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)

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