If the reading revolution represented the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history, the screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history.

It was an age of monumental works of thought and knowledge: the Encyclopédie , Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language , Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason . Radical new ideas about God, about history, about society, about politics, and even the whole purpose and meaning of... See more

Tim Blanning writes, “conservatives were appalled and progressives were delighted, that it was a habit that knew no social boundaries.”

As Neil Postman puts it in Amusing Ourselves to Death :

Philosophy cannot exist without criticism . . . writing makes it possible and convenient to subject thought to a continuous and concentrated scrutiny . Writing freezes speech and in so doing gives birth to the grammarian, the logician, the rhetorician, the historian, the scientist-all those who

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As Walter Ong writes in his book Orality and Literacy , certain kinds of complex and logical thinking simply cannot be achieved without reading and writing. It is virtually impossible to develop a detailed and logical argument in spontaneous speech — you would get lost, lose your thread, contradict yourself, and confuse your audience trying to... See more

Most intriguing — and alarming — is the case of IQ, which rose consistently throughout the twentieth century (the so-called “Flynn effect”) but which now seems to have begun to fall.

The result is not only the loss of information and intelligence, but a tragic impoverishing of the human experience.

For centuries, almost all educated and intelligent... See more

Thinking is where certainty goes to die

If the reading revolution represented the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history, the screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history.

Even more importantly print changed how people thought.

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... See more