Text is king

read on, queen

photo cred: my dad

The hot new theory online is that reading is kaput, and therefore civilization is too. The rise of hyper-addictive digital technologies has shattered our attention spans and extinguished our taste for text. Books are disappearing from our culture, and so are our capacities for complex and rational thought. We are careening toward a post-literate society, where myth, intuition, and emotion replace logic, evidence, and science. Nobody needs to bomb us back to the Stone Age; we have decided to walk there ourselves.

I am skeptical of this thesis. I used to study claims like these for a living, so I know that the mind is primed to believe narratives of decline. We have a much lower standard of evidence for “bad thing go up” than we do for “bad thing go down”.

Unsurprisingly, then, stories about the end of reading tend to leave out some inconvenient data points. For example, book sales were higher in 2025 than they were in 2019, and only a bit below their high point in the pandemic. Independent bookstores are booming, not busting; 422 new indie shops opened last year alone. Even Barnes and Noble is cool again.

The actual data on reading isn’t as apocalyptic as the headlines imply. Gallup surveys suggest that some mega-readers (11+ books per year) have become moderate readers (1-5 books per year), but they don’t find any other major trends over the past three decades:

Other surveys document similarly moderate declines. For instance, data from the National Endowment for the Arts finds a slight decrease in reading over the past decade:

And the American Time Use Survey shows a dip in reading time from 2003 to 2023:

Purple line = reading with children. Turquoise line = reading for personal interest. These averages include everybody, not just those who spent a non-zero amount of time reading. (source)

These are declines, no doubt. But if you look closely at the reading time data, you’ll notice that the dip between 2003 and 2011 is about twice the size of the dip between 2011 and 2023. In fact, the only meaningful changes happen in 2009 and 2015. I’d say we have two effects here: a larger internet effect and a smaller smartphone effect, neither of which is huge. If the data is right, the best anti-reading intervention is not a 5G-enabled iPhone circa 2023, but a broadband-enabled iMac circa 2009.

DO YOU BUY THE DIP?

Ultimately, the plausibility of the “death of reading” thesis depends on two judgment calls.

First, do these effects strike you as big or small? Apparently, lots of people see these numbers and perceive an emergency. But we should submit every aspiring crisis to this hypothetical: how would we describe the size of the effect if we were measuring a heartening trend instead instead of a concerning one?

Imagine that time-use graph measured cigarette-smoking instead of book-reading. Would you say that smoking “collapsed” between 2003 and 2023? If we had been spending a billion dollars a year on a big anti-smoking campaign that whole time, would we say it worked? Kind of, I’d say, but most of the time the line doesn’t budge. I wouldn’t be unfurling any “Mission Accomplished” banners, which is why I am not currently unfurling any “Mission Failed” banners either.¹

The second judgment call: do you expect these trends to continue, plateau, or even reverse? The obvious expectation is that technology will get more distracting every year. And the decline in reading seems to be greater among college students, so we should expect the numbers to continue ticking downward as older bookworms are replaced by younger phoneworms. Those are both reasonable predictions, but two facts make me a little more doubtful.

Fact #1: there are signs that the digital invasion of our attention is beginning to stall. We seem to have passed peak social media—time spent on the apps has started to slide. App developers are finding it harder and harder to squeeze more attention out of our eyeballs, and it turns out that having your eyeballs squeezed hurts, so people aren’t sticking around for it. The “draw people in” phase of the internet was unsurprisingly a lot more enticing than the “shake ‘em down” phase—what we now refer to, appropriately, as “enshittification”. The early internet felt like sipping an IPA with friends; the late internet feels like taking furtive shots of Southern Comfort to keep the shakes at bay. So it’s no wonder that, after paying $1000 for a new phone, people will then pay an additional $50 for a device that makes their phone less functional.

Fact #2: reading has already survived several major incursions, which suggests it’s more appealing than we thought. Radio, TV, dial-up, Wi-Fi, TikTok—none of it has been enough to snuff out the human desire to point our pupils at words on paper. Apparently books are what hyper-online people call “Lindy”: they’ve lasted a long time, so we should expect them to last even longer.

It is remarkable, even miraculous, that people who possess the most addictive devices ever invented will occasionally choose to turn those devices off and pick up a book instead. If I was a mad scientist hellbent on stopping people from reading, I’d probably invent something like the iPhone. And after I released my dastardly creation into the world, I’d end up like the Grinch on Christmas morning, dumfounded that my plan didn’t work: I gave them all the YouTube Shorts they could ever desire and they’re still...reading!!

WILL WORK 4 REELS

Perhaps there are frontiers of digital addiction we have yet to reach. Maybe one day we’ll all have Neuralinks that beam Instagram Reels directly into our primary visual cortex, and then reading will really be toast.

