It’s not just about people reading, but reading the same thing at the same time. I’m thinking of Benedict Anderson’s idea that a community is formed when people read the same morning newspaper at the same time feel connected, even if they never meet—this is central to his concept of “imagined communities.”
Watching the same television programme at the same time, and discussing it afterwards, also helped us join and form social communities of interest. Time-shifting changed all of that. News feeds replaced daily newspapers, podcasting replaced audio broadcasting, and on-demand video fractured our shared viewing experiences.
So it’s not just what we read and watch, but whether we do these things together—whether we are connected by the social ties enabled by synchronous time-based experiences, or fragmented into individuals who can be easily identified, located, targeted, and manipulated.
Which goes to the question I had: why didn't the advent of television destroy literacy? Or, for that matter, with the introduction of desktop computers. Smart phones and the apps that feed them seem uniquely good at sucking people's time and attention and atomizing people within a society.
Marshall McLuhan believed television didn’t destroy literacy—it transformed it. He saw TV as a “cool medium” that required active participation, reshaping how we process information and form communities.
McLuhan’s famous dictum, “the medium is the message,” captures this insight: it’s the form of a medium—not its content—that fundamentally alters human perception and social organization. In his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, he argued that each medium extends human faculties in different ways. And there’s a trade-off—for every augmentation, there’s an amputation.
So an e-book isn’t just a weightless, more convenient version of a book, despite the visual simulation. It’s a different medium that affects us differently.
Yes. Socrates famously argued that writing would make every Greek stupid. Which it did, kinda! In some ways.
I would argue that broadcast TV and the movies even improved *collective* access to literature and a sort of shared cultural understanding through dramatizations of novels etc. And as some people have noted, some long series like The Wire are very fine examples of storytelling.
Now that TV and movies are accessed through personal devices and streaming video at home, the collective experience is lost (you make this point above). I'm not sure about the storytelling quality--my 11 year old boy and I don't have time to watch much beyond some pleasant BBC shows. And, we still read together! Treasure Island in the hopper right now. Read Tom Sawyer over the summer, and more. Some books are great for an out-loud, shared experience.
On a side note, I still use books and paper in ESL classrooms, even while the public school that my son goes to seems to regard books and paper as The Enemy. Although in ESL we also use videos and other media to supplement and amuse, fundamentally the experience of reading words on paper cannot be replaced. For his part, my son gets really exhausted by all the screen time suddenly required by his middle school assignments. I'm getting ready to hit an expensive "Eject" button into private school because of what seems to me a real and ongoing hit he is taking to both cognition and joy brought on by the school district's over-reliance on screens and tech (including AI) for both content delivery and even assessment and grading.
When computers began making their way into publishing companies, I met many editors who said they often missed mistakes on the screen that they noticed immediately on the printout. It seems our brains process information from emitted light differently than from reflected light.
Verrry interesting. Makes great sense to this old guy who welcomed the early interactive computers, on which one could amend a piece of text without retyping it, but still prefers to print it out in order to read it attentively and correct it.
I would also note that hardly anybody now proofreads anything before sending it out.
I remember typewriters and Wite-Out (and the first Apple LaserWriter). I’m also of the generation that’s bothered by text that clearly hasn’t been proofread—not just emails and Substack posts, but increasingly even traditionally published material.
"...great scene from Annie Hall. There are edited versions of this scene posted elsewhere but I wanted to upload the whole thing."
Woody Allen as Alvy Singer pulls Marshall McLuhan out from behind a movie poster while waiting online at a repertory movie theater to prove to guy behind him on line how wrong the loudmouth is in defining McLuhan's theories on communication. All for the benefit of raising insecure Alvy up in eyes and estimations of his date (doesn't look like Diane Keaton, is it?)
Annie Hall (the movie and perhaps Diane Hall err Keaton salving and scorching Woody Allen's well-spent Brooklyn yootful doppleganger character Alvy Singer too) intersperses such wish-fulfillment encounters as a running gag sequence from the character's development confronting his eternally repeating social psychological or shrink-wrapped psychological hang-ups amusingly through a sociological mise en scène throughout the flashback narrative.
Woody Allen seems to tip his hand at being a yootful reader and appreciator of Lit subversives like Kurt Vonnegut's more serious novelistic and short-story satires (editions like Welcome to the Monkey House or Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Stories). Though I wouldn't share that observation anywhere within ear shot of him...
Thanks for reminding me of that Annie Hall clip. I had forgotten that Woody Allen speaks directly to the viewer (foreshadowing “The Purple Rose of Cairo”). I can see why Marshall McLuhan never became an actor.
"why didn't the advent of television destroy literacy?"
In support of Mark McGuire's point below: it did.
