Last week, a report in the Atlantic suggested that young adults at prestigious universities were struggling to make it through their course reading, after years of being assigned only excerpts or articles in their high school classes. The piece argued that reading a novel cover-to-cover is not only daunting for students but they may also fail to keep track of characters and plots. When it came to reasoning this shift, it cited changes in American school guidelines, which prioritised preparing students for tests rather than their overall enrichment, the myriad problems posed by the pandemic, and, unsurprisingly, the volume of distractions offered by social media and smartphones.
This story shocked many, but professors on social media concurred that while students have always shirked much of their assigned coursework – skim-reading books or cramming before an exam is hardly new – they had noticed this change. One author explained that a reader had approached their book in this way – reading chapters discretely and “out of order” – and was shocked to discover how much more sense it made when read chronologically.
Similarly, a tweet went viral after its author argued that it was fair to expect university students to read 100 pages of reading material each weekday received backlash. Many claimed this expectation was absurd, while others noted how warped our perception of free time has become when so much of it is sucked away by scrolling (even at a generously slow pace, 100 pages would only amount to roughly three hours of dedicated reading – a standard task for an adult in full-time education). This comes at a time when studies are finding that substantial portions of adult readers have given up the hobby entirely, with respondents citing a perceived lack of free time and the draw of social media as a reason for no longer reaching for books.
It would be easy to chalk this up as simply more evidence of how visual media and our addiction to social media is winning out over the written word. But it reflects a broader trend in the way younger generations approach information as a whole. Rather than read articles and analyses about world events in their entirety, young people increasingly get their news via short-form (and often misleading) clips on TikTok. Instead of taking the time to read a document for work at length – or even a full email – they are able to ask ChatGPT and other AI tools to summarise information. Whatever content is being consumed, this new approach to learning is focused on efficiency, prioritising concision above all else.
Within this fixation on efficiency is a false implication that we are saving time by disregarding extraneous detail and focusing only on what’s important. Social media has encouraged us to consume all information in the same way: looking for quick hits of high-octane content before our dwindling attention runs out. The obsession around this kind of “optimisation” isn’t entirely new, nor is it exclusive to Gen Z. It’s the same impulse that has led to so many people, across all generations, to read posts filled with cherry-picked information on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and then believe they understand the whole story.
It may be a more “efficient” approach to gathering information, but what do we lose in the process? Our confidence in the truth of what we read, for one thing: the summaries we get from online talking heads and AI, for example, are often inaccurate. TikTok news sources are typically more concerned with engagement than truth, while AI tools inconsistently pull the correct piece of information from the text it analyses. For example, the New York Times reported that Apple’s new, flashy AI programme summarised an article about which tuna varieties have the lowest mercury levels by recommending a species which has one of the highest.
We lose something else, too, when we disregard context: the bigger picture. Reading one good essay in a book with ten bad ones can wrongly lead someone to the conclusion about a writer’s strength. Hearing that one country has attacked another, without knowing the broader geopolitical context, leads to similarly skewed deductions and inferences. Our sense of the world can become warped and lopsided. In the name of efficiency, we are left with an approach to knowledge in which we consume vast quantities of informational chunks, but take in next to nothing of real value.
It may be the case that, in some instances, you don’t need to read a book from start to finish to understand its core message – the same may well be said of breaking news articles or overwritten emails from colleagues. But in only understanding the gist, rather than the greater narrative, we don’t just miss out on vital context: we miss the point.
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