[mrr54]

>In these later letters, Wolf sounds like the kind of alarmist digital enthusiasts often deride. After all, they say, reading is not dying; it’s thriving. Wolf herself quotes a study from the University of California, San Diego, showing that an average user consumes 34 gigabytes of data per day—the equivalent of nearly 100,000 words.

How is that the equivalent of nearly 100,000 words? I appreciate people read a lot of text messages, articles, posts, etc. But they don't read 100,000 words worth of those things on average a day by any means. 34 gigabytes of data is also definitely not 100,000 words, more like 5,100,000,000 words or 17,000,000 pages.

Is it based on some 'a picture is worth 1,000 words' argument?

Reading is not thriving. It's hard to find anyone that actually reads books, even if you count reading on eReaders, even if you count listening to audiobooks! People consume a lot of data because they're watching Netflix, YouTube videos and Instagram (and downloading the same JavaScript over and over again on every website).

The whole article is just bizarre. It conflates so many unrelated things and doesn't seem to have any real thesis. People not reading books doesn't really have anything to do with people using phones except for the indisputable fact anyone here will attest to: going back to reading books after not doing so for a long time is really hard. You find your mind wandering, you find it hard to read linearly one line at a time without skipping around, etc. The kind of reading you do of a blog post is totally different from the kind of reading you do of a novel. That people read pamphlets in the 18th century has nothing at all to do with the decline in people reading books today.

I literally have students coming into tutorials that cannot write. They cannot write down answers on paper. They struggle to write (to write!) because they've been told they can just type and never have to write. It's absolutely bizarre, but that's what they're told by their school teachers, apparently. They also can't sit still and read something without getting out their phones. Students complain that their lecture notes aren't put online and they have to actually attend lectures and take notes themselves even though it's been proven again and again that handwriting notes in lectures is much better for information retention and synthesis of ideas than typing or god-forbid not taking notes at all.

Personally, I'm really unsure whether I would even let kids have access to the internet. I had a lot of great experiences online as a kid (I have very fond memories of RuneScape from ages 9-12), and I learnt computer programming online. At the same time, I think you have to be really careful to limit it. It shouldn't be the primary means of entertainment. Mobile devices are probably the main issue: avoid them and at least you can ration and supervise their access to the internet. It can be a tool for research, homework and learning (and fun and games) without the dangers. The mixed messages ("don't share your personal info online" + "put all your personal info online on Facebook and Instagram") are unhealthy and confusing to kids too, I think.

[burlesona]

I also “lol’d” at 34GB being equated to 100,000 words. A sibling poster suggests it was supposed to be 100k books, but I’m skeptical, it sounds to me like just a false correlation (the author saw somewhere that people read as many as 100k words per day and elsewhere that they consume 34GB of data and mistakenly connected those two dots).

[greggman3]

Not being able to write is common in Japan. Of course the average adult can write quite a bit but they'll forget how to write various kanji and most people blame it on the fact that they usually they no longer have to write them, they just type the sounds and the computer/smartphone turns it into the correct character.

This is especially funny in a Japanese class where the Chinese students end up correcting the teacher's kanji mistakes. Though, now that computers and smartphones are as common in China as Japan I suspect the same thing will happen in China.

Maybe it's the same thing as forgetting out to spell because we know the device will spell check and correct for us.

[tzs]

> How is that the equivalent of nearly 100,000 words?

It was probably meant to say 100,000 books. That would be 0.34 MB per book which is reasonable. For comparison, the first Harry Potter book as a text file is 0.4 MB.