Are the doomsayers right? Are we living in post-literate times?
Let the bells toll as we bid a sad farewell to the book because we will never see its like again.
I’ve been hearing laments like this all my life, and so far, the book has been remarkably chirpy for a species constantly threatened with extinction. But could the doomsayers be right this time?
Has the bell finally tolled for books?Credit: Alamy Stock Photo
There’s been a flurry of recent articles on this subject, and perhaps the longest and most terrifying jeremiad has come from The Times writer James Marriott. “Welcome to the post-literate society,” he says in his Substack newsletter Cultural Capital. He gives us a potted history of the print revolution and how it changed the world. And now, he says, we are living through the counter-revolution. Back to a feudal age. Nothing will ever be the same again. Blimey.
He quotes statistics showing that reading is “in free-fall”. In the US, reading for pleasure has fallen by 40 per cent in the past 20 years. In the UK, more than a third of adults say they have given up reading. The OECD found recently that literacy levels were declining or stagnating in most developed countries.
There are various reasons for this. In Marriott’s view, you will not be surprised to hear, the main culprit is the smartphone. But you read stuff on the smartphone, I thought. That’s how I read his essay.
Have we moved from a literate culture to a smartphone culture?Credit: Getty Images
Ah, says Marriott, but the smartphone demands your entire life. It is designed to be hyper-addictive. “If the reading revolution represented the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history, the screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history.”
There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence from university teachers that the current crop of students can’t keep up with the reading load and can’t keep track of what they do read. Certain kinds of complex and logical thinking simply cannot be achieved without reading and writing. In other words, we’re all being dumbed down.
As David Brooks writes in the New York Times, “passively scrolling TikTok or X weakens everything from your ability to process verbal information to your working memory to your ability to focus. You might as well take a sledgehammer to your skull.” And he neatly sums up Marriott’s argument: “Back in Homer’s day, people lived within an oral culture, then humans slowly developed a literate culture. Now we seem to be moving to a screen culture. Civilisation was fun while it lasted.”