Maybe. But it has proven very difficult to artificially satisfy even the most basic human pleasures. Who wants a birthday cake made with aspartame? Who would rather have a tanning bed than a sunny day? Who prefers to watch bots play chess? You can view high-res images of the Mona Lisa anytime you want, and yet people will still pay to fly to Paris and shove through crowds just to get a glimpse of the real thing.

I think there is a deep truth here: human desires are complex and multidimensional, and this makes them both hard to quench and hard to hack. That tinge of discontent that haunts even the happiest people, that bottomless hunger for more even among plenty—those are evolutionary defense mechanisms. If we were easier to please, we wouldn’t have made it this far. We would have gorged ourselves to death as soon as we figured out how to cultivate sugarcane.

That’s why I doubt the core assumption of the “death of reading” hypothesis. The theory heavily implies that people who would once have been avid readers are now glassy-eyed doomscrollers because that is, in fact, what they always wanted to be. They never appreciated the life of the mind. They were just filling time with great works of literature until TikTok came along. The unspoken assumption is that most humans, other than a few rare intellectuals, have a hierarchy of needs that looks like this:

I don’t buy this. Everyone, even people without liberal arts degrees, knows the difference between the cheap pleasures and the deep pleasures. No one pats themselves on the back for spending an hour watching mukbang videos, no one touts their screentime like they’re setting a high score, and no one feels proud that their hand instinctively starts groping for their phone whenever there’s a lull in conversation.²

Finishing a great nonfiction book feels like heaving a barbell off your chest. Finishing a great novel feels like leaving an entire nation behind. There are no replacements for these feelings. Videos can titillate, podcasts can inform, but there’s only one way to get that feeling of your brain folds stretching and your soul expanding, and it is to drag your eyes across text.

GIMME THAT WHEAT

That’s actually where I agree with the worrywarts of the written word: all serious intellectual work happens on the page, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. If you want to contribute to the world of ideas, if you want to entertain and manipulate complex thoughts, you have to read and write.

According to one theory, that’s why writing originated: to pin facts in place. At first, those facts were things like “Hirin owes Mushin four bushels of wheat”, but once you realize that knowledge can be hardened and preserved by encoding it in little squiggles, you unlock a whole new realm of logic and reasoning.

A clay bulla with an inscription, one of the earliest precursors to writing. (source)

That’s why there’s no replacement for text, and there never will be. Thoughts that can survive being written into words are on average truer than thoughts that never leave the mind. You know how you can find a leak in a tire by squirting dish soap on it and then looking for where the bubbles form? Writing is like squirting dish soap on an idea: it makes the holes obvious.

That doesn’t mean every piece of prose is wonderful, just that it can be. And when it reaches those heights, it commands a power that nothing else can possess.

I didn’t always believe this. I was persuaded on this point recently when I met an audio editor named Julia Barton, who was writing a book about the history of radio. I thought that was funny—shouldn’t the history of radio be told as a podcast?

No, she said, because in the long run, books are all that matter. Podcasts, films, and TikToks are good at attracting ears and eyes, but in the realm of ideas, they punch below their weight. Thoughts only stick around when you print them out and bind them in cardboard.

I think Barton’s thesis is right. At the center of every long-lived movement, you will always find a book. Every major religion has its holy text, of course, but there is also no communism without the Communist Manifesto, no environmentalism without Silent Spring, no American revolution without Common Sense. This remains true even in our supposed post-literate meltdown—just look at Abundance, which inspired the creation of a Congressional caucus. That happened not because of Abundance the Podcast or Abundance the 7-Part YouTube Series, but because of Abundance the book.

A somewhat diminished readership can somewhat diminish the power of text in culture, but it’s a mistake to think that words only exercise influence over you when you behold those words firsthand. I’m reminded of Meryl Streep’s monologue in The Devil Wears Prada, when Anne Hathaway scoffs at two seemingly identical belts and Streep schools her:

...it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room.³

What’s true in the world of fashion is also true in the world of ideas. Being ignorant of the forces shaping society does not exempt you from their influence—it places you at their mercy. This is easy to miss. It may seem like ignorance is always overpowering knowledge, that the people who kick things down are triumphing over the people who build things up. That’s because kicking down is fast and loud, while building up is slow and quiet. But that is precisely why the builders ultimately prevail. The kickers get bored and wander off, while the builders return and start again.

THE “GOLDEN” AGE

I have one more gripe against the “death of literacy” hypothesis, and against Walter Ong, the Jesuit priest/English professor whose book Orality and Literacy provides the intellectual backbone for the argument.

Most of the differences between oral and literate cultures are actually differences between non-recorded and recorded cultures. And even if our culture has become slightly less literate, it has become far more recorded.

As Ong points out, in an oral culture, the only way for information to pass from one generation to another is for someone to remember and repeat it.⁴ This is bit like trying to maintain a music collection with nothing but a first-generation iPod: you can’t store that much, so you have to make tradeoffs. Oral traditions are chock full of repetition, archetypal characters, and intuitive ideas, because that’s what it takes to make something memorable. Precise facts, on the other hand, are like 10-gigabyte files—they’re going to get compressed, corrupted, or deleted.

