A Post-Literate Society is a Too-Literal Society

Directness is a virtue and subtlety is lost

Ce n’est pas un signe

It seems premature to write of a literate society in the past tense, but it seems likely we can predict when a society predicated on mass literacy will meet its end — sometime in the next thirty to fifty years, as the cohorts educated and socialized into the era of print age toward their inevitable end.

Instructors at the coalface of higher education have been sounding the alarm about the growing non-literacy of students for some time, perhaps most notoriously

Adam Kotsko

. For years, a significant minority of critics have responded that the situation couldn’t possibly be that striking — that warnings that successive cohorts of young adults were less able to comprehend complex texts must have been exaggerated. I am, at this point, just genuinely angry when someone observes that adults have always bewailed the preparation of the young—especially when they bring up the quotation misattributed to Socrates about how the young have bad manners and contempt for authority. This quotation (which is more than two thousand years younger than Socrates, it turns out) serves as something of a thought-terminating cliche. Ah, see, there have always been complaints about the young, so observations about the young must be just more of the same.

Such reactions, however, miss the specificity and consistency of the complaints. It is not that young adults are contemptuous of authority—if anything, “excellent sheep” syndrome is alive and well. It is specifically that assignments and examinations that functioned well within the span of a few years are no longer feasible.

The more sophisticated version of the fake-Socrates rebuttal that one also often hears fails to refute the seriousness of this allegation because of this specificity. In that variation, adults past their college years wistfully and wryly recall that, well, they never did all of the reading either—surely there is nothing new under the sun. Thoughts thus terminated, they turn back to the other apps on their phones.

To be sure, professors know, if they are at all honest with themselves, that no student reads every page of each assignment. I certainly did not. Yet one could, in general, rely on many to most students to attempt to read many to most pages of many to most assignments—and to understand a like proportion of what they have read. In smaller courses, the difference in the quality of course discussion where 70 percent of the students have done 50 percent of the readings and one in which 20 percent have done 10 percent of the readings is obvious in the same way that a cold Coke tastes different than lukewarm spit. The former is no Chablis, but it is more palatable.

The observations also tend to be consistent about potential culprits. Students spend far more time on their devices than they once did. They report, consistently, less reading in high school. I no longer expect students to have encountered short stories or poems in secondary school — they appear to have been replaced by extracts, excerpts, and YA slop. (I’m insulting YA slop cynically because the YA folks will drive engagement with this piece, and sincerely because it is truly remarkable how that genre has pushed out challenging works from many bookshelves.) I do not believe it is literally true that students have never read a poem or a short story before, but I do believe it feels true to them — the sorts of directed reading exercises I did in my perfectly median public schooling appear to have vanished.

The decline of print culture has removed many of the supports I did not even realize I relied upon. I can no longer assume that students know how to use a table of contents, much less an index. (I assure you this is no exaggeration, even if this problem is not univeral.) At some point, I and many people my age must have been taught the difference between a book written by a single author and an edited volume; this is now knowledge I will be working into my lesson plans. In the same way, I find it is now incumbent on me not only to explain what a peer-reviewed journal is but also what a journal (or any sort of periodical) is. When one waits in a dentist’s office now, after all, one does not read an old issue of Time; one reads Reddit. These sorts of understandings, some transmitted directly and others tacitly, were part of the culture in which print—literal print, words mashed into dead trees—was essential not just for schooling but for being an active member of the culture.

Now, of course, everything is glass over pixels; the same screens that show YouTube can, if they rarely do, show books or text. But if everything is born digital, then the distinctions that mattered so much in a world of physical knowledge no longer have much purchase. (Why, after all, do scholarly journals continue to have volume and issue numbers? I genuinely cannot recall the last time I pulled a bound volume of a journal from a shelf; when I did, I am confident it was to turn its contents into electronic representations as soon as possible.)

Print literacy assumed and facilitated conversation; it also developed familiarity with the conventions of a literate society — that is, a society in which a dominant, even a predominant, stratum was aware, if sometimes only implicitly, of distinctions now lost, such as the difference between a tabloid and a broadsheet or between a pulp and a textbook. (In my recent experience, students no longer reliably process the pagination and layout of textbooks as helpful or as conveying hierarchies or cues about how to read them — rather, many struggle with how to navigate textbooks, as they have not often been exposed to them.)

