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

The article references a study which claims that university students have difficulty reading Dickens or Jane Austen. Here's an excerpt of the Dickens from the study:

"LONDON. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest."

I'm a college-educated, reasonably well-read person and this is a rough paragraph to get through. Old idioms, excessively lengthy sentences, anachronisms (what is a "horse blinker"? "Michaelmas"?), etc. Why choose this type of subject matter to draw conclusions from?

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* 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.

I enjoy reading as much as anyone, but I find these kinds of posts to be very short-sighted.

First off, civilization precedes mass reading by millennia. To attribute the Enlightenment and modern industrial civilization to reading, and any counter-movement against the Enlightenment as anti-reading, is to fundamentally misunderstand most of history.

E.g., Romanticism was an explicitly anti-Enlightenment movement and arguably had more interest in poetry and literature than the forces it was reacting against. You could also probably make the argument that widespread reading via the printing press led to more anti-intellectualism culturally, as the onus of belief shifted from the elite priestly class to the popular individual.

Secondly, the vast, vast majority of people were not reading complex literature or scientific papers, they were reading the equivalent of Netflix series. Deep, intellectual reading has always been a niche thing reserved for a small percentage of the population.

Thirdly, and I think most importantly: reading is a historical technology. It's not the end-all greatest thing ever invented, never to be surpassed by anything new.

I personally think that audiovisual media is far, far superior to reading in many situations, especially for education - language learning, for example. The problem right now is that we're assuming that short clip-based media like TikTok is somehow the ultimate form of video. It's not, and short attention spans are more due to the economics of media consumption than anything inherent to the video format.

I think we're just very, very early in the development of a new media format that combines the best elements of text, audio, moving images, and other data in a way that is ultimately more compelling and effective than static words on paper. Video, like books, is ultimately a historical technology and not necessarily the end-all of future media.

I don’t disagree that the decline is there and that TikTok is really bad influence, but I also think reading has moved to online writing since books offer a much slower feedback mechanism (especially if others around you are not reading them). Books offered much more than not having information to those with initiative or enough push by educators. Now information is a lot more abundant and has faster (not necessarily better) delivery methods that don’t need involve cost before getting it. The problem with free is that it’s also likely influenced / paid by others. Social Media speeds up the delivery so much with visuals and audio that everything else seems far less attractive. The lazy consumer what’s easy and emotionally entertaining. Those who have more rigor and also enjoy faster flow, may get audiobooks and listen to them T 2x speed. Yet others now use AI to drill into areas that would take a lifetime of hunting down hard to find books. Information is more liquid now. The key is ensuring smart people know how to get what is real and helpful vs stuff that just showers them if they are lazy.

I'm sympathetic to the concerns motivating this essay, but the charts related to test scores are ridiculous. The y-axis is so compressed it makes it look like performance has dramatically plummeted over the least 20-25 years, but the actual declines are basically 1-5%.

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."

I've read a bunch of these types of takes (though this is definitely one of the better referenced & more comprehensive ones) & there's an aspect I haven't seen raised in the context of the correlation of modern trends/changes with declines in literacy, IQ, etc.

The immediate goto is always either smartphones (as in this piece) or the world wide web. Other pieces looking at longer term trends might even reference TV (the dawn of media entertainment consumption without intentionality).

These are all focused on leisure: what we do in our spare time, presumably because we mostly read for pleasure in our spare time. What I rarely see highlighted is the growth of the so-called "knowledge economy" & the shift of common "workers" being employed in physically skilled jobs to common workers being employed in sedentary jobs requiring the application of (basic) literacy for most of our days.

Given we spend a lot more time in work than we do at leisure activities this contrast of an increase in (relatively mindless, unstimulating) "literate" activity in work with the decline in (focused, stimulating) literature-oriented leisure activities seems relevant in my mind.

>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...

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.

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.

Yes, but...

There is a bit of arrogance in the assumption "literate thinking is the best kind of thinking". Knowledge disseminates through different channels today.

