alt Hacker NewsWho cares about reading? Take a step back - humans don’t exist to read, reading is a tool, a means to an end. It’s to transmit information from one to another. If we can do that with more information-dense, less lossy methods, all the better.
Lamenting the end of reading is like lamenting the end of manual farm work: the goal isn’t to work in fields, it’s to harvest. We found ways to harvest more than ever for less effort and time than ever, let’s celebrate it.
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I'm trying really hard not to be judgemental about this...
Until we invent some sort of matrixesq knowledge transfer, the printed word is hands down the best technology we have to transfer knowledge from one human to another. If a student finishes their education, and is so uncomfortable with reading that they never read another book, we have failed them.
Images / Video can be useful to convey something which is hard to describe in words, but books give an author the ability to dive in much deeper depth on a subject than a video ever could.
What method do you suggest is more information-dense and less lossy?
What people are lamenting is that reading is being replaced with less information-dense, less accurate, less effective mechanisms, like Tiktok shorts and TV news.
If you can’t read, you can’t write, and if you can’t write, you can’t think.
Depending on your place in the class hierarchy, and the orientation of your moral compass, this may or may not be a good thing.
Culture is "a tool, a means to an end. It’s to transmit information from one to another"?
Half joke: If I had to bet, I would guess that reading will exist for as long as civilization does.
More seriously: I am less certain that it will exist in its current form (mass media, publishing houses, etc), but I am certain that textual information will be a standard means of communication and that people will read it. I do think that computer-assisted cognition (including computer-assisted reading) are eventualities at this point. This sort of thing fundamentally challenges the concept of reading: is your brain (by computer-assistance) scanning a hard drive reading? Even though it's alien to us now, I think the answer is yes.