The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society
- Reference: 0179639136
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/10/03/096256/the-dawn-of-the-post-literate-society
- Source link:
> The world of print is orderly, logical and rational. In books, knowledge is classified, comprehended, connected and put in its place. Books make arguments, propose theses, develop ideas. "To engage with the written word," the media theorist Neil Postman wrote, "means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning."
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> As Postman pointed out, it is no accident, that the growth of print culture in the eighteenth century was associated with the growing prestige of reason, hostility to superstition, the birth of capitalism, and the rapid development of science. Other historians have linked the eighteenth century explosion of literacy to the Enlightenment, the birth of human rights, the arrival of democracy and even the beginnings of the industrial revolution. The world as we know it was forged in the reading revolution.
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> Now, we are living through the counter-revolution. More than three hundred years after the reading revolution ushered in a new era of human knowledge, books are dying. 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. In America, reading for pleasure has fallen by forty per cent in the last twenty years. In the UK, more than a third of adults say they have given up reading. The National Literacy Trust reports "shocking and dispiriting" falls in children's reading, which is now at its lowest level on record. The publishing industry is in crisis: as the author Alexander Larman writes, "books that once would have sold in the tens, even hundreds, of thousands are now lucky to sell in the mid-four figures."
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> [...] What happened was the smartphone, which was widely adopted in developed countries in the mid-2010s. Those years will be remembered as a watershed in human history. 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.
[1] https://jmarriott.substack.com/p/the-dawn-of-the-post-literate-society-aa1
\o/ (Score:5, Funny)
> The world of print is orderly, logical and rational. In books, knowledge is classified...
tldr
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It feels like snobbery to me. People are probably reading and writing more than they ever did, thanks to so much of the communication on the internet being via text. The complaint seems to be that they are not reading the right material.
Literacy is the ability to communicate with and understand the written word, not if you read Shakespeare.
Re:Phones are not a cause (Score:5, Insightful)
> It feels like snobbery to me. People are probably reading and writing more than they ever did, thanks to so much of the communication on the internet being via text. The complaint seems to be that they are not reading the right material.
> Literacy is the ability to communicate with and understand the written word, not if you read Shakespeare.
Have you read the things younger folks write? It's all short-burst abbreviated LOLcats style nonsense.
And there's a big difference between saying, "People aren't reading books," and saying, "People aren't reading the right books." Long-form books, whether fiction or non-fiction, hold a lot of value for developing thinking skills, and if people get all their information in short-burst activities via the phone, they're going to thing in short burst fashion. ADD and ADHD are on the rise for a very specific reason. And long-form reading, whatever the material, is one way of helping slow that rising ride.
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What were young people writing before? I think you will find it was little better, for some of them.
I'd attribute the decline in literacy rates to other things. In some places it is going up.
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> I'd attribute the decline in literacy rates to other things. In some places it is going up.
Are those places in first world countries?
Re:Phones are not a cause (Score:5, Interesting)
When you pick up a book and read it, it's because you chose to read it. You had to physically make the decision to get up and get the book and read it, whether from a library or your elsewhere. Reading and writing on a smartphone is partially controlled by you, but there's an aspect of it that involves algorithmic decisions about what content you consume, especially if someone participates in any of the social media platforms which curate content for you, which is all of them.
So your statement is true, but a book will never seek you out to target your brain and person with an intention to program you with ideas. Smart phones are a direct brain tap whose control of what you consume is not entirely in your hands. This is the aspect of control that is most easily lost in the smart phone age. Certainly you can own a smart phone and intentionally avoid the worst of it, and even consume intelligently some social media -- but the traps are ever present and evolving.
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You clearly haven't experienced the Amazon.com books section algorithmic and e-mail pushes to buy books.
Re:Phones are not a cause (Score:5, Insightful)
> but a symptom of lazy parenting as I see it. It began with shoving the kids in front of the TV with weekly toy commercial series instead of interacting with them or stimulating their creativity. Unless a kid discovers their interest in some activity they'll just seek out easy entertainment and perpetuate that often to their kids later.
> Books and (Technic) Lego certainly had an influence on my development towards technology and IT.
The problem is that we've prioritized profit to the point where if someone manages to create a profitable product, they become above scrutiny. These phone companies are massively profitable, and our government, at least here in the US, doesn't really regulate massively profitable endeavors because they have decided that the entire purpose of civilization is to serve the whims of the profitable.
We need to first cross that hurdle, before we ever start to address the addictive qualities of the devices they peddle.
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Libertarian arguments tend to not resonate well with me for the simple fact that most of them tend to strike me as unnecessarily callous to the less fortunate in favor of the more fortunate. Granted, that tends to be most political ideologies these days, and anything else gets called "lunatic fringe leftist rhetoric."