The "non-reading kids of today" are, among other things, having far less unprotected sex, consuming less alcohol and tobacco (although more amphetamines), taking less unnecessary risks (driving, firearms, etc), and being more tolerant of differences in ethnicity, gender, etc.

This article is an example of these alternative channels. Fifty years ago, it was in Postman's book ("Amusing Ourselves to Death", excellent reading b.t.w.). Today, it is read by many people around the world without even being printed and sold in bookstores. Besides, it is a collective experience: its arguments don't just reach individual minds, they also reverberate in this thread.

This post is basically a rehash of Postman's book. I strongly recommend that you read that book. It is a much more solid explanation, although the book predates smartphones by decades.

If you look at the actual ranges on his graphs, the conclusion is a little bit exaggerated, but the basic point is valid.

Education systems need to have very strong curriculum about AI use and the necessity of just not using it to some degree to be able to obtain any level of actual literacy or other competency.

Actually education should be redesigned to properly incorporate personalized AI tutoring and as part of that effort provide a supportive environment where students don't feel the need to go around it to cheat.

If the goal is to communicate and solve problems, the technologies will probably be a huge improvement if we can manage them properly.

I definitely do not have the depth of vocabulary that some 18th century readers had, but I am a good problem solver. Probably a more effective problem solver with AI. But kids do need to be trained that they will lose it if they don't use it.

If you look at the extreme amount of video content these days and combine that with the increasing abilities of AI video generation, there may be a trend towards more visual (and often more literal) communication.

I often find that screenshots or screencasts are important for technical communication.

But of course we don't have any visual replacement for the abilities of natural language so I hope we can keep that.

We need a deliberate and effective effort in education.

But we are rapidly approaching the era where your access to AI and robotics determines your labor productivity. So it increases the existing inequalities.

It comes down to the topology of the social networks and how the built environment and belief systems shape that. But the belief systems mostly serve the social groups rather than the other way around. So maybe what happens is determined by group dynamics.

Thank you to anyone who read my ramble.

Here's the preface to Bleak House by Dickens, in case anybody is interested: "A Chancery judge once had the kindness to inform me, as one of a company of some hundred and fifty men and women not laboring under any suspicions of lunacy, that the Court of Chancery, though the shining subject of much popular prejudice (at which point I thought the judge's eye had a cast in my direction), was almost immaculate. There had been, he admitted, a trivial blemish or so in its rate of progress, but this was exaggerated and had been entirely owing to the "parsimony of the public," which guilty public, it appeared, had been until lately bent in the most determined manner on by no means enlarging the number of Chancery judges appointed — I believe by Richard the Second, but any other king will do as well. This seemed to me too profound a joke to be inserted in the body of this book or I should have restored it to Conversation Kenge or to Mr. Vholes, with one or other of whom I think it must have originated. In such mouths I might have coupled it with an apt quotation from one of Shakespeare's sonnets: "My nature is subdued To what it works in, like the dyer's hand: Pity me, then, and wish I were renewed!" But as it is wholesome that the parsimonious public should know what has been doing, and still is doing, in this connexion, I mention here that everything set forth in these pages concerning the Court of Chancery is substantially true, and within the truth. The case of Gridley is in no essential altered from one of actual occurrence, made public by a disinterested person who was professionally acquainted with the whole of the monstrous wrong from beginning to end. At the present moment (August, 1853) there is a suit before the court which was commenced nearly twenty years ago, in which from thirty to forty counsel have been known to appear at one time, in which costs have been incurred to the amount of seventy thousand pounds, which is a friendly suit, and which is (I am assured) no nearer to its termination now than when it was begun. There is another well-known suit in Chancery, not yet decided, which was commenced before the close of the last century and in which more than double the amount of seventy thousand pounds has been swallowed up in costs. If I wanted other authorities for Jarndyce and Jarndyce, I could rain them on these pages, to the shame of — a parsimonious public. There is only one other point on which I offer a word of remark. The possibility of what is called spontaneous combustion has been denied since the death of Mr. Krook; and my good friend Mr. Lewes (quite mistaken, as he soon found, in supposing the thing to have been abandoned by all authorities) published some ingenious letters to me at the time when that event was chronicled, arguing ...

