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Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

Phones/screens is one I'm not sure about. On the one hand, to use a mobile phone, and social media, and messaging apps, you have to read and write. I certainly spent a lot less time reading and writing messages to my friends in the 1980s than the typical kid does today. We just talked, in person or on an old-fashioned phone call.

On the other hand, it's shallow. Messages are short, and filled with shorthand and emoticons. There's no deep reading or expression of complicated ideas in written form.

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There is also quite a difference between being able to type out and read short messages to friends like "who wants to go to the park today" or read a menu and know if a sandwich has mustard on it or not and being able to have deeper inferential and evaluative understandings of written thoughts and ideas.

I think back to some college peers who even in some more basic classes could clearly read the words of the assigned writings, they couldn't then parse out the deeper meanings behind the assignments. They weren't illiterate, you could ask them to read a passage, and they'd be able to say all the words. You could ask them face value questions about the text, and they'd probably be able to answer most questions right. But any deeper analysis was just beyond them. So, when the professor would ask deeper questions, they'd say "I don't know where he's getting this, the book didn't talk about that at all".

Agree, but I'm not sure how much worse this is today?

I avoided English Lit in college but thinking back to High School I recognize the "I don't know where he's getting this" reaction. I just rarely engaged with the so-called "classic" stuff we had to read, and like you say I had no trouble reading the words but struggled with deeper meanings or even just getting past the archaic language. And this was in the early 1980s, no chance it was influenced by social media or mobile phones or AI. My parents probably blamed television.

At least we now have AI, where a student could (if motivated) ask questions about the meaning of a passage and get back a synthesis of what other people have written about it. Back then I used Cliffs Notes to do that.

There's a difference between reading and writing, and reading and writing well. I would expect the tests to expect higher proficiency than what is expected in your usual text messages.

The quality of most text msgs is higher than what passes for “quality literature” in many lit classrooms.

Texting is unironically a better use of time than reading infinite jest, or gravities rainbow, etc.

While you can certainly argue that some texts have more substance to them than these literary works, you cannot deny that most texts have worse prose than the books.

Hum... "R U OK" is sooo much better than

... “How do you feel, Jake?” “Fine, it doesn’t hurt much.” “Are you all right?” ...

(Hemmingway)

> The quality of most text msgs is higher than what passes for “quality literature” in many lit classrooms.

First: Your HS kids hang out with a different crowd than my HS kids :-)

Second: This is about reading ability (comprehension, etc), not literature. Whether the quality of a text message is superior/inferior to whatever they use in literature classes is irrelevant.

Disturbing % of people just consume tiktok style video and that's it.

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