Literacy wasn't obliterated by the TV, that is, turned down to zero, but its role as exclusive vehicle for socio-cultural awareness and truth acquisition was obsolesced. Literacy's meaning went from core-competency to status-contingent-gratuity, lending continued credence to the specialist and expert class, as commerce and industry require and reward. But literacy had become a gratuity and a shibboleth, a mark of cultivation and grooming.
In the main, the Moonlanding could never have 'gone over' without the TV image to render it. Even 10 years ago, the only demographic that consistently, greater than 50%, believed the Lone Assassin/Single Bullet myth of the JFK assassination was College Graduate White Men. For all their literacy, they could not perceive the obvious. They are the ones who assume the most that veracity inheres to the written word exclusively. They are most willing to not believe their eyes. Those under the sway of the TV image, however, those whose status does not derive so significantly from their literacy, aren't so credulous and easy to dupe (on the centrally important sacred-cow matters, anyway.)
The TV/smartphone screen image can make of us dupes in other ways; mostly by repetition, appeals to authority, and relying on Ashe Experiment peer influence methods. But a populace confident in its empirical abilities, unafraid of going it alone, and armed with logic is able to contend with and transcend these techniques.
I think you are missing the obvious cause of the decline in literacy: government education. It was only a matter of time before government would succeed in dumbing down the masses, thereby increasing control over citizens, especially after federal government involvement.
I think way too little emphasis is placed on WHAT people read. Just as we are encouraged to eat a well-balanced diet for good health, we should read a well-balanced diet for good mental and emotional health. Reading more and more of the same thing is a study in confirmation bias. Four years of study in college can isolate a person intellectually rather than expand their thinking.
And, PLEASE, could we all stop using 'democracy' as a synonym for freedom. It is very close to being an antonym, as in "The tyranny of the majority."
I just scanned the "post-literate society" essay and digested the interview highlights above. I apologize in advance for reading-to-refute, so to speak. But I engaged this subject matter looking for a recognition of institutional momentum, and in particular malicious intention, beyond the unintended consequences of technological determinism, so easily written off and internalized falsely as second nature. [I will not be defending the personal mobile device, however, as it is clearly a weapon for dominating the psyche and mining the soul, under the regime of total surveillance. But it is the control regime, not the device itself that renders its ubiquity destructive.]
So far in James' presentation, I see no mention of STEM policy. This seems an obvious blind-spot. It has been a federal policy priority in the U.S. for the last 3+ decades to de-prioritize, disincentivize, and devalue the art of reading. Educator and author Robert Guffey observed, "why would W. and Obama education policies, alike, remove fiction reading requirements from the youngest students, except for the fact that a population not raised on fiction is ill-equipped to discern when their leaders are lying to them or not."
Likewise, academic fashion abandoned teaching the Classics since the WWII (consult Brian Maruresku for comment), and the Deconstructionists were given the loudest, most well-indulged megaphones at the academies. "Social Studies" replaced "Civics" in the late 70s/early 80's, astutely pointed out by Frank Zappa. I can't speak to the commensurate policies in the UK, but must assume the same themes are operative, since the results are the same. These policies really make the tragic state of literacy described by Marriott and others seem like consequences of intentional design, rather than accidents of history.
Thus it seems that a more conspiratorial view might be in order, so as to diagnose this problem, rather than applying technological determinism vs nobles oblige, at best, or victim blaming, at worse, to explain it. Ultimately, the dire condition Marriott describes may not be as existential for (authentic, actual) culture as he describes; it may only pose existential threat for "official culture," the spoon-fed canned culture of slop and the blob.
Marriott's distinction between liberal-individualist results of literacy vs. collective self-destructive revolutionary effects of literacy (in France and Russia) are important. But this dichotomy should not resolve in deference to outsourced authority of paternalistic elite management. That's a false equivalency. Liberal Individualism emerged in spite of guidance by elite management, not because of it.
Let's recall that McLuhan and Bruce R. Powers in The Global Village observed that a literate society - without being armed with a robust arsenal of critical skills and techniques, such as the doctrine of logical fallacies*, for instance - is a MORE EASILY propagandized population, more impressionable, more readily programmed, more credulous and docile in the face of sophisticated power, than an illiterate society. [*Honorable mention of the ad hominem fallacy, in this context as wielded by Marriott, in the next follow up.]
The other way to discuss a post-literate society is to describe it as a re-mystified society. A mystified society is one in which the ear dominates over the eye in the matrices of sense-ratios. It is a society that co-exists harmoniously with contradiction, simultaneity, ambiguity, decentralization, out-sider-ness, and it is one that shuns the reduction of all value to the mercantile accounting house standard, so convenient to the Clearinghouse at the top that dictates value, coerces compliance, and demands cognitive conformity.
