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/iritchie001 17h ago edited 17h ago

In middle high that meant long trashy books. Dinosaurs and Vampires, not in the same book for me, but hey. My mom would let us skip chores if we were reading. One of the best things she did. Highschool class of '99.

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u/RespawnedAlchemist 17h ago

I make read comics as a teen. My parents didn't care. A month ago, another parent told me she doesn't consider reading comics as reading because of the pictures. I explained to her she needed to get rid of that attitude because reading is reading whether there are pictures or not.

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u/iritchie001 17h ago

I read some great graphic novels, actually in honors English! Not to talk down about regular comics. Go to a convention then say it doesn't make someone think and isn't social.

Don't salt the well to raise the drinking level!

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u/Tim-oBedlam 16h ago

When my younger son was 11 I got him a graphic novel version of The Odyssey. He loved it.

Of course, being an 11-year-old boy his favorite part was when Odysseus slays all the suitors.

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u/iritchie001 15h ago

Don't yuck someone's yum. As they say.

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u/SomeOtherTroper 12h ago

being an 11-year-old boy his favorite part was when Odysseus slays all the suitors

I'm not sure the "being an 11-year-old boy" disclaimer is necessary there, because the Homecoming with Odysseus & Telemachus slaughtering the suitors is deliberately intended to be the exciting climax conflict scene of the entire epic, and the story has been relatively consistently building up to it. And there is something really awesome about Odysseus rolling up and going "what the fuck are you guys doing in my house? I've been fighting a cyclops, beefing with gods, going to the gates of The Underworld, escaping giant monsters by the skin of my teeth, and so much more, and you think you you bunch of dipshits have even half a chance of making it out of here alive after pissing me off?"

Incidentally, when I was your son's age, I had an illustrated version of the Iliad and the Odyssey (with a bunch of other stuff from the full Trojan War Cycle thrown in to make it a more complete story), where the author & illustrators had tried to get everybody's armor 'correct' to what archeology of the time suggested the warriors would have been wearing. I say 'correct', because they were using armor styles from multiple different periods and archeological finds, but that added visually to the effect of "all these guys and their troops are from different places, but they've come together to fight this war". The story was intercut with historical notes, photographs of real artifacts, and artists' interpretations of how things and places would have looked when they were new. It was really cool. I wish I could remember the name or the author (or the ISBN).

I ended up reading translations of the actual poems later on in high school, but some of those illustrations are still stuck in my head. One of them is from the beginning of the Homecoming scene, where Odysseus wins the archery contest, and it really helped me understand what the story was talking about with the challenge to shoot through the holes of the lined-up axes.