Will Your Child Be A Second-Class Citizen?

America has become increasingly stratified as wealth concentrates in fewer hands and the broad middle class struggles more. The top 10% in the U.S. control nearly 70% of the wealth in the country. The bottom 50% have less than 3% of the nation’s wealth.

This immense wealth allows a small fraction of America’s citizenry to control Congress through their unrestricted ability to donate to campaigns. Those who take the big money are, in a sense, bought. They will ensure legislation passes that protects the assets of the rich.

Now, a new divide is growing in America that could further stratify people into classes of haves and have-nots. 

“The idea that technology is altering our capacity not just to concentrate, but also to read and to reason is catching on. The conversation no one is ready for, though, is how this may be creating yet another form of inequality,” British journalist Mary Harrington writes in a column with the headline, “Thinking is Becoming a Luxury good.”

Harrington links the developing inequality between those who read books and those who don’t to good nutrition and ultra-processed foods.

“As ultra-processed snacks have grown more available and inventively addictive, developed societies have seen a gulf emerge between those with the social and economic resources to sustain a healthy lifestyle…” and those who consume foods that lead to obesity.

People with lower levels of education tend to pay less attention to what is healthy for their bodies and minds. They buy more junk food. They can’t afford the choices, quality, or cost of a more nutritious diet.

“Across the developed West, obesity has become strongly correlated with poverty. I fear that so, too, will be the tide of post-literacy,” she writes.

As we become less capable of reading long-form books in print form, our minds are becoming duller. After decades of rising IQ scores in developed nations, the trend has stopped.

Reading books “rewires our brains, increasing vocabulary, shifting brain activity toward the analytic left hemisphere, and honing our capacity for concentration, linear reasoning, and deep thought,” Harrington writes. But we’ve known for a long time now the damage the interest is doing to our attention span and our ability to retain what we read online.

In his 2012 book “The Shallows,” Nicholas Carr writes that to turn short-term memory into long-term memory, the human brain requires attentiveness. Attentiveness is fragmented on the internet.

Our constant searching, reading, and scanning of our digital devices is improving our ability to rapidly skim, but we can’t access the depths where greater meaning, understanding, and connection lie. These shallow reading habits are being ingrained in children and adults.

“Social media platforms are designed to be addictive, and the sheer volume of material incentivizes intense cognitive ‘bites’ of discourse calibrated for maximum compulsiveness over nuance or thoughtful reasoning,” Harrington writes.

There is evidence mounting that just as people of lower incomes have poorer diets, they will have more junk information from their heavy diet of internet skimming.

As literacy scholar Maryanne Wolf points out, “literacy and poverty have long been correlated. Now poor kids spend more time on screens each day than rich ones — in one 2019 study, about two hours more per day for U.S. tweens and teens whose families made less than $35,000 per year, compared with peers whose household incomes exceeded $100,000,” Harrington writes. 

“Research indicates that kids who are exposed to more than two hours a day of recreational screen time have worse working memory, processing speed, attention levels, language skills, and executive function than kids who are not,” she says.

Now, some may not even have to read much to gather the information they seek.

“Increasingly, the very act of reading scarcely seems necessary. Platforms such as TikTok and YouTube Shorts offer a bottomless supply of enthralling, short-form videos. These combine with visual memes, fake news, real news, clickbait, sometimes hostile misinformation, and, increasingly, a torrent of AI-generated slop content. The result is a media environment that seems like the cognitive equivalent of the junk food aisle and is every bit as difficult to resist as those colorful, unhealthy packages,” she writes.

Harrington sees the possibility of the divide between the educated and the internet addicted growing.

“Bluntly: Making healthy cognitive choices is hard. In a culture saturated with more accessible and engrossing forms of entertainment, long-form literacy may soon become the domain of elite subcultures,” she writes. That long-form literacy will belong to the upper classes, Harrington warns.

How do you fight back against this apparent destiny of our culture and society? Read books to your children. Get them in the habit of picking up a book. Encourage our schools to use printed textbooks more often.

Last year, some schools in Finland chose to take electronics out of the classroom and buy printed textbooks. Multiple studies have shown that what kids read in print they remember and understand better.  Kids are less restless and more focused in classes without digital devices present.

In America, more private, elite, and religious schools are turning to print book learning, Harrington writes.

“As new generations reach adulthood having never lived in a world without smartphones, we can expect the culture to stratify ever more starkly,” Harrington warns.  “On the one hand, a relatively small group of people will retain, and intentionally develop, the capacity for concentration and long-form reasoning. On the other hand, a larger general population will be effectively post-literate, with all the consequences this implies for cognitive clarity.”

The consequences? “An electorate that has lost the capacity for long-form thought will be more tribal, less rational, largely uninterested in facts or even matters of historical record, moved more by vibes than cogent argument, and open to fantastical ideas and bizarre conspiracy theories. If that sounds familiar, it may be a sign of how far down this path the West has already traveled,” she says.