A mystified society is a less prosaic and more poetic society. At its best, a mystified society can more reliably reconcile and elevate true qualitative (subjective) value; at its worst it descends into superstitious violence when it purely abandons all objectivity. The consequences depend on how it is wielded and whether it has the sovereignty to self-direct and midwife an organic, authentic culture autonomously. As it stands, the emergent mystified society (represented largely by podcasters and substackers) is being undermined, sabotaged, abused, discredited and intentionally misunderstood by the dying, cloying, desperate 'literate' society that has lost its credibility and been exposed for a hall of mirrors designed by sociopaths and narcissists, or at least well endowed interests that lack self-awareness, humility, and wisdom.
If we commit for a moment to our McLuhan goggles/headphones, we must recognize that 200+ years of textual dogma has pathologically stuck us to the particle model of reality. It never fully grappled with wave model. It certainly could not adapt to the field model, which offers us the best mode for coping. And the textual dogma joined to the particle model remains today in total denial of a field understanding despite the fact that such a field model animates all of our dominant, dominating technology.
This gumption trap thus prejudicially denies the central role of subjectivity. And so we are stuck in this cultural hiccup that prevents competing narratives from diffident cosmologies and dissenting ontologies, those which might be capable of reconciling the central roles of the Body and Metaphor (the places where we, as a society, suffer most) to the phenomena of our experience and our epistemology. Love and Pain are both purely subjective, unmeasurable, unproveable, and, so, in the objective hegemony of the eye-centric mercantile culture, "not real." Perhaps this is why prosaic fiction of literate culture raises Love and Pain to the ultimate mysteries of existence to which all stories offer a mere calculus for approaching them, but never attaining or satisfactorily palliating. In advertising, the absence of love and the eminence of pain are the fulcrums upon which all levers of influence are set.
Within this context it is no wonder that aural rhetorical modes, which Alex Jones, Candace Owens, and Russell Brand wield with great efficacy, [since James brought them up] are being mis-attributed as the cause of our social ills. Their popular successes have required sub-rosa and blatantly overt stigma campaigns to discredit and diminish their appeal, to make people not listen to them, so as to pre-bunk their messages via ad hominem warfare. (Only a smug literate-man refuses to peek through Galileo's glass to test for himself whether the claims might be true or not, and to what degree exactly the cursing of these popular figures holds up to scrutiny.)
Whatever you may believe about these critical presenters, Jones, Brand and Owens do actually read robustly and critically - critical discernment in the face of the public record is the core of their brand. Alex Jones actually reads all of the policy papers he critiques brashly, anxiously, perhaps over-indulgently, and - I agree - so annoyingly that he discredits himself to the literate-minded personality type at the outset. His success is unfortunately predicated upon partisan polemics, choir preaching to the converted.
On some matters concerning metaphor, Jones is exceptionally sophomoric: demonology and psychedelics, recently discussed, for instance. That is not the case with Brand, and perhaps only a little bit of a problem with Owens. Nonetheless, they supply a product that is evidently in exceptionally high demand and entirely unfacilitated by the Castle-Keep of "Journalism," so-called, that tosses revelatory Assanges and whistleblowing Snowdens down the memory hole with sycophantic relish. Russell Brand promoted these heretics and look what happened to him - sex-crime cancellation based on concentrated vapors, but no substance. This is a textbook act of character assassination, so cliche that any independently-minded literate man should balk, and ask 'oh my, what IS this heretic actually saying, that I'm not supposed to indulge it?'
These (three) critical personalities, among others, whom Marriott has chosen to demonize as his examples of civic failure, have harnessed the natural appeal to aural rationality on screen and in ear in a way that is more persuasive to vast swaths of the audience, than Dan Rather-sorts and Walter Cronkite-types could ever appeal to the recently skeptical and appropriately cynical. Case in point, these three are actually anti-war, pro-accountability, and anti-establishmentarian. They are pro-body (empiricist) & pro-metaphor (via their appeal to religious mythos.) Not coincidentally they promote a science returned to the empirical, one removed from a monopoly of outsourced authority, never settled or settle-able, surely un-verified by manufactured consensus and blatant conflicts of interest, aka "The Science (TM)". For these rhetoricians credibility in their approach resides with the liberal individual to discern for themselves, just as the unenforced Nuremberg Code granted and the abandoned Hippocratic Oath assumes.
Hence - one can surmise - the institutional necessity of character assassination and impugned reputations they suffer at the hands of the life-support-dependent, drowning network-news-casters, their editors (at the behest of their P.E. owners, we must presume), those who could never afford to oppose the forever-war-machine, the social-media mind-control servo-mechanism, nor the emergent totalitarian banking hegemon, the gang of which so forcefully animates our faker than fake hive-culture more and more everyday.
