The dawn of the post-literate society – and the end of civilisation

This is a very verbose essay that i don't feel quite says much. I want to put question the presented statistics a bit in particular.

The essay quotes studies showing the leisure-reading prevalence among teens and adults dropping. I do not see how this is relevant at all to "death of intellect and reason". Reading fiction can give a person new perspectives on life, but so could a movie or a manga or radio-show. It's a leisure activity. I'm far more worried about drop in reading and writing *proficiency* overall. Writing proficiently is dropping with LLMs in school, and reading proficiency is worse than the early 2000s. But i don't think this tells the whole story either.

I think the average person reads and writes as much as always thanks to the prevalence of technology. Keyboards, instant messaging, blogs, social media. Writing is easier than ever, and reading is more worthwhile than ever. But the *format* has and media has shifted. This shift in format is not reflected when asking people "how often do you read" (people read constantly, but much fewer books).

And to question the very premise further; Reading isn't that brought the revolution in science and intelligence; better storage, spreading and access to knowledge is. That this came in the format of text should matter. If people engage with thought provoking reason through audio or visuals instead of text, what does that matter?

now, i AM worried about some of this. In particular the decline of news quality and consumption, rise in (seemingly) acquired ADHD, and a drop in writing proficiency (which i think is vital for deep thought and contemplation), but this article really does not discuss the issue fairly or well.

What a sobering indictment of our screen-obsessed world. It seems all roads lead back to the introduction of the smartphone —the mid-2010s, a critical turning point:

> "Never before has there been a technology like the smartphone. Where previous entertainment technologies like cinema or television were intended to capture their audience’s attention for a period, the smartphone demands your entire life. Phones are designed to be hyper-addictive, hooking users on a diet of pointless notifications, inane short-form videos and social media rage bait."

> "The average person now spends seven hours a day staring at a screen. For Gen Z the figure is nine hours. A recent article in The Times found that on average modern students are destined to spend 25 years of their waking lives scrolling on screens."

We're symbol sleepwalkers, their arbitrariness is a meaning sink. Literacy is essentially mind-control by severely limiting the semantic resources words and narratives provide. Literacy makes us into minions. Post-literacy should have arrived with Chinese or Mayan glyphs (900BC/800AD) and conformed the West's sense of individualism with the concatenation capabilities of the East/MesoaAm, but the West's valuation of the arbitrary extractive processes and potentials of symbols and metaphors for economic and political control were much too addictive and sedative. Our only chance is to overthrow symbols and literacy to engage in direct perception of reality. This is a postcard from the edge by a medieval scribe.

In high school debate, I found a killer piece of evidence to counter any given doomsday argument.

From Eric Zencey:

There is seduction in apocalyptic thinking. If one lives in the Last Days, one’s actions, one’s very life, take on historical meaning and no small measure of poignance.

I recommend The Image by Daniel Boorstin. Smart phone is not the dawn at all but I guess more like high noon. The world is replaced by graphics (more generally , images) for a century at least. Books by "digests", heroism by celebrity and so forth. A little bit of media theory goes a long way to making the world "legible" again. Since we are absolutely steeped in media culture.

I think the most optimistic future we could hope for now is some kind of Star Wars like future where incredible technology could be all around us but the vast majority of people do not participate much in its creation or maintenance, so the technology just becomes part of nature and we see people use it in illogical or anachronistic ways, because they don’t know any better. Life becomes something like the Middle Ages but with shiny tech instead of iron and stone. People can’t read because they just talk to their interfaces or communication devices. Most people have menial subsistence type jobs. And ruling over everything is some vast empire that is cartoonishly evil, because the people running it are as simple minded as the people they govern.

This essay attributes rather too much to literacy. The end of feudalism, for example, started with the Black Death, and the journey to modern democracies involved centuries of concessions by kings to the emerging middle classes. Sure, mass literacy was key to enabling universal suffrage, but the end of absolute monarchy started long before that.

The present decline in literacy is probably the consequence in a temporary prestige given to other forms of media. We are very much heading into a great crisis, but the old social order where knowledge is valued by the elites will re-emerge once the crisis is resolved. The Second World War emerged from the chaos of the 1920s and 1930s, and the reason why so many people who lived through the war said they enjoyed it was the common purpose that swept away the prior disorder. This is why the 1950s were so socially conservative and repressive.

We live in interesting times, but the world will again be boring.

And yet thousands of people have liked (and presumably read) his long article and hundreds have replied. Substack provides levels of information sharing that a book can't provide.

With books, some small amount of people read difficult works while most people read beach lit. With phones, some small amount of people are learning at rates never possible before, while most people consume Tik Tok.

I agree that social media may be causing a collapse in society, but not that a lack of book reading is causing societal collapse.

If literacy is what prevents monarchy / dictatorship, what explains China and Russia?

>Numerous studies show that reading is in free-fall. Even the most pessimistic twentieth-century critics of the screen-age would have struggled to predict the scale of the present crisis.

Marshall McLuhan, the media theorist, began his academic career as a scholar of Medieval history, but his attention soon turned to the Gutenberg press and the rise of literacy (over 3 centuries), and how it changed the way we think. He then applied his theories to radio, film, TV etc.

In the 1960s McLuhan was invited to tour the skunkworks at IBM, Xerox Parc, and Bell Labs where they were working on the early iterations and basic building blocks of what would become the internet we know today.

They showed him their vision for "Peer to peer electronic media", and McLuhan applied his theory of media to the not-yet-realized notion of social media.

He definitely saw it as something that would bring a death knell to the literary age, and recognized that social media was inherently tribalistic. According to McLuhan we would all be "marching to the beat of the tribal drums". And that brings us to today, wherein America is officially under the spell of state sponsored tribalism, and reading in the literary sense no longer holds court as the driver of our discourse and thinking.

The dude skated to the puck a good 30 years before it arrived, and he was extremely pessimistic. Mark Zuckerberg has claimed to be a McLuhan fan, but if he actually understands what McLuhan was saying, that's scary:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/amnesty-report-finds-face...