"If you’ve ... been concerned with the decline of reading as a leisure activity, or you’re wondering what happens if a culture abandons literacy, this is a conversation for you. ... ranging from the rise and fall of literacy, the causes behind it ..., and what this could mean for politics. ...
"[S]tatistics, which show pretty consistently—... and virtually everywhere—that reading is in quite severe decline. ... [A] third of UK adults have given up reading for pleasure. ... UK reports shocking and dispiriting falls in children reading for pleasure. Researchers .... found a 40% drop in reading for pleasure in the last 20 years in America. [A]n OECD report at the end of last year found rates of literacy were falling or stagnating across the developed world ...[P]ublishing’s been dying for 100 years. But ... even college graduates have by and large abandoned reading for pleasure after they leave university. ... And the most talented and the most ambitious students [themselves] now read almost the same as the least talented students who have often not really read that much. ...
"[I]f we were to abandon literacy, you might expect some devastating consequences, or at least the world would be quite different than the world we’ve become used to living in, especially in the last 500 years when literacy became a widespread phenomenon. ... if writing transforms consciousness, how does television or broadcast transform consciousness? What do we lose when we move towards rapidity and breadth over slowness and depth?"~ from an interview with Jared Henderson and James Marriot on 'The Post-Literate Society'
RELATED: 1. Marriot's post on The dawn of the post-literate society ...
RELATED: 2. Conversely, author Jonathan Rose reflects 20 years later on his book, first published in 2001, uncovering which books people read, how they educated themselves, and what they knew; from the preindustrial era to the twentieth century:
'If I today had a chance to rewrite [my book] The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes ["the classic book about auto-didacticism, especially in the UK"], would I revise anything? I have changed my mind about one important issue. In 2001 I assumed that the autodidact tradition died out after 1945, but it is today very much alive and kicking. Twenty-first century book clubs – untold thousands of them in the UK and US – are the successors to the nineteenth-century 'mutual improvement societies.' These are seminars without professors, where students democratically select their readings and educate each other.
"The Internet is, for all its flaws, the greatest machine for self-education ever invented, and it does far more good than harm. The fact that the powerful and wealthy want to control and censor it is a testimonial to its immeasurable social value. When economic inequality is breaking all records, when the media is concentrated in ever fewer hands and deeply complicit with corporations and governments, when universities create vast bureaucracies devoted to shutting down debate, when Western liberals have abandoned liberalism, online discussion groups and websites must be preserved as islands of free thought and individual self-direction."
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