It is in this context that the literate-minded-but-easily-propagandized and obedient lieutenant class (who is gullible enough to believe the NY Times, for instance) must appeal to James Marriott's nostalgia for simpler times, engage in distracting witch-hunts, and so avoid probing the real causes of our problems, which much more likely come from the top down.
TL;DR I fear James Marriott is confusing symptoms with causes and diagnosing maladies, such that the patient is to blame for his ailment, rather than the nefarious Dr. Munchausen, under whose guidance the "merely literate" suffer Stockholm Syndrome. Mine is a sympathetic concern.
I'm a proponent of the 'dumb' phone and will resist the smart phone and a majority of these apps, forever and a day. I think we're nearly post-internet at this point. The value any singular app brings is diminishing rapidly, one app is just a carbon copy of another, though they used to serve distinct purposes.
I feel we're close to seeing a mass exodus from online tethers that have worked to kick up the culture and sink us into submission. I've already heard more folks speaking about the need for books, tangible media sources, the return of third spaces that encourage face-to-face interaction. I don't feel all hope is lost, I think people are getting wise to the grift that is 'social' media, a grift that's long advertised ease of connection while delivering high-detachment instead. I think reading books, not unlike listening to vinyl, will snap back. I hope that's the case. I'm a dreamer, though, what do I know?
I’m hearing the same although I’m a dreamer too. The exodus will be triggered by an exogenous event… cyberattacks which will access all our personal financial information.
Thank you for this conversation. The arrows seem to be aimed quite exclusively at mobile phones. Yet, around the same time that these phones became widespread, something very drastic happened in reading education in the United States and many other Western countries.
To put it simply: for centuries, reading instruction focused on actually reading a lot and then talking or writing about what had been read. But gradually, much more attention was given to teaching reading strategies — particularly how to use information about text structures while reading. Students were increasingly asked questions like: What is the main idea of this paragraph, of this text? What text features can you expect given the genre?
Perhaps reading education should be an important factor in this conversation, offering an alternative to the doom scenario that sees the rise of the mobile phone as the end of reading altogether.
Jared, did you or your set-designer arrange your LED tube lights to mimic McLuhan's mic-stands at University of South Florida in 1974 intentionally? Or was it small-d divine intervention? Well, regardless, it is a great and prescient reference whether it be yours or Nature's. McLuhan's presentation is perfectly on point.
Thank you very much for sharing this piece. Permit me to add two thoughts:
(1) If I had my "druthers," I would like a cell phone with which I could receive and make calls, accept and send texts, use for its GPS (since I have always been somewhat "directionally challenged"), and perhaps access at least one email account -- and nothing else!
(2) We must also note the diminishing attention spans, particularly amongst the young. That is why "shorter is better," and writers are now encouraged to think of chapters no longer than 1,500 words. Anything over that limit might exhaust the patience of many "readers."
Again, my gratitude for this entry. The decline of reading does not bode well for any culture -- or nation.
The Alphabet vs The Goddess by Leonard Shlain should be part of this conversation. He addresses the concept that was discussed about why different cultures are affected by literacy, truth, and influence.
The Master & His Emmisary by Iain McGillchrist and Gioia's own Music: A subversive history are couple other books that have given me important insights on this subject.
This shows how low the bar is being set for youth who want to compete and succeed. Your kids don't need several degrees; it's just enough to teach them to read and to enjoy it. To read voraciously, in fiction and non-fiction, sciences and the arts. mainstream and indie, classics and contemporary. Not with a checklist in mind, but rather just to be exposed to a wide range of ideas and viewpoints. And as the article points out, reading encourages the development of logical thinking and creativity. Skills we used to mainly take for granted, but now 'enough' to vault over their peers that are staring at smartphones and repeating four-word memes..
It’s not just about people reading, but reading the same thing at the same time. I’m thinking of Benedict Anderson’s idea that a community is formed when people read the same morning newspaper at the same time feel connected, even if they never meet—this is central to his concept of “imagined communities.”
Watching the same television programme at the same time, and discussing it afterwards, also helped us join and form social communities of interest. Time-shifting changed all of that. News feeds replaced daily newspapers, podcasting replaced audio broadcasting, and on-demand video fractured our shared viewing experiences.
So it’s not just what we read and watch, but whether we do these things together—whether we are connected by the social ties enabled by synchronous time-based experiences, or fragmented into individuals who can be easily identified, located, targeted, and manipulated.
Which goes to the question I had: why didn't the advent of television destroy literacy? Or, for that matter, with the introduction of desktop computers. Smart phones and the apps that feed them seem uniquely good at sucking people's time and attention and atomizing people within a society.
