Texting makes us stupid
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This article by Niall Ferguson, "Texting Makes U Stupid" skipped my notice when it first appeared in Daily Beast (9/11/11). I would have missed it again this time around had it not been called to my attention by Harvard's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. Anyway, it's still a hot button issue, so better late than never.
Abstract
The good news is that today’s teenagers are avid readers and prolific writers. The bad news is that what they are reading and writing are text messages.
According to a survey carried out last year by Nielsen, Americans between the ages of 13 and 17 send and receive an average of 3,339 texts per month. Teenage girls send and receive more than 4,000.
It’s an unmissable trend. Even if you don’t have teenage kids, you’ll see other people’s offspring slouching around, eyes averted, tapping away, oblivious to their surroundings. Take a group of teenagers to see the seven wonders of the world. They’ll be texting all the way. Show a teenager Botticelli’s Adoration of the Magi. You might get a cursory glance before a buzz signals the arrival of the latest SMS. Seconds before the earth is hit by a gigantic asteroid or engulfed by a super tsunami, millions of lithe young fingers will be typing the human race’s last inane words to itself:
C u later NOT :(
Now, before I am accused of throwing stones in a glass house, let me confess. I probably send about 50 emails a day, and I receive what seem like 200. But there’s a difference. I also read books. It’s a quaint old habit I picked up as a kid, in the days before cellphones began nesting, cuckoolike, in the palms of the young.
Half of today’s teenagers don’t read books—except when they’re made to. According to the most recent survey by the National Endowment for the Arts, the proportion of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 who read a book not required at school or at work is now 50.7 percent, the lowest for any adult age group younger than 75, and down from 59 percent 20 years ago.
Back in 2004, when the NEA last looked at younger readers’ habits, it was already the case that fewer than one in three 13-year-olds read for pleasure every day. Especially terrifying to me as a professor is the fact that two thirds of college freshmen read for pleasure for less than an hour per week. A third of seniors don’t read for pleasure at all.
Why does this matter? For two reasons. First, we are falling behind more-literate societies. According to the results of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s most recent Program for International Student Assessment, the gap in reading ability between the 15-year-olds in the Shanghai district of China and those in the United States is now as big as the gap between the U.S. and Serbia or Chile.
But the more important reason is that children who don’t read are cut off from the civilization of their ancestors.
So take a look at your bookshelves. Do you have all – better make that any – of the books on the Columbia University undergraduate core curriculum? It’s not perfect, but it’s as good a list of the canon of Western civilization as I know of. Let’s take the 11 books on the syllabus for the spring 2012 semester: (1) Virgil’s Aeneid; (2) Ovid’s Metamorphoses; (3) Saint Augustine’s Confessions; (4) Dante’s The Divine Comedy; (5) Montaigne’s Essays; (6) Shakespeare’s King Lear; (7) Cervantes’s Don Quixote; (8) Goethe’s Faust; (9) Austen’s Pride and Prejudice; (10) Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment; (11) Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.
Step one: Order the ones you haven’t got today. (And get War and Peace, Great Expectations, and Moby-Dick while you’re at it.)
Step two: When vacation time comes around, tell the teenagers in your life you are taking them to a party. Or to camp. They won’t resist.
Step three: Drive to a remote rural location where there is no cell-phone reception whatsoever.
Step four: Reveal that this is in fact a reading party and that for the next two weeks reading is all you are proposing to do—apart from eating, sleeping, and talking about the books.
Welcome to Book Camp, kids.
It's not just texting, folks, and it's getting worse and worse by the day. Without book reading, will we evolve into a different kind of (un)knowing?
Selected readings
- Niall Ferguson, "Without Books We Will Be Barbarians”, The Free Press (10/10/25)
- "Literacy: peasants and philosophers" (10/10/25)
[h.t. John Rohsenow]
AntC said,
April 29, 2026 @ 9:58 pm
will we evolve into a different kind of (un)knowing?
I think that's already happened. And my chief evidence is somebody who's 80 in a few weeks. Although it's his unknowing of Languages (Liberia, English, covfefe, LLog anon) and Culture (Persia/Mesopotamia) that's more concerning.
Jonathan Smith said,
April 29, 2026 @ 10:42 pm
The author speaks of "quaint", well, Sweet Jesus. Turns out texting didn't make u stupid, at all. U were actually a superstar, building language creatively from virtual scratch and all. Now it's 2026, and people who should know better r trying to make u believe it's totally fine & great 2 generate zombie texts from 5 word prompts and have others i.e. u use ur time & energy 2 engage with them seriously. That is, maybe more than anything (many other things), SO DAMN RUDE.
