Comment by TrackerFF

A good idea to consider might be what Hans Magnus Enzensberger referred to as "second-order illiteracy".

> [The second-order illiterate] has come a long way: his loss of memory causes him no suffering; his lack of will makes life easy for him; he values his inability to concentrate; he considers it an advantage that he neither knows nor understands what is happening to him. He is mobile. He is adaptive. He has a talent for getting things done. We need have no worries about him. It contributes to the second-order illiterate's sense of well-being that he has no idea that he is a second-order illiterate. He considers himself well-informed; he can decipher instructions on appliances and tools; he can decode pictograms and checks. And he moves within an environment hermetically sealed against anything that might infect his consciousness. That he might come to grief in this environment is unthinkable. After all, it produced and educated him in order to guarantee its undisturbed continuation.

https://www.thefreelibrary.com/IN+PRAISE+OF+ILLITERACY.-a062...

I recently argued with someone in their 60s who argued, in total sincerity, that nobody should ever need to read or write more than 500 words at a time. I asked about Terms of Service agreements, hospital paperwork, etc, and she insisted that it was not a useful skill. I think she might qualify as illiterate.

(For reference, your comment and my reply combined make for about 180 words.)

The UNESCO/World Bank literacy rate is basically defined how you thought. But high income countries don't usually report this because literacy by this measure is nearly universal. So they often report at higher thresholds (e.g. how many people can read at a grade 9 level), and news headlines often don't make it clear that this is not the same as the UNESCO definition.

> It makes me wonder if literate people can regress to illiterate,

Under normal circumstances for a healthy human, I'd say no, at least directly. Not a scientific analysis of course, but I don't feel reading ability in a language that you use regularly is going to degrade that significantly. A very similar problem might come about through a drop in attention span which is definitely an issue for many these days, but I wouldn't count this as a literacy problem: the written letters/words/sentences/… are not the issue and other things are going to be equally impacted.

For a second+ language, especially if you never got to a particularly fluent state, this is probably quite different - for anecdata I did pretty well at Spanish GCSE then never spoke a word the 32 years before starting to relearn last year. But again I would not really call this a general literacy problem.

One place where you do see literacy fall precipitously is due to mental degradation due to common complications of old age, if you have relatives with dementia you will have seen this first hand. While literacy is only part of a massive problem here, reading and writing abilities are things that fall away relatively quickly for many (presumably due to them being relatively complex operations, and needing conscious concentration rather than being autonomic life-preserving functions).

> I was somewhat surprised to find out that illiteracy does not mean that someone needs to be a total (or near) analphabet - but rather that it is a broad and wide spectrum. I always imagined that “teenagers can’t read” meant that they couldn’t read at all, but then I never met such a person.

Indeed, and this is the source of the discrepancy in the reddit-style gotcha that gets repeated about Americans being illiterate. It's not that they can't read, it's that illiteracy (as measured by whichever agency in the US does the measuring) means something more than just "can't read at all."

I think that literate people can recover from a period of not reading (books) at all.

I recently had more than a year of not reading any books that was interrupted when I found about The Culture series. I read Use of Weapons and had to read all novels from that universe. After that I tried to find some books similar to them, tried to read some recommended ones (didn't finish any of them) and stopped reading.

In my case reading books is a kind of fever that I get every year or so.

> I was somewhat surprised to find out that illiteracy does not mean that someone needs to be a total (or near) analphabet - but rather that it is a broad and wide spectrum.

It's a very recent redefinition, pushed by people looking to make money from a panic. They're trying to make people who are simply incurious (through stupidity, fear, boredom or whatever) into illiterates. More people are literate than ever before because of the internet. Before the internet, there were an enormous number (up to a quarter of the US population) of actual illiterates.

The new definition of illiteracy is (manipulatively) somehow including people who wouldn't be able to understand something that is being read to them.

I suspect that a lot of middle-class people are illiteracy truthers, because they've never met someone who actually couldn't read. I'm from poor, black, uneducated, working people, and before the internet there were plenty who simply couldn't read. If you asked them to write the word "STOP" they would make a good attempt to copy what they remembered from a stop sign, and draw it like a picture. They're normal people, though, and if you didn't know them well, the strategies that they've developed over a lifetime would keep you from noticing.

It's going to be back again - technology has removed the need to read and write because of voice recognition and interfaces. We're calling it too early.

> It makes me wonder if literate people can regress to illiterate, for no other reason than lack of reading maintenance.

I think it's too easy to be exposed to words. To fall into illiteracy through atrophy would be like forgetting Spanish while living in Mexico. The good thing about comprehension-type skills is that they put you into a virtuous circle passively. Once your French gets to a certain point, it takes an effort not to understand French; and every piece of French you fail to fail to understand makes you better at understanding French. If you're in Paris, riding the bus, and somebody is babbling into a cellphone, you'll wish you didn't understand French.

English (like French) is just an absurdly hard language to read and write. Of course there are people who can't, at all. French, although absurd, is probably easier to read than English (though a bit harder to write.)