
— Rose HorowitchIn their own words · checked verbatim
he said most described reading for pleasure as an alien practice
Rose Horowitch4:12
we know that two decades ago, the average attention span on a screen was two and a half minutes. And five years ago, it was 47 seconds.
Rose Horowitch8:32
that wasn't their personal experience. And so they couldn't, they couldn't answer. They refused to try.
Rose Horowitch10:00
Donald Trump is the first postliterate president.
Rose Horowitch30:00
People now.Choose their politicians much more through dating criteria.
Rose Horowitch32:18
there's nothing that's permanently like changed or damaged in our brains at all.
Rose Horowitch42:24
Plato was right. Socrates was right
Rose Horowitch45:00
Figures
| Average attention span on a screen (twenty years ago) | 2.5 minutes | 8:32 |
| Average attention span on a screen (five years ago) | 47 seconds | 8:32 |
| Books assigned per year by secondary school teachers | 0-4 | 19:59 |
| Elementary teachers reporting students received school devices before kindergarten | 80% | 19:59 |
Glossary
- postliterate
- A media-theory term: a society still surrounded by text, but where long-form reading is no longer the primary vehicle for information and ideas.
- secondary orality
- Walter Ong's term for the reappearance of oral-culture traits through radio, television and the internet, on a foundation that is still literate.
- syllogism
- Deductive reasoning in which a conclusion follows necessarily from two premises, as in ‘all bears in the Arctic are white’.
- epithet
- An epic-style fixed label, such as ‘Sleepy Joe’, built for memorability and retransmission.
How to listen
Founders and product managers in content, education and political communication: this episode makes clear what you are substituting for long-form reading. Investors can use it to re-price attention scarcity.
The ads from 40:00–42:24 and the subscription pitch after 55:00 are skippable; everything else is worth hearing.