Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human histo
Archive Link
Reading is more than a skill, or one mode of communication among many. The media we use to interact with one another shape the world we inhabit. Early humans spent millennia communicating only by voice. The advent of reading and writing transformed society. It altered people’s consciousness and politics, along with the intellectual feats they were capable of. The decline of reading will bring about changes of the same magnitude. It will affect our innermost thoughts, our society’s politics and culture, and how we tell the history of our civilization. If we look closely, we can see that these changes have already begun.
...
And yet, even Puchner now believes that the doomsday scenario has arrived: A return to text, away from video, seems awfully unlikely. Maybe McLuhan and Postman weren’t wrong in predicting that our society would become postliterate. They were merely early. The world that these theorists foresaw half a century ago is now here. The literate era will prove to be a brief interlude between the oral and digital ages.
