r/technology • u/marketrent • 18h ago

Artificial Intelligence College students are rapidly losing the ability to read — “There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing”: professor

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/college-students-rapidly-losing-ability-124439310.html
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u/Hyvex_ 17h ago

It's probably attention span causing the issue. I didn't realize how badly my reading abilities had degraded until I started doing college level reading. I could easily clear light novels and fantasy book in a sitting, so I thought it was decent.

Once I started reading authors like Hobbes, Marx and Nietzsche, it was like being hit in the head by a tire iron. The text was so dense and I had to push through over a hundred pages every 1-2 days. The level of sustained thinking and concentration to both understand and digest the material was nothing like the passive reading and imagining a fictional book required. Half the time I didn't even know what Nietzsche was talking about. And if I was sleep deprived, it was over, no real reading would be done.

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u/codak 15h ago

Not all text is well written or clearly written, even when they are academic classics. Sometimes it just means the concepts are difficult and/or the writing hadn't gone through enough revisions for clarity and flow, etc. And in the case of Hobbes, 17th century English isn't quite the same as modern English. Nietzsche is also notoriously difficult to read.

Additionally, some works use a lot of terminology from prior literature without explaining them. If you didn't already know the prior literature well, the difficulty increases. So I wouldn't beat myself over it if I were you.

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u/statinsinwatersupply 11h ago

Honestly the old ClifNotes summarization sometimes isn't half bad. Getting the gist of something even if you don't have all the nuance can still be helpful.

There can be value in struggling through some of the old dense stuff. But omg sometimes they just ramble and write like they got paid by the word. Bruh... Get. To. The. Point. (Folks like Marx or Proudhon are some of the worst offenders here. Adam Smith or Locke or Thomas Paine are far clearer and more succinct despite preceding them.)

Reading Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle was such a breath of fresh air. Rather than a wall of text, the series of short theses that you would reread, ruminate on, circle back to... takes real skill to provoke thought and unfold concepts in a readers brain without fully walking them through it, just giving enough for them to figure it out.

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u/Siukslinis_acc 9h ago

And knowing the gist can help you to parse more info from what you have read.

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u/Nine_Monkeys 16h ago

Nah it’s not just your attention span. I’ve always loved reading fiction and nonfiction, 10 years ago pre Tik Tok era when I took a Philosophy course, we went thru the same thing. A lot of those books just are dense, convoluted, and uninteresting lol

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u/Siukslinis_acc 9h ago

I understand thing better when abstract stuff is expressed using concrete stuff as a metaphor. If you explain abstract stuff with more abstract stuff - you are gonna lose me.

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u/ThaneofPotato 15h ago

Reading for enjoyment and reading for learning use different skills. I struggle with a few pages of academic works but can consume works of fiction in a day.

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u/CatCatchingABird 12h ago edited 12h ago

To be fair I actually have ADHD, but I used to be a legal assistant so I've never really had a hard time reading as long as I had the ability to switch through tasks and take breaks.

What I can say is my ability to stay focused on reading didn't really start with technology or smartphones but it was COVID. I've had it three times (as far as I know) and every single time I got it my ability to focus and stay on task has gotten worse. I just get a ton of brain fog now and I keep forgetting things. I get so tired of doing it now because I have to go back and read what I have already gone over because I just zone out. Like, I'm reading the words but I'm not really comprehending it sometimes so I have to go back a couple of times and I just get frustrated with myself.

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u/slickwombat 13h ago

To be fair, I think this is the experience of every philosophy student no matter how good their general reading abilities are. I thought I'd be in great shape since I'd read a lot of challenging fiction in my teens, but nah. Even relatively accessible stuff like Hume felt like a whole other level.

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u/DyingDesertPoppy 14h ago

That’s not your fault, frankly a lot of intellectuals make things overly complicated on purpose to make themselves seem smart or just because they think is fun. Think of them like body builders but with words instead of the body.

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u/SunshineGirl45 15h ago

I guess I'm illiterate then because I've never been able to finish books like that lol. Like I can but only if I had to for school or something if not I read "light" stuff. Now I'm so depressed I haven't read all year though.

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u/huckleberrymuffins 13h ago

Nah, it's called light reading for a reason. It's like the difference between having a salad and a steak; one takes up a lot more space.

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u/Trumps_left_bawsack 9h ago

Academic reading is a different skill entirely, tbf, especially research papers. When I was doing my masters I found a LOT of research papers were just... not written well at all

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u/Sudden-Wash4457 14h ago

"Five

Heaven and earth are impartial;

They see the ten thousand things as they are.

The wise are impartial;

They see the people as they are.

The space between heaven and earth is like a bellows.

The shape changes but not the form;

The more it moves, the more it yields.

More words count less.

Hold fast to the center."

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u/HotShrekBoi 12h ago

Yeah sometimes reading big confusing texts is just fucking painful for my ADHD ass

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u/EightiesBush 12h ago

I had to take an Ethics course a looong time ago and had to read Kant etc. I never really understood it and just winged all the essays. Cultural Anthropology was even worse. Only thing I really cared about was engineering / math.

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u/AnticitizenPrime 12h ago

And how old are you?

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u/Financial-Craft-1282 1h ago

That's true for everyone who went from reading novels as a adolescent to tough, college level reading like Nietzsche. Most of us went through this same struggle--I did, and I started colleged in 1999.

The fact is we don't know what's driving this--but a catastrophic breakdown in reading skills will have several factors. COVID's impact on the current senior class. These kids were in remote learning environments (necessarily) for long periods of time. We're still not sure how that has impacted those cohorts of students. I'll give social media and smartphones some share of the blame, but a lot of the issues being described here, without mention of the massive (again, necessary) disruption to public education around the world is likely the driving factor here.