Jonathan Smith said,
April 29, 2026 @ 10:51 pm
the Chinese expression "你來我往" just occurred to me and might be interpreted as encapsulating what communication is supposed to be about: mutual and symmetrical investment/engagement.
katarina said,
April 30, 2026 @ 2:35 am
I would email my college-age grand-kids. They never responded.
I told my daughter. She said, "Didn't you know? They don't email anymore.
They just text." I texted and they responded.
Rick Rubenstein said,
April 30, 2026 @ 5:49 am
Pity you only reposted a 15-year-old rant about how young people are (obviously) getting dumber and stubbornly refuse to study the things which their elders deem important. You should have gone back further and included the different-but-exactly-the-same takes from 30 years ago, 60 years ago ("All kids read these days is comic books!), 100 years ago, 2000 years ago… It's honestly amazing that we've managed to stay afloat when every generation is less well-educated about the important things (old books by white people, evidently) than the previous one.
Michael Vnuk said,
April 30, 2026 @ 7:27 am
It seemed odd that the abstract went on for over 12 paragraphs, so I thought I would check the original.
The first two links provided lead to a 'Daily Beast' 404 page with the note: 'This page is so lost, even our intrepid reporters can't find it…'
The third link, to the Weatherhead Centre, has the entire article as quoted above, and titles it 'Abstract'. Strange!
Roscoe said,
April 30, 2026 @ 7:51 am
Those aren’t “the 11 books on the syllabus for the spring 2012 semester.” They’re the 11 books on the syllabus for the spring 2012 semester of Literature Humanities (“Lit Hum”), which is just one of several courses making up Columbia’s undergraduate Core Curriculum.
Incidentally, the Atlantic’s 2024 article about “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” opens with a lament by a Columbia professor that his Lit Hum students no longer have the inclination or attention span to read those same books in their entirety:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/
This apparently happened “over the past decade,” which suggests that things were hunky-dory when Ferguson’s article was published.
Daniel Barkalow said,
April 30, 2026 @ 8:26 am
When I took a literature class in college, To the Lighthouse was on the curriculum, but we didn't end up getting there. Having read it in high school, I considered writing an essay about the symbolism in not actually getting around to reading To the Lighthouse like you'd planned, but I'd already caused enough trouble in that class with my essay on the symbolism of most people not getting through The Heart of Darkness.
Victor Mair said,
April 30, 2026 @ 10:13 am
Until about twenty years ago, my family had a vibrant, vital email list, which we called eMair. But then my sister announced that thenceforth we should switch to Facebook for communications. I did not follow them, and kept the eMair list going till today, a rump remnant of what it used to be.
The Facebook group even use that platform for messaging and many other online functions.
This is in line with what katarina experienced in her family.
David Marjanović said,
April 30, 2026 @ 10:40 am
Really strange to imply on a blog that only books can be read.
And so…
The Latin teachers have a really strong lobby in Austria, so we translated a chunk of the Aeneid and I think a smaller one of the Metamorphoses as well as a few small ones of the Confessions. We even did the traditionalist thing of learning the most famous passage of the Aeneid by heart! But reading the whole of any of these three, even in translation? Unthinkable.
Apart from a few short quotes and a lot of references to it, I've never read the Divine Comedy… except… the Disney-franchise version, which I wholeheartedly and unironically recommend. Call it a graphic novel if you have to.
No Essays, I think, but we were taught about them.
No King Lear.
No Don Quixote, but I think we were taught a summary.
We read most of Faust in school.
No Pride, no Prejudice. No Crime, no Punishment.
I haven't even heard of To the Lighthouse.
Victor Mair said,
April 30, 2026 @ 11:37 am
I'll never forget reading through the whole of Don Quixote during study hall when I was a sophomore in high school. I probably should have been preparing for my regular classes, but once I started DQ, I couldn't put it down.
Buzz70 said,
April 30, 2026 @ 11:25 am
Maybe it's just me, but I think reading Niall Ferguson makes you stupid. Ranting about how "the kids these days don't have no culture and learning" is the lowest hating fruit of old codgers. And for the record I'm 69 and have 7 of the 11 books he names on my shelves plus all three of the extras. I admit that I bounced hard off The Idiot when I was younger and have never had any desire to read Dostoevsky again. I never finished War and Peace since I realized half way through that I disliked every single character and found Tolstoy's philosophical musing banal.
NSBK said,
April 30, 2026 @ 11:41 am
As a millenial, I'm taken aback by how little the GenZ and GenAlpha know of classic internet memes, and can't help but lament how far we've fallen from that golden age where we all knew how to navigate programs on desktop computers.