I think capitalism without regulation is bound to lead to the exact society we find ourselves in today. Governments would rather throw money at corporations than address real societal issues, a
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Libertarian ideology is an artificial billionaire farce manufactured with attractive utopian, American nationalist ideals woven with Ayn Rand's extreme communism reflex to be palatable to an under-educated middle- and upper-class while concealing the aims of billionaires like the Kochs' to keep polluting, denying climate change, and rolling back regulations while denying the value of properly-functioning government regulation like pollution management and commonwealth shared infrastructure and services bett
Re: Phones are not a cause (Score:2)
So... Do you think we should repeal anti-slavery legislation? IIRC that was pretty profitable. Otherwise, you kind of have accept society should proscribe some behaviour as unacceptable and we're really just talking about where that line is. Not making a point of principle.
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I don't think anybody in government is sitting there thinking about the "purpose of civilization". Sure, they all took political science in school, and to the extent that they realize that governing is compromise, and any government is better than anarchy, I suppose they might have given it a bit of thought in the past. But they mostly just work to get elected next time. All of their actions, and mostly just their words, are always in support of that one goal. "How many votes can I gain by saying this, a
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BuT bUt CoMmUnIsM aNd BiG gUbBeRmEnT bAd!
We must ruthlessly evangelize the essential need for the supremacy of fair and just democratic forms of government with strong independence, regulatory mandate and authority, and limited power per branch firewalled from religions, wealth, and media. These cannot and must not be allowed to endure for a second more to keep buying elections, policies, and rigging the system in their favor. The rich must sit their asses down and hope we don't take 99% of their wealth
Re:Phones are not a cause (Score:5, Interesting)
There are kids with one parent who's busy working, kids with no parents, etc. There are a lot of edge cases.
One thing my parents did when I was knee high to a grasshopper is they bought the World Book Encyclopedia. They also got an add-on. I don't quite know what to call the add-on. It was a big slab with a circular top edge. You put a disk of questions in there and a smaller disk of white paper. When you closed it, a question would appear in one cut out and the white paper in the other. You wrote your answer, push a lever, and another question and white space would appear. I spent hours with it.
Another thing they bought, dunno if it was connect to World Book, but it was a series of science books about 1/2-3/4 in. thick each. They had biology, chemistry, physics, math, etc. I loved reading those books and sometime would just pull out, say, the P volume of the encyclopedia and page through, reading any article that caught my fancy.
I think that somehow gave me a never-ending need to read and learn science. One thing I noticed from my parents that at first confused me, they never once told me to read that stuff or use the machine.
This is all anecdotal, but I believe if I had an iPhone or a laptop, it would not have the same effect. Those devices encourage a short attention span. Even now I find it incredibly annoying to see a news site and have panes with dancing, popping, jumping crap. When you do analog, you are free, even encouraged, to move slowly at your pace, not one induced on you by marketing professionals.
One cannot learn mathematics by dancing, popping, jumping web pages. It requires slow careful work and you must do the exercises. Spend two weeks whacking a problem into shape if you need to, but spend the time if that is what it takes you to solve the problem. Only then will you develop any depth of reasoning for the subject.
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Perhaps you are thinking of the Time-Life series?
They had books on all the sciences from biology to mathematics.
Another series I remember fondly was the How and Why books.
We need to attack the addiction angle (Score:5, Interesting)
We know too much about addiction today to continue to pretend that it's not in the public interest to actively punish companies that leverage the psychology of addiction to make money.
What we really need is to create a working group in the FTC with UX specialists, psychologists and other professionals who can study the way industry works and put forward regulations for the FTC.
It should target the design, not speech. If necessary, it should require an entire redesign or elimination of entire use cases like YT shorts or able to tell TikTok "if this is all you provide, you'll have to find an entirely new business model."
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Stanford had a class on maximizing exploitation of and manipulating users that's no longer offered for political reasons: Captology ("The Facebook Class") by B.J. Fogg, head of the "Behavior Design" Lab. It explored ideas like all websites are similar to in-person nonverbal behavior because they always emit superficially-evaluated signals that are judged by different people ascribing to them different amounts of properties, and that changing things can subtly change the apparent values and appearances/site
Post historic events (Score:2)
I've been waiting for post history to start.
Schools (Score:3)
Reading books has been largely de-emphasized in schools. My son is a senior and has only had two full books assigned as reading. No summer reading. Most reading assignments involve "texts," like news articles, blog posts, social media posts, and short stories. Fortunately, he likes reading and reads quite a bit independently. His classmates, if not doing the same, are going to run into problems when going to college.
