I don’t see anything about exactly WHAT people were reading. Literacy, certainly nowadays, is not taught so that the masses are better able to experience classic literature but to enable them to transmit and receive factual information and instructions efficiently and effectively an this usage is inherently more suited to shorter sentences. We now live in a time when the fraction of all knowledge that anyone can ever hope to ingest is declining exponentially and so we benefit from greater clarity and higher information density whilst, simultaneously, for whatever reason, reading for pleasure is in decline.
I don’t see anything about exactly WHAT people were reading. Literacy, certainly nowadays, is not taught so that the masses are better able to experience classic literature but to enable them to transmit and receive factual information and instructions efficiently and effectively an this usage is inherently more suited to shorter sentences. We now live in a time when the fraction of all knowledge that anyone can ever hope to ingest is declining exponentially and so we benefit from greater clarity and higher information density whilst, simultaneously, for whatever reason, reading for pleasure is in decline.