Also that's sacrasm, if it wasn't clear.
Has the author of that so-called abstract considered that there actually might come a time where the works they have listed may not be as relevant anymore, compared to more recent works? They even qualify with "of Western civilization" and "as I know of".
If we want to be in tune with the actually-alive-now civilization of the world, maybe books are part of that, but why not moveis — like KPop Demon Hunters? And that's not sarcasm, I really mean it. There's surely some reason that much of the (internet-connected) world resonated with that movie. There's sure as heck symbolism and other "literary" concepts going on there. Dissecting _why_ that movie and not others took off is surely a better source of introspection and cultural awareness than stories that have existed for thousands of years. And before you tell me that
NSBK said,
April 30, 2026 @ 11:44 am
…and before you tell me that they survived that long because they were such good stories, just bear in mind that movies just haven't had that long to prove themselves yet. Surely some small number of them will persist that long in some way. Which ones? That's for the next 25 generations to determine.
And each one of those generations will think the end is nigh because the kids these days aren't experiencing things the way I did back when I was their age dammit.
Jonathan Lundell said,
April 30, 2026 @ 12:32 pm
Sounds like a reading list calculated to put a non-reading teen off reading for decades.
Chas Belov said,
April 30, 2026 @ 2:27 pm
My first reaction to that list of books was "¿Where is 'The Story of the Stone'?" although, to be fair, it runs about 5,000 pages.
Karl Weber said,
April 30, 2026 @ 3:31 pm
In addition to the other observations about the silliness of Ferguson's rant, it's also interesting that he cites a reading list from Columbia University to represent the best of Western civilization. Didn't he get the memo laying out the official right-wing position that the Ivy League universities are among the forces deliberately destroying Western civilization?
Barbara Phillips Long said,
April 30, 2026 @ 8:47 pm
There are a lot of books in English that I find more interesting than the titles considered part of the Western canon. Encouraging students to find books that interest them is more important to me than assigning readings. Among the books listed in the "abstract," I have and have read the Shakespeare and the Austen. I find it interesting that Austen's work has spawned a lot of variations — Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and also Pride and Prejudice and and Sea Monsters, among many others — none of which particularly interest me.
With Shakespeare, I find that watching the play on stage is much more rewarding than reading the play, often because stage business illuminates the text in ways I did not imagine when reading. I am not enthusiastic about teaching Shakespeare in high school without showing a movie or a stage production to the students. I think movies are a natural outgrowth of the theater and should be taken seriously, as some commenters have noted.
The biggest threat to Western civilization, in my opinion, is misinformation and disinformation. So I read a lot of news from news sites, most of them connected to print newspapers or television and radio news programs. And reading there, mostly on my phone, is a trial. Paragraphs slide off the page to be replaced by ads. Or halfway through a paragraph, an ad will cover the whole screen and I have to figure out how to close it and get back to the article. I have to "multitask" to read, even though I am not trying to do two things at once. It's very frustrating.
As a former writer and editor at rural newspapers, I understand the need for advertising revenue. But I am not sympathetic to that need when it destroys the reading experience. To me, that's a more urgent concern than texting, because I think it discourages people from reading the complete article and taking in the nuances of information that are presented deeper in the story in the follow-up quotes, statistics, and background.
The United States needs well-informed voters who can parse news stories and avoid misinformation and disinformation. Many of these readers can't afford to subscribe to a lot of news sites in order to minimize advertising interruptions. Making news reading difficult in order to placate advertisers is probably eroding reading comprehension skills. I haven't seen any popular articles about this problem.
Philip Taylor said,
May 1, 2026 @ 1:49 am
At the age of 79, I read a very great deal (there are currently four stacks of books, each about a foot high, and bookcases or bookshelves in almost every room in the house, but I have not read any of the "11 books on the syllabus for the spring 2012 semester: (1) Virgil’s Aeneid; (2) Ovid’s Metamorphoses; (3) Saint Augustine’s Confessions; (4) Dante’s The Divine Comedy; (5) Montaigne’s Essays; (6) Shakespeare’s King Lear; (7) Cervantes’s Don Quixote; (8) Goethe’s Faust; (9) Austen’s Pride and Prejudice; (10) Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment; (11) Woolf’s To the Lighthouse". I own copies of Virgil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but don't think I've ever read them, I prefer Dickens to Shakespeare, and that's about it. But I doubt whether I have sent more than five or so text message in my entire life.
ajay said,
May 1, 2026 @ 4:02 am
The 13-17-year-old texters this article is about are now between 28 and 33 years old (not far off the age Ferguson was when he wrote this piece).