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His classmates, if not doing the same, are going to run into problems when going to college.
You assume too much of college :-D
It isn't "post-literate" (Score:5, Interesting)
It is just illiterate, the way it was back before public schooling.
The drive backwards is just incredible, almost every place in the world went 50, 70 or a few hundred years back in just a few short years.
We had been in the age of truthiness for years (Score:3)
and now, thanks to the collapse of the educational system and AI, we're boldly entering the age of vibe-reasoning.
Stopped clocks (Score:2)
Marriott has a fairly chequered record as a columnist, to be honest, and has written some utter drivel in the past. However, this is isn't one of those times. But that's mostly because he's mostly borrowing from Postman (who, oddly enough I just read after meaning to for a number of years). Lots of Postman's thinking is directly mapped onto experiences in US society and culture at the time he wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death, though some of the worst aspects have crept through to the rest of us over time.
Buggy whip? (Score:3)
Are they dieing? Are they really? "Publishing" is going away, because there are so many ways to write, edit, and market books yourself. Did this study look into the number of e-books that are being sold, and shared? I agree that reading literature is slowing. But I don't think it's going away.
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Everyone expected e-books to kill off dead tree publishing. But it never did. Ebook "sales" never did overtake dead tree. It's still a big thing for some people (and obviously very profitable), but among the general populous, ebooks have never really gained much traction. And I don't know of anyone that reads books on their phones.
Audiobooks seem to be increasing in popularity, however. I'm not sure how that influences this growing trend of illiteracy. I do know more than a few people that don't like r
Hammer of Witches! (Score:3, Insightful)
print culture ... associated with ... hostility to superstition...
Oh, really??? Many burned/hung/drowned "witches" would disagree.
They said the same thing about television (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem isn't reading it's the message. Go look up some of the bizarre propaganda sci-fi novels you can find in Russia. It doesn't matter if you're reading it that shit's still going to rot your brain.
The actual problem is around 1930 a little man in Germany figure it out what you could do if you had control of media. Not long after dictators figured out how important it was to control the education system and teachers.
It's about going after the academia and intelligencia. Violent people want to use violence to take power and smart people will try to stop them using non-violence.
So the violent people will try to control the stupid people's access to information to keep them stupid. And it mostly works.
This isn't anything new. We've been fighting this fight for thousands of years. The Christians went around burning books of anyone that criticized them once they were in power. The Muslims did the same thing destroying their countries science and mathematics in order to cling to power. Doesn't have to be religion either you see the same sort of thing in North Korea and Pol pot famously killed people with glasses.
If you want to be a dictator you have to kill smart people and you have to keep a limited number of them around and in a constant state of fear.
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> Not long after dictators figured out how important it was to control the education system and teachers.
Are you saying the ones controlling the teachers in USA are dictators?
Attention monetization is the problem (Score:1)
Read "Stolen Fucus" by Johann Hari, at least the first few chapters. A big part of the problem is that there is a while economy around capturing your attention and keeping it: the famous engagement metric. The book argues, rightfully so I believe, that we get way more information than we used to, but in a way that is so fragmented, that we are losing our ability to sustain a train of thought. That is what books had that today's medium rarely have. I don't think it needs to be whole books, but even reading a
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Interesting, thanks for sharing. I'll check it out
"...hostility to superstition..." (Score:1)
That, along with other things like the rise of Faux Newts, seems like a possible explanation for the increase in conspiracy theory believers. Critical thinking has certainly suffered over the last 20-30 years. I remember being shocked when Dubya said in an interview that he doesn't read books, and now that seems to be the norm.
I don't blame it all on the smart phone. I think part of it is also availability. Amazon and the big-box book store destroyed the local book store: within 75 miles of me right
Steve Jobs' legacy will be the impact of smartphon (Score:5, Funny)
I have a strong suspicion that historians 100, 200, maybe 500 years from now won't look at Apple as a technology company and Jobs as a leader and inventor, they will look at them as harbingers of disastrous unforseen consequences, like Whitney and the cotton gin or Nobel and nitro.
Jobs created a device that has directly and indirectly unraveled centuries, and in some cases millenium, of painstaking civilizational growth and development... and he will be remembered for that, not one company or a UI innovation on desktops.
Also he was an asshole.
TLDR (Score:2)
something about cats?
Orderly, Logical and Rational? (Score:2)
Only good writing is orderly, logical and rational. There is plenty of human generated slop out there that bounces from topic to topic irrationally and without logic.
The Founding Fathers Could Not Forsee (Score:2)
The existence of the fully automatic printing press.
Ok, fine! (Score:5, Funny)
... I'll go read that book I've been meaning to read for a while.