Marshall McLuhan believed television didn’t destroy literacy—it transformed it. He saw TV as a “cool medium” that required active participation, reshaping how we process information and form communities.
McLuhan’s famous dictum, “the medium is the message,” captures this insight: it’s the form of a medium—not its content—that fundamentally alters human perception and social organization. In his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, he argued that each medium extends human faculties in different ways. And there’s a trade-off—for every augmentation, there’s an amputation.
So an e-book isn’t just a weightless, more convenient version of a book, despite the visual simulation. It’s a different medium that affects us differently.
Yes. Socrates famously argued that writing would make every Greek stupid. Which it did, kinda! In some ways.
I would argue that broadcast TV and the movies even improved *collective* access to literature and a sort of shared cultural understanding through dramatizations of novels etc. And as some people have noted, some long series like The Wire are very fine examples of storytelling.
Now that TV and movies are accessed through personal devices and streaming video at home, the collective experience is lost (you make this point above). I'm not sure about the storytelling quality--my 11 year old boy and I don't have time to watch much beyond some pleasant BBC shows. And, we still read together! Treasure Island in the hopper right now. Read Tom Sawyer over the summer, and more. Some books are great for an out-loud, shared experience.
On a side note, I still use books and paper in ESL classrooms, even while the public school that my son goes to seems to regard books and paper as The Enemy. Although in ESL we also use videos and other media to supplement and amuse, fundamentally the experience of reading words on paper cannot be replaced. For his part, my son gets really exhausted by all the screen time suddenly required by his middle school assignments. I'm getting ready to hit an expensive "Eject" button into private school because of what seems to me a real and ongoing hit he is taking to both cognition and joy brought on by the school district's over-reliance on screens and tech (including AI) for both content delivery and even assessment and grading.
When computers began making their way into publishing companies, I met many editors who said they often missed mistakes on the screen that they noticed immediately on the printout. It seems our brains process information from emitted light differently than from reflected light.
Verrry interesting. Makes great sense to this old guy who welcomed the early interactive computers, on which one could amend a piece of text without retyping it, but still prefers to print it out in order to read it attentively and correct it.
I would also note that hardly anybody now proofreads anything before sending it out.
I remember typewriters and Wite-Out (and the first Apple LaserWriter). I’m also of the generation that’s bothered by text that clearly hasn’t been proofread—not just emails and Substack posts, but increasingly even traditionally published material.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXJ8tKRlW3E
"Woody Allen meets Marshall McLuhan"
Tralfaz666
2.71K subscribers
303,255 views Dec 1, 2011
"...great scene from Annie Hall. There are edited versions of this scene posted elsewhere but I wanted to upload the whole thing."
Woody Allen as Alvy Singer pulls Marshall McLuhan out from behind a movie poster while waiting online at a repertory movie theater to prove to guy behind him on line how wrong the loudmouth is in defining McLuhan's theories on communication. All for the benefit of raising insecure Alvy up in eyes and estimations of his date (doesn't look like Diane Keaton, is it?)
Annie Hall (the movie and perhaps Diane Hall err Keaton salving and scorching Woody Allen's well-spent Brooklyn yootful doppleganger character Alvy Singer too) intersperses such wish-fulfillment encounters as a running gag sequence from the character's development confronting his eternally repeating social psychological or shrink-wrapped psychological hang-ups amusingly through a sociological mise en scène throughout the flashback narrative.
Woody Allen seems to tip his hand at being a yootful reader and appreciator of Lit subversives like Kurt Vonnegut's more serious novelistic and short-story satires (editions like Welcome to the Monkey House or Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Stories). Though I wouldn't share that observation anywhere within ear shot of him...
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Thanks for reminding me of that Annie Hall clip. I had forgotten that Woody Allen speaks directly to the viewer (foreshadowing “The Purple Rose of Cairo”). I can see why Marshall McLuhan never became an actor.
"why didn't the advent of television destroy literacy?"
In support of Mark McGuire's point below: it did.
Literacy wasn't obliterated by the TV, that is, turned down to zero, but its role as exclusive vehicle for socio-cultural awareness and truth acquisition was obsolesced. Literacy's meaning went from core-competency to status-contingent-gratuity, lending continued credence to the specialist and expert class, as commerce and industry require and reward. But literacy had become a gratuity and a shibboleth, a mark of cultivation and grooming.
In the main, the Moonlanding could never have 'gone over' without the TV image to render it. Even 10 years ago, the only demographic that consistently, greater than 50%, believed the Lone Assassin/Single Bullet myth of the JFK assassination was College Graduate White Men. For all their literacy, they could not perceive the obvious. They are the ones who assume the most that veracity inheres to the written word exclusively. They are most willing to not believe their eyes. Those under the sway of the TV image, however, those whose status does not derive so significantly from their literacy, aren't so credulous and easy to dupe (on the centrally important sacred-cow matters, anyway.)
