We live in an era of fake news, conspiracy theories, distortions and disinformation, simplifications and outright lies, assiduously spread by our rulers to compromise society’s capacity for informed democratic decision-making. We need all the more to be able to critically interrogate what’s around us, and that comes with experience in engaging with the content and language of texts we read. Those who read very little are the ones vulnerable to manipulation by false and motivated WhatsApp forwards.
The scholar-authors conclude that reading skills and practices are “the foundation for full participation in the economic, political, communal and cultural life of contemporary society”, including “social, cultural and political engagement” as much as “personal liberation, emancipation and empowerment”. A healthy democratic society that requires “the informed consensus of a multi-stakeholder and multi-cultural society” also needs resilient readers, they argue.
I'd love to see the data that they have to backup this claim. I remember reading a while back that listening to an audiobook gets all the same mental benefits of reading a book, as long as you are reading above a 5th grade level (basically sounding out words).
Was that for reading for enjoyment or for information. In my experience I find folks who prefer written documentation over video explanations tend to figure out and perform things better. I also find those who mostly get their information from videos have a hard time understanding and doing due diligence on sources and thus tend to get emotional over things that are not entirely true or presented in a very slanted light. While you can rewind to double check something said before in a video I find few people, including myself (and I likely do do it more than most) will bother to rewind and do the double check. When reading its much easier to page back and check that item. Its also way easier to assess data from multiple sources and you can chekc particular parts of writings within minutes easily wereas finding and checking areas of videos where they all talked about the same thing is not so easily. Even scrolling around a forum or search for things is easier. Heck searching to get text is much more likely to quickly find you something than search video for a specific thing.
It was in reference to reading for enjoyment. There's definitely a huge benefit to having written documentation to search through for technical purposes for sure.
yeah and that applies to evaluating news articles as well which is pretty much what keeps one from avoiding being manipulated by fake news.
It's not hard to believe. The brain is wired for visual memory.
What about oral history?