Comment by AdamN
14 hours ago
What they're getting at is that people aren't able to sit down and digest a moderately challenging book. This is due to attention span, the habit of 'scrolling' vs turning a page, etc... Those people can still 'read' and are literate in a sense.
I would say most of us have this situation already but it's much worse when you look more broadly around. People without an interest in books used to read tabloids which for all their faults were still more edifying then what the TikTok or YouTube shorts algorithms are presenting.
That is not what PISA is about. The test does not care about your ability to sit through "The Miserables". Long PISA exam text is still pretty short. The test is about your ability to figure out implied factual information from something somewhat convoluted.
This feels like a non sequitur? The point is that people either aren't able or willing to read books anymore; that's what the author of that Atlantic piece means by post-literate. By your own admission, PISA isn't relevant.