The TV/smartphone screen image can make of us dupes in other ways; mostly by repetition, appeals to authority, and relying on Ashe Experiment peer influence methods. But a populace confident in its empirical abilities, unafraid of going it alone, and armed with logic is able to contend with and transcend these techniques.
I think you are missing the obvious cause of the decline in literacy: government education. It was only a matter of time before government would succeed in dumbing down the masses, thereby increasing control over citizens, especially after federal government involvement.
Let's all remember, and never forget, the intensive educational practices of Hitler's Youth. "State controlled education" is largely an oxymoron.
I think way too little emphasis is placed on WHAT people read. Just as we are encouraged to eat a well-balanced diet for good health, we should read a well-balanced diet for good mental and emotional health. Reading more and more of the same thing is a study in confirmation bias. Four years of study in college can isolate a person intellectually rather than expand their thinking.
And, PLEASE, could we all stop using 'democracy' as a synonym for freedom. It is very close to being an antonym, as in "The tyranny of the majority."
The future looks bleak, folks.
Make and model of your dumb phone, please!
I believe he uses the Qin F22!
I do! Highly recommended!
I just scanned the "post-literate society" essay and digested the interview highlights above. I apologize in advance for reading-to-refute, so to speak. But I engaged this subject matter looking for a recognition of institutional momentum, and in particular malicious intention, beyond the unintended consequences of technological determinism, so easily written off and internalized falsely as second nature. [I will not be defending the personal mobile device, however, as it is clearly a weapon for dominating the psyche and mining the soul, under the regime of total surveillance. But it is the control regime, not the device itself that renders its ubiquity destructive.]
So far in James' presentation, I see no mention of STEM policy. This seems an obvious blind-spot. It has been a federal policy priority in the U.S. for the last 3+ decades to de-prioritize, disincentivize, and devalue the art of reading. Educator and author Robert Guffey observed, "why would W. and Obama education policies, alike, remove fiction reading requirements from the youngest students, except for the fact that a population not raised on fiction is ill-equipped to discern when their leaders are lying to them or not."
Likewise, academic fashion abandoned teaching the Classics since the WWII (consult Brian Maruresku for comment), and the Deconstructionists were given the loudest, most well-indulged megaphones at the academies. "Social Studies" replaced "Civics" in the late 70s/early 80's, astutely pointed out by Frank Zappa. I can't speak to the commensurate policies in the UK, but must assume the same themes are operative, since the results are the same. These policies really make the tragic state of literacy described by Marriott and others seem like consequences of intentional design, rather than accidents of history.
Thus it seems that a more conspiratorial view might be in order, so as to diagnose this problem, rather than applying technological determinism vs nobles oblige, at best, or victim blaming, at worse, to explain it. Ultimately, the dire condition Marriott describes may not be as existential for (authentic, actual) culture as he describes; it may only pose existential threat for "official culture," the spoon-fed canned culture of slop and the blob.
Marriott's distinction between liberal-individualist results of literacy vs. collective self-destructive revolutionary effects of literacy (in France and Russia) are important. But this dichotomy should not resolve in deference to outsourced authority of paternalistic elite management. That's a false equivalency. Liberal Individualism emerged in spite of guidance by elite management, not because of it.
Let's recall that McLuhan and Bruce R. Powers in The Global Village observed that a literate society - without being armed with a robust arsenal of critical skills and techniques, such as the doctrine of logical fallacies*, for instance - is a MORE EASILY propagandized population, more impressionable, more readily programmed, more credulous and docile in the face of sophisticated power, than an illiterate society. [*Honorable mention of the ad hominem fallacy, in this context as wielded by Marriott, in the next follow up.]
The other way to discuss a post-literate society is to describe it as a re-mystified society. A mystified society is one in which the ear dominates over the eye in the matrices of sense-ratios. It is a society that co-exists harmoniously with contradiction, simultaneity, ambiguity, decentralization, out-sider-ness, and it is one that shuns the reduction of all value to the mercantile accounting house standard, so convenient to the Clearinghouse at the top that dictates value, coerces compliance, and demands cognitive conformity.
A mystified society is a less prosaic and more poetic society. At its best, a mystified society can more reliably reconcile and elevate true qualitative (subjective) value; at its worst it descends into superstitious violence when it purely abandons all objectivity. The consequences depend on how it is wielded and whether it has the sovereignty to self-direct and midwife an organic, authentic culture autonomously. As it stands, the emergent mystified society (represented largely by podcasters and substackers) is being undermined, sabotaged, abused, discredited and intentionally misunderstood by the dying, cloying, desperate 'literate' society that has lost its credibility and been exposed for a hall of mirrors designed by sociopaths and narcissists, or at least well endowed interests that lack self-awareness, humility, and wisdom.
