Post-Literate Society
Contextual Quote
""With the advent of ChatGPT, there has been increasing discussion about whether Western civilization is moving into a “post-literate” era. We’re at a 40-year low in the U.S. in terms of young people reading for pleasure, according to Pew Research. Bosses complain their younger employees boast that they don’t read emails — even work emails — at all. Universities are dropping requirements for standardized test scores and even personal statements from applicants. Short TikTok videos and 280-character tweets are the limited and limiting daily fare of the rising generation. One high school student told a writer that “I should be on TikTok, because Andrew Tate is, and because it’s neither here nor there if I write books because his generation doesn’t read.” It’s hard not to see a post-literate Western society as the advent of a new type of Dark Ages. While historians argue over how dark the Dark Ages actually were, what we know occurred is that the knowledge, learning and thinking skills accrued during the golden ages of Greece, Rome and Arabia were largely lost to the rising generations through war and destruction. This time around, these things are being lost to our advances in technology —but the effect is still the same."
- By Valerie Hudson [1]
Description
From the Wikipedia:
"A postliterate society is a hypothetical society in which multimedia technology has advanced to the point where literacy, the ability to read or write, is no longer necessary or common. About the book: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/156...
The term appears as early as 1962 in Marshall McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy. Many science-fiction societies are postliterate, as in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Dan Simmons' novel Ilium, and Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story. A postliterate society is different from a pre-literate one, as the latter has not yet created writing and communicates orally (oral literature and oral history, aided by art, dance, and singing), and the former has replaced the written word with recorded sounds (CDs, audiobooks), broadcast spoken word and music (radio), pictures (JPEG) and moving images (television, film, MPG, streaming video, video games, virtual reality). A postliterate society might still include people who are aliterate, who know how to read and write but choose not to. Most if not all people would be media literate, multimedia literate, visually literate, and transliterate.
In his recent nonfiction book, The Empire of Illusion, Pulitzer prize--winner Chris Hedges charts the recent, sudden rise of postliterate culture within the world culture as a whole.
Author Bruce Powe, in his 1987 book The Solitary Outlaw, had this to say about a post-literate society:
Literacy: the ability to read and interpret the written word. What is post-literacy? It is the condition of semi-literacy, where most people can read and write to some extent, but where the literate sensibility no longer occupies a central position in culture, society, and politics. Post-literacy occurs when the ability to comprehend the written word decays. If post-literacy is now the ground of society questions arise: what happens to the reader, the writer, and the book in post-literary environment? What happens to thinking, resistance, and dissent when the ground becomes wordless?"
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postliterate_society)
Characteristics
Valerie Hudson on 'What is Lost'
Valerie Hudson:
"What is being lost? First, the younger generation does not commit knowledge to memory; why should they? The internet serves as their memory. But without substantive knowledge banked in your own memory, you cannot think well. For example, I remember when a colleague told me that our master’s students in international affairs did not need to know where Afghanistan was on a map because they could just Google it. I would argue that if you do not have a mental idea of where Afghanistan is and what nations surround it, you simply cannot think at a sophisticated level about Afghanistan.
Furthermore, and I can testify to this, it’s not just that students don’t know what nations surround Afghanistan — they don’t even know what continent Afghanistan is in. The sheer level of ignorance is stunning.
And if you outsource your personal knowledge base to Google or AI, you may or may not receive factual information, as my little experiment demonstrated. The line between fact and opinion, always contested, is now being given up for lost. What’s true according to ChatGPT depends on what part of the internet it has happened to scrape at a particular time. And that in turn is dependent on what social media companies boost, and what they bury. The idea that we would seek a truth that stands independent of our viewpoint is considered quaint, even silly. So much for the Renaissance.
Second, allusion is lost.The cultural touchstones that enriched our society are just gone. If I used the phrase, “Ask not what your country can do for you,” many of my students would not know it was JFK who immortalized that phrase. If I were to say, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” many of my students would not know it was Jesus Christ who said this. And don’t even think about a Shakespearean allusion.
Third, deep reading and critical thinking skills are lost. The most important arguments cannot be distilled into 280 characters. These arguments are not only deep, but they are wide and nuanced, and have many dimensions. And it is in that richness that critical thinking becomes possible, as one dives beneath the thin surface of an argument to its complex roots to understand where the weaknesses are. In our time, there is but shallow understanding, for all nuance has been lost. Indeed, even debates on controversial issues, where one could hear critical thinkers engage each other’s viewpoints, are now anathema because if there is only surface, what could there be to debate?
Last, of course, is that all these things combine to create not only extremist ideologies divorced from reality, but these in turn create mobs who are prepared to literally or figuratively rend dissenters limb from limb in the quest for purity of thought."
More Information
- Video panel with Chris Hedges, who wrote a book on the topic in 2009, et al., via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80CFKM473hg