Writing is one way of solving the storage problem, but it’s not the only way, and we use those other ways now more than ever. Humans took an estimated 2 trillion photos in 2025, and 20 million videos get uploaded to YouTube every day. No one knows how many spreadsheets, apps, or code files we make. Each one of these formats allows us to retain different kinds of information, and it causes us to think in a different register. What psychology is unlocked by Photoshop, iMovie, and Excel?

There is something unique about text, no doubt, and I’m sure a purely pictographic, videographic, or spreadsheet-graphic culture would be rather odd and probably dysfunctional. But having more methods of storage makes us better at transmitting knowledge, not worse, and they allow us to surpass the cognitive limits that so strongly shape oral culture.

Put another way: hearing a bard recite The Iliad around a campfire is nothing like streaming the song “Golden” on YouTube. That bard is going to add his own flourishes, he’s going to cut out the bits that might offend his audience, he’s probably going to misremember some stanzas, and no one will be able to fact-check him. In contrast, the billionth stream of “Golden” is exactly the same as the first. Even if people spend less time reading, it is impossible to return to a world where every fact that isn’t memorized is simply lost. I don’t believe we are nearly as close to a post-literate society as the critics think, but I also don’t believe that a post-literate society is going to bear much resemblance to a pre-literate society.

HAIL TO THE KING

I have text on my mind right now for two reasons.

The first is that I’m writing a book, and it’s almost done. So maybe everything I’ve said is just motivated reasoning: “‘Books are very important!’ says man with book”.⁵ But the deeper I get, the more I read the thoughts that other people have tamed and transmuted into a form that could be fed into the printing press and the inkjet printer, and the more I try to do the same, the more I’m convinced that there is a power here that will persist.

The second reason is Experimental History just turned four. This is usually the time of year when I try to wax wise on the state of the blogosphere and the internet in general. So here’s my short report: it’s boom times for text.

I know that what we used to call “social media” is now just television you watch on your phone. I know that people want to spend their leisure time watching strangers apply makeup, assemble salads, and repair dishwashers. I know they want to see this guy dancing in his dirty bathroom and they want to watch Mr. Beast bury himself alive. These are their preferences, and woe betide anyone who tries to show them anything else, especially—God forbid—the written word.

But I also know that humans have a hunger that no video can satisfy. Even in the midst of infinite addictive entertainment, some people still want to read. A lot of people, in fact. I serve at their pleasure, and I am happy to, because I think the world ultimately belongs to them. 5,000 years after Sumerians started scratching cuneiform into clay and 600 years after Gutenberg started pressing inky blocks onto paper, text is still king. Long may it reign.

P.S., SPEAKING OF EXPERIMENTAL HISTORY’S FOURTH BIRTHDAY:

Here are last year’s most-viewed posts:

1. The Decline of Deviance

2. Face It: You’re a Crazy Person

3. 28 Slightly Rude Notes on Writing

4. Bag of Words, Have Mercy on Us

5. New Paradigm for Psychology Just Dropped

And here are my favorite MYSTERY POSTS that went out to paid subscribers only:

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Thank you to everyone who makes Experimental History possible, including those who support the blog, and those who increase its power by yelling at it on the internet. Godspeed to all of you, and may your 2026 be too good for words.

1. By the way, here is the actual data on cigarette smoking, via the American Lung Association:

In case you’re wondering, the decline in smoking has not been offset by an increase in vaping. While adults vape a tiny bit more today than they did in 2019, the difference is very small:

source: National Center for Health Statistics via the CDC

2. It’s curious that the word “phubbing” (a combination of phone and snubbing) never caught on. Maybe that’s because it was coined by fiat: an advertising agency simply decided that’s what we should call it when someone ignores you and looks at their phone instead. If this word had bubbled up naturally from the crush of online discourse, maybe it would have gotten more buy-in, and maybe we’d be more sensitive to the phenomenon.

3. I know it might seem rich to quote a movie in a post that’s extolling text, but then Streep didn’t deliver her diatribe off the dome. Someone wrote it for her, and then she spoke it aloud. (And that script in turn was based on a novel.) It’s an obvious point, but when we’re decrying the death of literacy, it’s easy to forget that film is mainly a literate art form.

Improv comedy, in contrast, is a purely oral art form. And I can’t help but notice that film actors make millions and become world famous by speaking written words aloud, while improvisational actors never touch text at all and they mainly go into debt.

4. This isn’t completely true, of course—a parent can fashion a handaxe and hand it down to their child, thus transferring some handaxe-related knowledge. But lots of facts can’t be encoded in axes.

5. It comes out Spring 2027, so I’ll have more details then.