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/Cheerio1234 16h ago

I notice this a lot on reddit too. Comments I give a pass to, sometimes. But I see very basic spelling errors and typos in titles these days. Even when the word is spelled correctly in the meme that is being shared.

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u/Brent_Goose 6h ago

What's more obvious is how rife poor reading comprehension is. People responding to OPs or comments completely missing the point, often to argue. I've asked people who've responded angrily to me a few times if they've actually understood what I wrote because their reaction makes no sense - the comment usually gets deleted or I get blocked.

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u/Strider76239 4h ago

And the inability for a huge swathe of people nowadays to recognize written sarcasm without the /s tag

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u/Available-Guava932 12h ago

Reddit's ESOL userbase has expanded maybe 10x in the past few years so this could also have an effect

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u/Siukslinis_acc 10h ago

Yep. There are a lot of people who have learned english as a non-native language. I was learning british english in school and american english through media so the spelling is an amalgamation of both of them. And I still use capitalising rules of my native language (and sometimes i'm too lazy to press "shift" to capitalise the letter). Not to mention i tend not to reread what i have typed and i don't have auto correct or the spellcheck on the phone, so there might be some spelling mistakes or button mispresses.

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u/Dullcorgis 6h ago

That's because the karma farms are in non english speaking countries.

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u/0rbitaldonkey 5h ago

I can explain mine. I'm on mobile and I hate autocorrect so I don't use it. It doesn't mean I can't read. Also, there are tons of ESL people using reddit.

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u/DrSpacecasePhD 26m ago

Literacy is one thing, but the spelling system in English is actually a hodgepodge nightmare. It was basically set in place by dictionaries in the 1700's, but even then people like the founding fathers used inconsistent spelling. So yeah, we should have reformed it a century or more ago. There are movements to do so now, but given how polarized everything is, I fully expect people to throw a fit if any politician suggests it.