If we commit for a moment to our McLuhan goggles/headphones, we must recognize that 200+ years of textual dogma has pathologically stuck us to the particle model of reality. It never fully grappled with wave model. It certainly could not adapt to the field model, which offers us the best mode for coping. And the textual dogma joined to the particle model remains today in total denial of a field understanding despite the fact that such a field model animates all of our dominant, dominating technology.
This gumption trap thus prejudicially denies the central role of subjectivity. And so we are stuck in this cultural hiccup that prevents competing narratives from diffident cosmologies and dissenting ontologies, those which might be capable of reconciling the central roles of the Body and Metaphor (the places where we, as a society, suffer most) to the phenomena of our experience and our epistemology. Love and Pain are both purely subjective, unmeasurable, unproveable, and, so, in the objective hegemony of the eye-centric mercantile culture, "not real." Perhaps this is why prosaic fiction of literate culture raises Love and Pain to the ultimate mysteries of existence to which all stories offer a mere calculus for approaching them, but never attaining or satisfactorily palliating. In advertising, the absence of love and the eminence of pain are the fulcrums upon which all levers of influence are set.
Within this context it is no wonder that aural rhetorical modes, which Alex Jones, Candace Owens, and Russell Brand wield with great efficacy, [since James brought them up] are being mis-attributed as the cause of our social ills. Their popular successes have required sub-rosa and blatantly overt stigma campaigns to discredit and diminish their appeal, to make people not listen to them, so as to pre-bunk their messages via ad hominem warfare. (Only a smug literate-man refuses to peek through Galileo's glass to test for himself whether the claims might be true or not, and to what degree exactly the cursing of these popular figures holds up to scrutiny.)
Whatever you may believe about these critical presenters, Jones, Brand and Owens do actually read robustly and critically - critical discernment in the face of the public record is the core of their brand. Alex Jones actually reads all of the policy papers he critiques brashly, anxiously, perhaps over-indulgently, and - I agree - so annoyingly that he discredits himself to the literate-minded personality type at the outset. His success is unfortunately predicated upon partisan polemics, choir preaching to the converted.
On some matters concerning metaphor, Jones is exceptionally sophomoric: demonology and psychedelics, recently discussed, for instance. That is not the case with Brand, and perhaps only a little bit of a problem with Owens. Nonetheless, they supply a product that is evidently in exceptionally high demand and entirely unfacilitated by the Castle-Keep of "Journalism," so-called, that tosses revelatory Assanges and whistleblowing Snowdens down the memory hole with sycophantic relish. Russell Brand promoted these heretics and look what happened to him - sex-crime cancellation based on concentrated vapors, but no substance. This is a textbook act of character assassination, so cliche that any independently-minded literate man should balk, and ask 'oh my, what IS this heretic actually saying, that I'm not supposed to indulge it?'
These (three) critical personalities, among others, whom Marriott has chosen to demonize as his examples of civic failure, have harnessed the natural appeal to aural rationality on screen and in ear in a way that is more persuasive to vast swaths of the audience, than Dan Rather-sorts and Walter Cronkite-types could ever appeal to the recently skeptical and appropriately cynical. Case in point, these three are actually anti-war, pro-accountability, and anti-establishmentarian. They are pro-body (empiricist) & pro-metaphor (via their appeal to religious mythos.) Not coincidentally they promote a science returned to the empirical, one removed from a monopoly of outsourced authority, never settled or settle-able, surely un-verified by manufactured consensus and blatant conflicts of interest, aka "The Science (TM)". For these rhetoricians credibility in their approach resides with the liberal individual to discern for themselves, just as the unenforced Nuremberg Code granted and the abandoned Hippocratic Oath assumes.
Hence - one can surmise - the institutional necessity of character assassination and impugned reputations they suffer at the hands of the life-support-dependent, drowning network-news-casters, their editors (at the behest of their P.E. owners, we must presume), those who could never afford to oppose the forever-war-machine, the social-media mind-control servo-mechanism, nor the emergent totalitarian banking hegemon, the gang of which so forcefully animates our faker than fake hive-culture more and more everyday.
It is in this context that the literate-minded-but-easily-propagandized and obedient lieutenant class (who is gullible enough to believe the NY Times, for instance) must appeal to James Marriott's nostalgia for simpler times, engage in distracting witch-hunts, and so avoid probing the real causes of our problems, which much more likely come from the top down.
