Books have been the people’s guide on how to live their lives ever since they existed in 868 AD, when the first book was printed on paper in China. Books experience their own evolution; starting with illustrations on tablets in 3500 BC, until the printed book on paper as we all know now. We can read books whenever and wherever we want due to the evolving technology. Unfortunately, this evolution also caused the descending of children’s literacy rate. Speaking from personal experience, the amount of time I had spent reading when I was 9 years old in the 2010s is different from the amount of time my younger brother had spent reading when he was 9 years old in the 2020s. Only in a span of 10 years, children's literacy rate experienced a drastic change, mainly because of the evolution of technology. Then, why is the decreasing literacy rate relevant to this day? And what will prepare us to live as a society? Let’s break it down.
Books have been in human life ever since before the century started. Looking back, books, or writings, are the reason why humankind still exists to this day. Writings on stone tablets, papyrus scrolls, until today’s modern paperbacks contain the history of life. This history is the one thing that keeps us going until now. The writings contain guides for us on how to light fire, how to cook food, how to build weapons, how to tell time, and even on how to do mathematical problems. Booksーfictional, non-fictional, even Holy Scriptures (The Holy Bible, Al-Qur’an, The Tipitaka, and others)ーno matter the genre or form, are still relevant to this day. Yet nowadays, books are slowly being replaced with short-length videos on screens. Even though books are now available to be read on screens, people seem to be more interested in using their screens to view these particular videos. This behaviour cannot be blamed on technology’s development alone, but it can also be blamed on how people decided to act towards the development. Technology will always evolve; how we act towards its evolution is the problem we should fix.
To me, the decreasing number of children’s literacy is concerning. As a child, I used to go to the bookstores with my parents and buy books that I wanted. But now, my brother does not want to go to the bookstore; he prefers to buy gadgets or games instead. I know that every child has a different preference, but not only is the preference a type of screen, the screen time he spends a day compared to mine is also higher. This is deeply concerning. What if there are many more children whose screen time is higher than that of the average adult? Besides the high screen time, the main thing the children see lately is short-length videos like TikToks, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts. These short-length videos can shorten a person’s attention span to a minimum; this can make a person want to consume information only if presented in short videos. Short-length video is also the main cause of the decreasing numbers of literacy. When many people are addicted to short-length videos, their attention span becomes shorter, and in the end, they only want an “instant” way to gain information: through another short-length video.
What can we do to fix this, or at least, try to stop this from continuing? We cannot stop the main cause, technology, from fully evolving, because we also need it to sustain life. Books are still relevant and important to this day, yet they are slowly being forgotten by society and getting replaced with videos on screen. Then, what will prepare us to live as a society if we keep letting this happen?