Before the printing press, transcribing books was an arduous task, and not many people in society were able to read in the first place. After the press was invented, however, literacy rose substantially, and while reading was still often relegated to wealthy elites, people had much easier access to pamphlets, newspapers, and books. Thus, we saw the emergence of a much more literate society. Novelists like Charles Dickens achieved celebrity status. Newspapers and periodicals exploded.

But if there was such a thing as a “pre-literate” society (which accounted for much of human history), does that entail the coming of a “post-literate society”? Given the new revolutions in digital technology and artificial intelligence, a good number of public intellectuals and writers think we’re essentially already dealing with that hand of cards. We are heading away from literacy and towards something a world mediated by the internet in which we divide ourselves into tribes and echo chambers. Are they right?

Mary Harrington, a journalist from the UK, is one of the most interesting voices on the subject of post-literacy and is writing a book on the topic set to release in 2027 called The King and the Swarm. In an interview with Modern Age, she talks about new technologies like the smartphone and AI as extensions of the human self and questions how that might affect our relationship to knowledge and ideas. She says,

I bring up the medieval art of memory as a quite precise analogy for the kind of thing we need to be attentive to when we think about how something like a smartphone, for example, or the use of ChatGPT changes our relationship to our ideas. It changes how we retain ideas, what ideas we retain, and how we structure our approach to thinking. I think if it’s possible for the loss of something like the art of memory to create so fundamental a cultural gulf between different eras, then it stands to reason that an equivalent shift in our relationship to our storage and retrieval of ideas could very well have an equivalently transformative effect, which could be good, or it could just sever the world that is from the world that will be. 

Another way to think about this is that our technology essentially allows us to “offload” our memories to machines. There is less pressure to memorize directions to a new place if Google Maps can take me there. Similarly, with infinite information at our fingertips, it is tempting to retain less information in our own heads. Past generations, however, like those in the medieval era, had to depend much more on memory in order to retain and pass on knowledge.

The journalist Rose Horowitch wrote a long deep dive on the apparent crisis of literacy for The Atlantic titled “The End of Reading is Here.” Horowitch has already written on this topic for the magazine but seems to have put all of her best efforts and breadth of reporting into this new report. She does a good job demonstrating the benefits of a highly literate society. Riffing off the work of scholars Walter Ong and Neil Postman, Horowitch writes,

“More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness,” Walter J. Ong, a historian and Jesuit priest, wrote in his 1982 book, Orality and Literacy. He argued that literacy created the conditions for inner concentration, extended focus, and logical deduction. It allowed for a new kind of rational, linear, and analytical thought.

Literacy cultivates civil dialogue and the development of complex ideas. What happens if we lack literacy, then?

Harrington, for one, is cautious to give any specific prediction. And not everyone agrees with Horowitch’s bleak diagnosis of the state of reading. Joel Miller, a popular book reviewer on Substack, wrote a piece noting how despite the common idea that people in decades past were more sophisticated and literary than we are, bad pulp novels were snatched and bought by the millions. Writers like Hemingway, Steinbeck, Melville, and Faulkner have endured largely because of the quality of their work, but many of the great authors barely sold a book in their own lifetimes. Thus, print can be a double-edged sword, leading to great novels and propaganda pamphlets alike. Miller writes,

Yes, print produced everything from the Federalist Papers to the Pentagon Papers; it also produced yellow journalism, eugenics and race science, libel, red scares, and oceans of formula fiction arguably worse than the dregs of a discount streaming service. 

Despite good reasons to be optimistic about reading’s ultimate survival, Horowitch and Harrington are putting their fingers on something real and concerning. Even for someone like me, who grew up reading books, the allure of digital distraction is often overpowering. Kids raised on iPads and TikTok won’t fare well when their professors ask them to read a Dickens novel. Of course, will the professor even dare ask them to read at all? I sincerely hope they do. If parents and universities stop instilling a love of reading in the next generation, who will?