The rise of technology has lead to a decline of traditional reading year over year. Phones, audiobooks and Video games have all played a factor in the decline of traditional chapter book reading. Now you can read on your phone, read the news on apps, listen to audiobooks, play video games, watch TV. There are now multiple different ways that you can read books, get up-to-date and relevant news, audiobooks and just anything in between that you want to do. XFM news spoke to Carmi Levy, a tech journalist, XFM news also spoke to Emma Duerden, who is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education and a supervisor for graduate students in the School and Applied Child Psychology program and the Counselling Psychology Program. Carmi Levy shares his insight into how technology has played a role in traditional reading’s decline and Emma Duerden speaks on how this can affect children.
Carmi Levy shares his insights into what has been causing the decline of traditional reading.
“I mean, if you look at sort of the metrics around reading, how many of us are reading for leisure, for example, those numbers have been in decline for decades. How often or how long do we spend on a particular piece of reading? What is our attention span? That is also going down and I think this is all being driven by technology, largely thanks to the commercialization of the Internet. It started in the 90s, kind of made everything electronic”.
“We shifted over from reading newspapers and books and magazines to reading off of a screen, first on regular desktop and laptop computers and more recently on smartphones and tablets. And then, of course, along came social media, which essentially turned reading into a feed exercise. We consume content that we pick out from feeds as we scroll through them, as a result, it’s almost rewired our brains so that we’re less likely to sit with one piece of reading for an extended period of time. And all of the metrics, both from publishing organizations, even looking at how long we spend reading articles on a website, those numbers have been in decline for years, and that shows no signs of reversing anytime soon”.
He also says the people are in “a rush to get to the end.” because withe social media and algorithms, we are always wanting to get to the next thing.
Emma Deurden shares her thoughts about what the rise of technology has done to today’s youth.
“particularly excessive use of these technologies, research has indicated that they can be associated with alterations in brain development as well as decreases in physical activity and can place individuals at risk for mental health issues as well as difficulties with attention and memory.”
“Not all screen time is created equal, but I think for the excessive use of social media with people self-reporting that they’re spending upwards of eight, ten hours a day on platforms like TikTok, for example, you know, time in the day is finite. So, if you’re spending the majority of your time being sedentary on a single platform or a couple of different platforms, then, yeah, you’re not going to have times for other things that are also really important for healthy development, like interacting with people in real life, time for exercise, and time for studying, time for working, right? So, I think that’s kind of the major concern that, you know, for these, like, for social media platforms and, like, the way that they’re designed that young people, they can be more likely to use them, use them excessively for, you know, more than two, three hours a day, and that’s been associated with mental health issues. So, yeah, so that’s, I think, really the concern.”
Anna Camilleri shares her thoughts as someone who enjoys reading.
“Yeah, definitely causes me to read less because there’s just so many other things that I can do and I can also read on my phone and which makes it easier to switch back and forth between things.”
Brown and Dickson bookstore on Elias street in London spoke to XFM.
“So those, the people who say that, I mean, I don’t mean to sound condescending, but those people generally don’t read or they love panics. So the argument that people are not reading anymore because of this technology or that technology, that’s been said about every emerging technology industry.”
You can find more about technology has lead to a decline of traditional reading on the Almost 107 podcast, available wherever you get your podcasts.
Jacob Weirmier/XFM News