And I would be amazed if anyone, even in the US, is sending hundreds of texts a day any more. I still receive texts, but I've just looked back at the last two months of texts I received and exactly two of them were sent by humans (the rest are all "Hi! Your order has arrived and we'll deliver it today!" sort of thing).
And being stuck in a remote cabin with Niall Ferguson (an economic historian, let's remember, without any particular expertise in English literature) who is proposing to spend the next two weeks discussing "To The Lighthouse" with you sounds like the setup to the sort of film that ends with one of the cast, bloodied and traumatised, still clutching her improvised spear, staggering out of the woods to be met by aghast state troopers.
VMartin said,
May 1, 2026 @ 10:42 am
Exactly. It reminds me of my favorite Paul Leautaud. As he got older, he wrote that he only read the same 10 books. A reader asked him which ones they were. Leautaud replied: what's wrong with you, sir, we all have our own, find yours.
David Marjanović said,
May 1, 2026 @ 11:40 am
This is the year 76 After Present. What are you still doing on the internet without an adblocker!?!
It eats up a lot of bandwidth, too! In this age of data centers, think of the electricity!
Barbara Phillips Long said,
May 1, 2026 @ 12:40 pm
@David Marjanović —
For the last decades of my working life, advertising paid my salary. As ad revenue at newspapers cratered, coworkers and acquaintances were laid off. People whose work I admired no longer were employed. Then I was laid off.
I can't afford to subscribe to all the sites I read. The paltry advertising revenue that some places earn from my visits there are all I can do to support their staffing. That the ads may drive me away as a reader is not a happy thought. I may have to resort to an ad blocker, but for me, using one is a more complicated decision than it is for others.
Philip Taylor said,
May 1, 2026 @ 1:25 pm
Is it not the case, Barbara, that those of us that do choose to user an ad-blocker (formerly uBlock Origin, now whatever is integrated into Brave) are also those who wouldn't dream of clicking on an unsolicited advertisement in a million years ? And therefore their use of an ad-blocker is no more depriving the advertiser(s) of click-throughs than their behaviour would be in the absence of their use of an ad-blocker.
Barbara Phillips Long said,
May 1, 2026 @ 2:44 pm
@Philip Taylor —
My understanding of ad revenue is dated, so I would welcome more knowledgeable input. When I was reading about it, some advertising payments were based on views or exposures and some revenue on click-throughs. Other revenue was based on ratios of views to click-throughs and perhaps other statistics such as time spent viewing video ads or site traffic rates.
So I allow ads to appear on my screen. I don't click on them other than accidentally, which does limit my contribution to revenue. My age and geographic location may also reduce my value as an ad viewer.
Here's a post from a few years ago about ad revenue calculations:
https://www.aditude.com/blog/calculating-your-websites-ad-revenue-potential
Rod Johnson said,
May 2, 2026 @ 8:09 am
But this is Language Log, not Peeving Log…
David Marjanović said,
May 2, 2026 @ 10:07 am
Yes, ads are the internet's business model. One way or another, this has got to stop, and it's going to stop. It never was a good idea in the first place.
Tye S Power said,
May 2, 2026 @ 11:10 am
5th grade teacher here. 24 students in my class. We read books for two 30 minute sessions on most days. They handle this fine. Reading levels from 1st grade (English learner) to grade 12 (highly capable learner). We build fluency, comprehension, and analytical skills. Many kids like to read books in a series. Our librarian exposes them to a variety of good books. But *outside* school I think my students communicate more by video than by text, either reading it or writing it in any form. And I'm sure this reading landscape is different for older students.
Barbara Phillips Long said,
May 2, 2026 @ 4:06 pm
@David Marjanović —
Where will the money come from to support sites such as rural news sites, niche hobby sites, specialized academic sites, and other low-traffic internet content providers? So far, subscription income, gifts from donors, and occasional grants are mostly not enough. U.S. newspapers always relied on advertising revenue, and that looks unlikely to change. Pay-walling newspaper sites does not produce enough subscription revenue to replace ad revenue, but it does contribute to a less-informed public. Pay-per-click isn't enough to sustain places like rural newspapers, and it may not even be enough to sustain high-traffic news sites.
There are not enough people who will — or can — pay enough to keep all the internet sites that exist staffed. Until there is a way to replace ad revenue, ads will continue.
David Marjanović said,
May 3, 2026 @ 7:17 am
I don't know where the money will come from, I don't know whether it will; what seems clear is that the ad-based business model is not sustainable.
AlexB said,
May 4, 2026 @ 8:57 am
The Book Camp idea reminded me of the Camp Grenada lines
And the head coach wants no sissies,
So he reads to us from something called Ulysses.