If you aren’t feeling the itch yet, you will soon.

It could come by the end of this sentence or, on a good day, the fifth paragraph. But before long, a little voice in your head will whisper, “Click away for just a second” — just long enough to take a quick glance at your email or Instagram feed or group chat or 401(k) or chatbot’s answer to “how to tell if a mole is cancerous” or Amazon results for “joint-smoking garden gnomes.”

At least, this will happen if you’re anything like myself. And I am not alone.

Americans still consume plenty of text. Social media platforms teem with words — even video-based apps like TikTok are replete with captions and comments. And on average, we spend more than two hours scrolling through such platforms each day.

But not all reading is created equal. The mind can skim over the surface of a sentence and swiftly decode its literal meaning. But deep reading — sustained engagement with a longform text — is a distinct endeavor. As neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf explains, when you give your complete attention to a stimulating book or longform article, you activate a wide array of the brain’s linguistic and cognitive capacities. In this contemplative state, the reader rapidly draws connections between the text and their background knowledge, generating original thoughts in the process.

And this vital form of reading is in sharp decline. In 2021, American adults read fewer books on average than in any year on record, according to Gallup. Among young Americans, the dwindling of deep reading is especially stark. In 1984, some 35 percent of 13-year-olds said they read for fun “almost every day,” according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). By 2012, that figure was 27 percent. By 2023, it had fallen to 14 percent. Similar declines have transpired among the nation’s 9-year-olds and late adolescents. Meanwhile, daily screen time among all age groups is surging to record highs.

Even among the rising generations’ academic elite, reading books is an increasingly niche hobby. According to a recent report from The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch, many students at America’s most selective colleges now lack the capacity (or at least, the wherewithal) to read a book cover-to-cover.

In the view of some analysts, these trends don’t just threaten to curtail bookworms’ literary lives or stunt young Americans’ intellectual development. Rather, digital media’s displacement of books is propelling our species back to an ancient mode of cognition and communication: After a brief dalliance with literacy, humanity is returning to its oral roots.

According to such varied commentators as media theorist Andrey Mir, Bloomberg reporter Joe Weisenthal, historian Adam Garfinkle, and culture writer Katherine Dee, the digital age’s modes of thought and discourse increasingly resemble those of pre-literate oral cultures. In making this claim, these writers draw heavily on the work of Walter Ong, a philosopher who developed a deeply influential — but somewhat controversial — theory of how the oral and literate minds diverge.

For Mir and Garfinkle, America’s reversion to “orality” underlies much of today’s political dysfunction. In their telling, print media laid the foundations for liberal democracy. Now, as deep reading declines, the electorate’s commitment to pluralism, objectivity, universalism, individual rights, and the rule of law is swiftly receding.

The analogies between ancient oral cultures, as described by Ong, and today’s digital one are striking. And it’s reasonable to fear that scrolling TikTok doesn’t prepare a voter for rational self-government as well as reading the New York Times does.

This said, writers are liable to overestimate the social harms of our own cultural marginalization. And I suspect that Mir and Garfinkle are doing precisely that, when they blame the decay of American liberalism on the erosion of “deep literacy.”

The human mind before literacy

For roughly 98 percent of our species’ history, people could only communicate through the spoken word — and this constraint fundamentally shaped human thought and expression.

In his 1982 book Orality and Literacy, Ong detailed the characteristic features of communication and cognition in oral societies. Ong noted that, in a world of “orality,” information must be verbally repeated to survive: If spoken discourse doesn’t keep the timing of the harvest in a society’s working memory, farmers can’t fall back on an almanac or calendar. Therefore, in an oral culture, all important ideas must be expressed in a manner that is both memorable and easy to recite.

This entailed, among other things, the heavy use of repetition, formulaic lines, mnemonic devices and epithets. For example, in his oral epic, The Iliad, the Greek poet Homer persistently refers to Achilles as “swift-footed Achilles” — a phrase that helps the listener more easily recall both the character’s name and his defining trait.

Oral cultures’ reliance on memory also limited their capacity to generate complex, logical arguments. The complicated sentences typically found in a philosophical treatise, legal brief, or Vox article — with their prepositional phrases sandwiched between em-dashes — could not plausibly perpetuate themselves in the absence of written........

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