[DavidWoof]

In the midst of the perennial "woe the kids today" rant, it's worth considering that this generation is the first generation in the 300,000 year history of homo sapiens sapiens to widely utilize reading and writing as a primary means of daily communication.

Ob XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1414/

[trhway]

Reading/writing part of the brain is a repurposed part which otherwise responsible for the faces, facial emotions, etc. recognition. Giving the already noticeable decrease of the in-person skills in the young "texting" generations we can speculate where it may go.

[ben_w]

They might all become hyper-nerds interested in D&D?

Sounds cool.

But then, my brother was already into D&D in the late 80s back when I was learning to read from the Commodore 64 user manual, so of course I'd think that :P

[ThrowawayR2]

Yes, they'll be able grasp the beauty of Les Misérables or The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire so long as it is fed to them as a stream of <280 character tweets, dohohoho.

Mr. Munroe is falling victim to the unfortunate phenomenon where people believe their popularity means that their opinions outside of their areas of expertise are well-informed. Whether they can spell better or not, minds weaned on little chunks of text laced with memes and emoji are going to struggle with chapters, let alone full books.

[ben_w]

Given the comic is an echo of conversations like this, I think perhaps that if he is guilty of that then so too are you and I and all others here.

Myself, I say that to equate the modern proclivity for tweets with a degradation of intellectual rigor is as fallacious as imagining that the concise elegance of Tacitus foretold a dulling of Roman wit. Or something like that.

Will they (kids these days) like the style of old classics? Of course not, just as few native english speakers alive today wish to speak (or write) in the style of Shakespeare — breaking a long thing up into tweet-sized chunks, that is simply style, no more relevant than choice of paragraph or sentence length.

But to dismiss a generation’s capacity for engagement with monumental works (be they Les Mis, The Decline and Fall etc., Shakespeare, Dickens, or any other) on the basis of their chosen tools of communication betrays not only an ignorance of how often communication has changed so far — when Edward Gibbon wrote the Decline and Fall, literacy in the UK was somehere around the 50% mark, but still the illiterates could watch plays and listen to tales — but also modern attention spans when we also have binge-watching of entire series of shows as a relatable get-to-know-you-better topic on dating apps.

[rsynnott]

I mean, I'm pretty sure that more people have read Sam Pepys in the last 15 years than in the previous few hundred, due to https://www.pepysdiary.com (it's a bot that tweets Pepys' Diary in real time; no longer available on Twitter due to API changes, but it's still on RSS, Mastodon and Bluesky. It's on its third run through the diaries).