On a deeper level, the move from the habits and conventions of print, with its assumed continuous attention span, and contemporary video, which is made to accommodate fractured attention, has transformed audiences’ expectations. A TikTok is meant to be consumed whole quickly, like a diabolical amuse bouche; contemporary longer-form streaming video (oldheads still call them “television” and “movies”, as if we did not view them on glorified computer screens, where they are content that differ principally in length) is designed to be viewed while the audience is distracted.

Something is clearly lost when audiences can no longer be expected to serve as audiences. I have never seen Lawrence of Arabia in widescreen, because I am neither old nor (anymore) a resident of the New York or Los Angeles metro areas; still, I did see it, and I saw it without distractions. Imagine if that content had been made without the assumption that the audience would watch it — the long shots probably would have seen engagement dip fatally. Perhaps a pop song or a series of quick cuts could have brought limbic systems back into play.

(This essay features too many parentheticals already, but what else can I do — you can get perfection or you can get content, and it has been three weeks since I last updated, and so the asides will flow like spice, or perhaps a Temu Sam Kriss, because that is how the stream of consciousness becomes a torrent of subscribers; thus, I will add one more observation that is pertinent to but not directly linked to this line of argumentation: when people say that it is the job of college professors to keep students engaged but that we can also not ban devices, I want to sigh performatively—how, exactly, am I supposed to keep them hooked when Hollywood can’t keep them hooked? Even on my very best days, which are very good, I am just not able to supply the methadone equivalent to salve nervous systems addicted to endless novelty and engagement, and denying that we are facing a planetary crisis of concentration while expecting us to soldier on stoically is not helping.)

To cope with their audiences’ fried brains, scripts are made with the assumption that the content on the big screen is secondary to whatever For You feed audiences are scrolling as they ostensibly watch a movie or show. This sort of leaden repetition used to feature in reality shows (I am thinking of Fixer Upper and Kitchen Nightmares, two pop-culture data points from which you can precisely establish my real, as opposed to aspirational, class identity), in which the first scene after every commercial break would feature a recap of the show to date (“And now, the Substack author seeks to reconnect his essay with the point teased in the headline!”). Now, every scene, almost every line, must do the same thing—fail to do this, and the audience is lost. Every sign must explain it is a sign, and perhaps have another sign pointing to it explaining that a sign signifies.

As a result, younger audiences believe this sort of engagement is how texts should work, and that texts written without this sort of visible scaffolding are engaged in hostile acts. Perfectly ordinary degrees of implication or purposeful misdirection produce confusion, and thus anger. Every argument must be stated as baldly as a recipe; every narrative must begin “Once upon a time”; every apparent hero must be simon-pure and every villain’s hat should be black. (I follow several online forums for Foundation, which now allows you to perfectly estimate my class, and many, many viewers are upset that they were led to believe a character had nice traits before he committed mass murder—how could the creators make them root for a bad guy?)

Doubters will respond that such problems have long existed, and I agree, but quantity has a quality all its own—if these sorts of habits become hegemonic, then the practice and transmission of cultures in which we ask and expect audiences to engage beyond a grade-school level becomes infinitely more challenging. It may in fact be that the best way to proceed would be to embrace an Inner Party model (or, as I prefer, a scribal model): epistemic elites just Benedict Option themselves and leave the masses to their slop. However, this raises ethical problems to the extent that one believes that the cultivation of taste and thought is beneficial for society and individual agency. It also raises the prospect that seclusion might be met not with acceptance but pitchforks and torches.

Developing a broader-based strategy to respond to the crisis requires recognizing two aspects. First, this is not a “literacy” crisis, or at least not always—individual words and paragraphs can be processed; where we face a challenge is in stringing these tokens back into longer, decodable arguments. The demise of literate culture has just left us with a form of nonliteracy, in which simple texts can be processed but elaborate ones may as well be written in Linear B. Recovering familiarity with literate culture should be a priority, especially in primary and secondary school; the child is father to the undergrad.

Second, this crisis is not limited to text. Even the decoding of more complex video texts and cognate art forms is challenged by these (again, thanks to my too-extensive engagements with Strange New Worlds and Foundation forums, I can assure you that people do not grasp what is textual, much less what is subtextual). In other words, this isn’t a whiny scholar problem—it’s a cognitive challenge. The stakes are actually quite large and we probably need to think about the urgency and scale of the solution in similar scales.

The alternative is bleak—a TL;DR stamping on a human face, forever.