GwenStarlight

Metroplex System

@GwenStarlight

Producing lesbian demons since 1993

  • She/her They/them

TMA, multiply neurodivergent, ancient by internet standards, poylam and happily married.

I was on Cohost from 11/04/2022 until its last day (10/01/2024)

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GwenStarlight
@GwenStarlight
NireBryce
@NireBryce
lcsrzl
@lcsrzl

a “marked decline in reading resilience”

For children who were raised with smartphones, by contrast, that foundation is missing. It is probably no coincidence that the iPhone itself, originally released in 2007, is approaching college age

lcsrzl
@lcsrzl

“we are all in the process of throwing [print] away for something we know is worse”

The effort to just cut to the chase and give us the information has actively destroyed the conditions for understanding and using that information in an intelligent way.

NireBryce
@NireBryce

how much of this is the computers and how much of this is the decline in education in general, especially k-12?

I keep meeting first year undergrads who don't know how to touch type in CS programs, or only recently learned it

nullpat
@nullpat

reminded me of this post here from a while ago

definitely feel like as much as smartphones and other screens may contribute the actual problem is so much deeper (I'd add that, just from my own experience, having a lot of structured down time—like an hour and a half on public transit each way, or a job staffing a front desk somewhere that's not very busy—is almost a prerequisite for me reading at all. and it seems like a lot of modern life is basically designed to deny people structured downtime as completely as possible)

I also recall reading that millennials and zoomers both use public libraries more than previous generations, but I guess the post-zoomer numbers wouldn't be in yet since they'd still be going—or not—with their parents, or at school

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in reply to @lcsrzl's post:

NoelBWrites
@NoelBWrites

oh my god I was literally talking about this with my friends yesterday.

The biggest difference I see between my younger classmates and the classmates that are older is that the youngest can't actually read. Like it goes beyond "the kids can't tease out nuanced complexities in the text." They will make up things not in the text, they don't understand the basic chronology of a linear narrative, they will change words for ones that start with the same letter and kind of make sense when reading out loud, they will answer a completely different question than the one asked in the assignments.

I was doubting whether I was being unfair and shaking my cane at these kids so they would get off my lawn, but it seems to be an actual trend.

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nys
@nys

on a post about declining literacy i almost just relinked the op article. :eggbug-nervous:

but it’s absolutely a very concerning trend that began with punitive based systems like No Child Left Behind but was exacerbated by standardized testing in general and horribly flawed systems like reading recovery (which actually makes kids worse readers as they grow up)

about 15% of adults in america are functionally illiterate - they can’t read street signs. we’ve known it was a growing issue even in the 00s and 10s but it seems like smartphones and the pandemic took and accelerated it considerably. even the way modern media is designed around 4000 word count max articles because the research shows that attention starts to wander after that. that number used to be around 10000 words.

suffice to say, this is not a “back in my day” situation but absolutely a crisis.

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NoelBWrites
@NoelBWrites

I read the APM story on the Reading Recovery strategies in 2019 and I could not believe teachers were literally teaching kids how to guess words instead of reading them

And it's absolutely what I'm seeing in my younger classmates. Reading out loud and skipping words, making up words that kind of make sense and start with the same letter as the one they skipped, etc.

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cyaneus
@cyaneus

Not to derail, but I'm glad it's not just me: articles are really getting shorter. Every time I finish an article lately I'm left feeling confused, like--where's the rest of it? I assumed for a while that nobody could afford to pay for long-form journalism anymore, but maybe it's more the case that fewer people can read it.

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nys
@nys

it also means less details which means more advertiser friendly and more articles published which means more eyes. i think those studies are used more to have an excuse to keep word count short.

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fcbsd
@fcbsd

This is scary, I know that their are kids who were functional literate leaving primary school, but three years into secondary and no longer literate - usually due to life, but the idea that school is failing kids in this way is awful...

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in reply to @lcsrzl's post:

Saone
@Saone

I really disagree that books are a perfected medium.

Novels often have to be broken in in order to open wide enough to comfortably read them, and well-used books fall apart (my poor physics textbook especially is barely hanging on). Print and paper quality can be enormously variable, it can be very difficult to re-find a meaningful passage, and many books don't have the features the author prizes whatsoever. It's also difficult to share notes on a work in a way that augments the original work.

That said, websites have many, many reading anti-patterns, our systems and tools lack ways to annotate, and even within formats that allow that, the ergonomics are quite bad. There's a variety of reasons the status quo it like this, but chief among them is probably money, "ownership," and copyright.