TL;DR I fear James Marriott is confusing symptoms with causes and diagnosing maladies, such that the patient is to blame for his ailment, rather than the nefarious Dr. Munchausen, under whose guidance the "merely literate" suffer Stockholm Syndrome. Mine is a sympathetic concern.
I'm a proponent of the 'dumb' phone and will resist the smart phone and a majority of these apps, forever and a day. I think we're nearly post-internet at this point. The value any singular app brings is diminishing rapidly, one app is just a carbon copy of another, though they used to serve distinct purposes.
I feel we're close to seeing a mass exodus from online tethers that have worked to kick up the culture and sink us into submission. I've already heard more folks speaking about the need for books, tangible media sources, the return of third spaces that encourage face-to-face interaction. I don't feel all hope is lost, I think people are getting wise to the grift that is 'social' media, a grift that's long advertised ease of connection while delivering high-detachment instead. I think reading books, not unlike listening to vinyl, will snap back. I hope that's the case. I'm a dreamer, though, what do I know?
I’m hearing the same although I’m a dreamer too. The exodus will be triggered by an exogenous event… cyberattacks which will access all our personal financial information.
Thank you for this conversation. The arrows seem to be aimed quite exclusively at mobile phones. Yet, around the same time that these phones became widespread, something very drastic happened in reading education in the United States and many other Western countries.
To put it simply: for centuries, reading instruction focused on actually reading a lot and then talking or writing about what had been read. But gradually, much more attention was given to teaching reading strategies — particularly how to use information about text structures while reading. Students were increasingly asked questions like: What is the main idea of this paragraph, of this text? What text features can you expect given the genre?
I’m writing this from a Dutch perspective, where this shift also took place quite dramatically. At the moment, we’re re-examining whether the solution might actually be to return to reading, talking, and writing more with students — so that reading instruction once again becomes more about meaning and content (https://leesevolutie.nl/wp-content/uploads/sites/500/2025/08/NWA-ORC-2022-Full-Proposal-form-IMPACT-PLAN__Becoming-Literate-in-a-Digital-Age-1-1-1.pdf).
Perhaps reading education should be an important factor in this conversation, offering an alternative to the doom scenario that sees the rise of the mobile phone as the end of reading altogether.
Synchronistic coincidence or sage design...
Jared, did you or your set-designer arrange your LED tube lights to mimic McLuhan's mic-stands at University of South Florida in 1974 intentionally? Or was it small-d divine intervention? Well, regardless, it is a great and prescient reference whether it be yours or Nature's. McLuhan's presentation is perfectly on point.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l_ugK386QY
Thank you very much for sharing this piece. Permit me to add two thoughts:
(1) If I had my "druthers," I would like a cell phone with which I could receive and make calls, accept and send texts, use for its GPS (since I have always been somewhat "directionally challenged"), and perhaps access at least one email account -- and nothing else!
(2) We must also note the diminishing attention spans, particularly amongst the young. That is why "shorter is better," and writers are now encouraged to think of chapters no longer than 1,500 words. Anything over that limit might exhaust the patience of many "readers."
Again, my gratitude for this entry. The decline of reading does not bode well for any culture -- or nation.
We need an RSS feed for these. I'm just not going to watch/listen to them on YouTube. [Edit: forgot the "not"]
There should be an RSS feed in the sidebar now. We're working to have it listed on all podcast platforms as well for easier listening.
Awesome. Thank you! Subscribed.
Meanwhile, in France:
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTMqYvQ3m/
“The man that does not read has no advantage over the man that cannot read” - Mark Twain
The Alphabet vs The Goddess by Leonard Shlain should be part of this conversation. He addresses the concept that was discussed about why different cultures are affected by literacy, truth, and influence.
The Master & His Emmisary by Iain McGillchrist and Gioia's own Music: A subversive history are couple other books that have given me important insights on this subject.
This shows how low the bar is being set for youth who want to compete and succeed. Your kids don't need several degrees; it's just enough to teach them to read and to enjoy it. To read voraciously, in fiction and non-fiction, sciences and the arts. mainstream and indie, classics and contemporary. Not with a checklist in mind, but rather just to be exposed to a wide range of ideas and viewpoints. And as the article points out, reading encourages the development of logical thinking and creativity. Skills we used to mainly take for granted, but now 'enough' to vault over their peers that are staring at smartphones and repeating four-word memes..
When critics lament, "Nobody reads anymore," they mean, "Nobody reads what I regard as reading." I recently exposed this snobbery in 'Do You Use “British" To Mean “English” Or “Book” To Mean “Novel”? You’re Othering. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/do-you-use-british-mean-english-book-novel-youre-paul-stregevsky-znbze/