> A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children.

First, I think this is overly crediting "children" and unnecessarily harsh to the university students. The first sentence of the book proper is, "LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall." It seems perfectly reasonable for an average person today to not know what "Michaelmas" is, but otherwise that's a fairly simple sentence. So I assume the above refers to the first sentence of the preface, which is:

> A CHANCERY Judge once had the kindness to inform me, as one of a company of some hundred and fifty men and women not labouring under any suspicions of lunacy, that the Court of Chancery, though the shining subject of much popular prejudice (at which point I thought the Judge's eye had a cast in my direction), was almost immaculate.

That's not a simple sentence: ~60 words, with multiple interjections splitting up the actual point: "A CHANCERY Judge once informed me that the Court of Chancery was almost immaculate."

Further, English has wandered substantially over the intervening ~175 years. This criticism seems akin to complaining that college students of 1800 had a hard time reading Shakespeare, when any contemporary child in 1600 could have understood his work (had they been able to read it at all).

Finally, this ignores the advance of technology. Books were, in their day, a huge technological advance. People could only read more because of moveable type and mass printing. Someone in 1600 might have lamented the mass standardization of printed material, saying that it depersonalized the communication of information.

Today, if someone finds Bleak house challenging, an LLM can modernize, simplify, or summarize as needed. We're on the verge of being able to turn it into a graphic novel on demand.

All to say: there's a point to be made about what information people choose to consume, but focusing on how they consume it misses the point.

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

The analysis feels quite wrong just based on pure physics. Where has that curiosity, interest, and engaged thought gone? It has not simply vanished into the screen without heat loss, it is transformed energy. The mind's eye may no longer be fixed on glyphs on paper but it certainly has not closed. Kids these days are fluent in languages of memes and rich with visual experience. Just because tiktoks are a few seconds long doesn't mean there is nothing in them. Perhaps the vogue visual learning of today is more in common with "trashy pulp fiction" but there isn't nothing at all there as the article suggests.

There will be some challenge in adapting to this new format but attention remains. We are just not converting this new medium into the best educational content as seen in the declining graphs. People are still hungry for knowledge and information about the world, they are just getting it in a more convenient form and who can blame them? I personally do not engage in any of the endless scroll feeds available today and despise social media. I read books both in digital and physical form and I graduated right near the peak of that literacy chart around 2009.

We just need to find better incentives for content creation and the rest will follow on it's own. Often this can only be done with regulation but what regulation can improve the quality of short form media? It will likely take those who grew up steeped in it to imagine the best way to change it for their own children.

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.

..at some point a direct contact must occur between knowledge and reality. If we succeed in freeing ourselves from all these interpretations – if we above all succeed in removing the veil of words, which conceals the true essence of things, then at one stroke we shall find ourselves face to face with the original perceptions..

Ernst Cassirer The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

..when the tools for creating the content of the virtual world become good enough, all of a sudden you have a new, shared objective world where people can co-create the interior with a facility similar to language. And this is what I call post-symbolic communication, because it means that instead of using symbols to refer to things, you are simply creating reality in a collaborative conversation, a waking-state, intentionally shared dream. You're going directly to the source, avoiding the middleman of the symbol and directly apprehending the craftsmanship of that other person combined with your own, without the need for labels.

Jaron [interview with Jaron Lanier] Wired 1.02 1993

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.

>Welcome to the post-literate society

I dispute the basic thesis. Quoting from Our World in Data:

>While only one in ten people in the world could read and write in 1820, today, the share has reversed, with only one in ten remaining illiterate https://ourworldindata.org/literacy#all-charts

I think recently with smartphones and the like people have switched to new forms of information - youtube, or mucking about on HN rather than reading Dickens but I don't think it's worse.

(Typed funnily enough from the How The Light Gets In philosophy festival where yesterday we had "Roger Penrose - From the Big Bang to the fabric of spacetime and the nature of consciousness..." I don't really see this post literate thing.)

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.

Would writers please get to the point faster?

Article was too long. Can someone tldr please? </s>