I finished my degree when digital textbooks were juuuuuust barely becoming a thing, but I distinctly remember limitations on how many words I was allowed to copy from a book, and that instantly turned me off ever using a textbook through a publisher's tools again.

More widely available, "open" books and tools would improve the situation, and you can get better accessibility through piracy, but without mainstream adoption and investment the situation will remain bad.

Sites like http://arxiv.org/ for papers have been a big leap forward for information availability, but there's still a lot of room for improvement for, ya know, reasons above.

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squidcrusher
@squidcrusher

I don't have to work with kids/teen or anything for my job, so I dont see it directly. However it is something I have kinda noticed indirectly. My gf and I go to our local library at least once a w week. It's a two block walk from the house and it helps make sure I get out to at least one place a week that isn't work or shopping lol

Anyways, when I was a teen (graduated 2013), all my friends and I would hang out at the library after school. Our library has a nice teen area with a couple computers and several tables with plenty of room to spread out and hang out. We mostly just used it as a hang out space, but I mean we would still grab books to read.
edit to add: most of my friends in HS had phones, but it wasn't very common in our area for kids to have their own smartphones yet until i was in college. I never had a smart phone until Pokemon Go came out (i wanted to be able to play with my friends) and honestly I am glad I waited that long.
Whenever we go to the library now, I almost never see anyone in the teen area. The library kinda asks that adults stay out of the teen area. There is a lot of manga and graphic novels in the teen section, so my gf and I will go in there only if we feel we won't be bothering someone. Except... we never have to worry about that because there are almost always 0 teens there no matter what time of day we go. :/
I know the library has decent teen events, like they have monthly DND and similar sorts of things, but teens don't seem drawn to the library like my friends and I were around then.
edit again (don't let me write comments before I fully wake up lol): I will say one thing I am happy to see if the amount of parents with very young (2nd grade or lower) kids playing and checking out books at the library! I hope this means it is something people are noticing and trying to change?

Another thing; Growing up I went to the same school K-8 and we would have library time. I can't remember how often, but our teacher would walk us over to the school library and let us loose. We had to have at least one book checked out.
When I got to high school all freshmen get showed the library once, but after that they are never giving you time during the day to visit that library. If you take the bus, you get dropped off with just enough time to eat breakfast in the cafeteria before the bell rings. The buses leave 5-10 minutes after school lets out. You didn't ever have time to go to that library unless you asked a teacher to let you go down there during a slow class. I honestly think I only borrowed a book that one time because it was just generally inconvenient.

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fizbin
@fizbin

It's a minor point, but this:

Reading on the screen sucks. It actively injures our eyes.

Is something that varies wildly from site to site depending on font and color choices.

You know where it's most true? On sites that do all three of:

  • serif font
  • light background and dark text
  • the dark text is not actually black, but some sort of gray that's trying to mimic an imagined feel of newsprint.

I would find the article's point a bit more convincing if the web design employed did not seem deliberately designed to cause the reader pain for the sake of some newsprint-esque aesthetic.

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lcsrzl
@lcsrzl

You're not wrong that readability, in some ways, can be improved with careful typography, colour, etc. All the typography in the world, however, won't save one from being distracted with notifications, ads, etc. much less from it being tied to a device that is made for interaction and so always affords clicking or touching, often away, from the text on which the reader means to focus.

Further, there is quite a bit of evidence (on-going and recent too: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/17/kids-reading-better-paper-vs-screen), that reading off a screen seems to be inferior to reading off of paper with regard to some specific aspects, like ability to recall, integrate events in the text, etc.

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locust-breakfast
@locust-breakfast

got annoyed when we got to the part of maryanne wolf's book "proust and the squid" that's about how the reading brain is changing "today" - when I was in undergrad back in ~2014. I think just last year I finally accepted I'd never finish that book and donated it. could be a good read for anyone interested in diving deeper on this

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locust-breakfast
@locust-breakfast

oh no I mean I was a spiteful undergrad who felt at the time like it was ignorant observation coming from someone who didn't understand the millennial relationship to screens and internet. this was not an accurate perception. also dr. wolf was teaching us the book herself and you're always going to be a little bit :/ at your own professors I think! at least I always was

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in reply to @NireBryce's post:

NoelBWrites
@NoelBWrites

yeah the first article specifically highlights K-12 education and how at some point the trendy way to teach kids how to read was, to put it delicately, dogshit. Like literally not being able to sound out words dogshit.

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