The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society

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Where previous entertainment technologies like cinema or television were intended to capture their audience’s attention for a period, the smartphone demands your entire life.

James Marriott • The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society

BBrad Barrish

No article has shaken me this year the way The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society has. Really fucked my shit UP.

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.

James Marriott • The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society

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

James Marriott • The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book because there would be no one who wanted to read one.

— Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

James Marriott • The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society

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

James Marriott • The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society

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

James Marriott • The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society

Thinking is where certainty goes to die

James Marriott • The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society

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 thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying,... See more