Some 2,000 years later, under very different circumstances, the darkness is gathering again. Americans, once members of a proudly literate society, read much less than they used to. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, which conducts the most comprehensive survey of the nation’s reading habits, fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38 percent read a novel or short story. A study analyzing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. (The study looked at people who had read a book, magazine, or newspaper; listened to an audiobook; or read an e-book.)

I mean, that excludes people who are reading text in electronic form other than e-books. Websites, various forms of text messaging, social media. My guess is that people most likely read considerably more text than they used to. They just may not be reading it in book or traditional mass-media form.

And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information.

...as the article body points out, somewhat at odds with the title.

Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis.

I mean, maybe. But that's a pretty different proposition than reading ending, and a lot of the numbers cited really aren't directly relevant to that claim, like the proportion that read newspapers.

Reading has come to seem extraneous even to some of the best-educated members of society. Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, told me she’d spoken with a student who was struggling to read a book written in Old English.

I mean...I can't read much Old English. And I'm pretty sure that if you go back 40 years or so, pre-mass-Internet-use, most of society would have a lot of trouble with even Middle English.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English

Fæder ūre þū þe eart on heofonum,
Sīe þīn nama ġehālgod.
Tōbecume þīn rīċe,

Ġeweorðe þīn willa, on
eorðan swā swā on
heofonum.

Ūrne dæġhwamlīċan hlāf sele
ūs tōdæġ,

And forġief ūs ūre gyltas, swā
swā wē forġiefaþ ūrum
gyltendum.

And ne ġelǣd þū ūs on
costnunge, ac ālīes ūs of
yfele.

Sōðlīċe.

It isn't the Internet doing that. It's the Norman occupation of Britain and subsequent language shifts.

The culprit: Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange.

I haven't read it, but I'm pretty sure that that's not written in Old English.

https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.182027/2015.182027.A-Clockwork-Orange_djvu.txt

So off we went our several ways, me belching arrrrgh on the cold coke I’d peeted. I had my cut-throat britva handy in case any of Billyboy’s droogs should be around near the flatblock waiting, or for that matter any of the other bandas or gruppas or shaikas that from time to time were at war with one. Where I lived was with my dadda and mum in the flats of Mumapal Flatblock i8a, between Kingsley Avenue and Wilsonsway I got to the big mam door with no trouble, though I did pass one young malchick sprawling and creeching and moanmg m the gutter, all cut about lovely , and saw in the lamplight also streaks of blood here and there like signatures, my brothers, of the night’s Allying.

Yeah. That's definitely not Old English.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clockwork_Orange_(novel)

The book is partially written in a Russian-influenced argot called "Nadsat"

Yeah.

The books that people do read are simpler than they used to be. New York Times best sellers today have sentences that are about one-third shorter than they were a century ago. Longer sentences aren’t inherently better. But their former ubiquity suggests an age when Americans had the inclination and ability to read serious works of literature.

Okay, but there's also been a shift that long predates the Internet towards shorter sentences. In general, spoken English uses shorter sentences than written English. Let me dig up a George Washington speech

those sentences would be long by even written English standards of, say, 1990.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/George_Washington%27s_Farewell_Address

While, then, every part of our country thus feels an immediate and particular interest in Union, all the parts combined cannot fail to find in the united mass of means and efforts greater strength, greater resource, proportionably greater security from external danger, a less frequent interruption of their peace by foreign nations; and, what is of inestimable value, they must derive from Union an exemption from those broils and wars between themselves, which so frequently afflict neighbouring countries not tied together by the same governments, which their own rivalships alone would be sufficient to produce, but which opposite foreign alliances, attachments, and intrigues would stimulate and embitter. Hence, likewise, they will avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments, which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican Liberty. In this sense it is, that your Union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty, and that the love of the one ought to endear to you the preservation of the other.

EDIT: Maybe the author's point is that the student thought that it was written in Old English, just because it was incomprehensible, and he was able to read it via ChatGPT without even learning which language he was reading? I guess that'd be kind of surprising, but...I'm not sure that that misunderstanding represents some sort of technology-induced downfall of civilization either. considers Honestly, if anything, I'd say that breaking down language barriers to that degree is probably a positive (though I suppose if part of the point of the work is to create linguistic barriers, you could say that it's defeating part of the point of the work). I mean, I read Journey to the West in an English translation rather than the original Chinese. I read Don Quixote in an English translation than the original Spanish. They were human translations rather than machine translations, but I don't think that anyone would hold those up as signs of the end of reading, either.