This is my third, and longest, post in a series on the importance of (post 1) and the science behind reading (post 2) and what that means for any ‘service’ or ‘read it later’ app that comes after Pocket.
The goal of higher income is not just bigger piles of money. The goal of longer lives is not just extra time. The ultimate goal is to have the freedom to do what we want. Me, I love the circus, and playing computer games with my grandchildren, and zapping through TV channels. Culture and freedom, the goals of development, can be hard to measure, but guitars per capita is a good proxy. And boy, has that improved. With beautiful statistics like these, how can anyone say the world is getting worse? – Hans Rosling, ‘Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About The World – And Why Things Are Better Than You Think’
Compound interest
Let’s get philosophical for a moment. When we discovered written language, we discovered something akin to money. Like money, writing allows us to store a thing of value. Reading allows for unlocking that value. Value which would otherwise have vanished. Let’s call this valued thing ‘human cognition’. You pour your human cognition in writing, I read it later.
That’s quite a bit like money. The fish you trade for cheese has to be consumed or it’ll perish; but a gold coin can be saved. Likewise, the curse you utter needs an audience, or it’s pointless. But a clay tablet captures the insult for the ages. Human cognition can be stored through writing, and unlocked through reading, just like money stores the trade value of a thing.
And like money, writing & reading have institutions that help secure it, store it, propagate it, improve upon it. Universities, libraries, publishers. These institutions act as pillars that support a well-read society, just like financial institutions support economic stability and growth.
And like money, writing can be put to work. When someone’s idea is picked up by some other person, built upon, referred to, read and thought about, triggering more writing – that creates the equivalent of interest. Stored value is producing more stored value. Writing & reading beget more writing & reading.
Stability and growth
When money and interest accrue more and more to the top (as has been happening for years now), we call that ‘rising inequality’. Working conditions getting worse, the value of labor going to an ever-shrinking group of people, and that leading to higher crime rates etc. When GDP growth slows down, you read about it in the newspaper. Employment numbers are reported monthly.
Economic stability and growth matter. So we measure related indicators, and make adjustments where needed. Because when we lose money as a society, or organize markets in such a way that the rich get much richer while the poor get poorer, most of us want to counteract that new development.
Writing probably has similar crises as money – but we’re not paying as much attention to the relevant metrics, so it’s harder to prove, and to improve. More human cognition is stored in writing than ever before. But what matters is how that human cognition is produced, where it accrues, and who benefits.
Newspaper subscriptions as a leading indicator
Take newspaper articles. Reading the newspaper used to be a highly valued pastime for young and old. But remember Wolf’s research. These days we skim news articles on websites. We know how ‘content’ is produced these days: legion are the stories of newspapers and magazines and websites where journalism is under pressure, journalists are simply copying press releases, AI produces lists of book tips, and all with the main goal of getting your eyeballs in front of ads.
Nevertheless, that scribbling and slop (and also any high-quality writing being published online) is still wasted on most of its readers. Because they read it on their phones. Distracted by video ads in the article, not to mention notifications, screen brightness, and the basic furtiveness of the scroll. This is bad reading, remember. And then, any reflection, the interest, is limited to short form responses written in bursts, and shared on the same, literally glaring hardware and software, owned and distributed by the same people who own the news outlets, just to expose you to more ads.
Gross National Cognition
What do we learn from this? Human cognition is arguably our only source of economic improvement. (As all new growth comes from an idea someone somewhere had one time.) But the production of human cognition – by which I mean writing and reading, the literal meaning-building in our heads as a manufacturing process, just like a little factory – is actually hindered by what is now a core reading technology, the smartphone. Phones as a tool, produce subpar human cognition.
Less thoughts, of lower quality, are being produced and stored since we all switched to smartphones.
All this to say: reading is not just a precious pastime, and not just a personal productivity driver, but a necessity for economic growth and a free society. But reading on phones diminishes the interest rate of our thoughts. So if we’re thinking about read-it-later apps, it’s very important they actually help us to read more, and read better. And not on your phone too much.