From Illiteracy to Idiocracy?

Time was when it was books that people were deep into. Now it’s smartphones with universities now complaining that their students have difficulty reading

James Marriott’s recent post The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society went viral, 

arguing that social media represented a revolution not dissimilar to Gutenberg’s 

invention of the printing press

Where readers had once read “intensively”, spending their lives reading and re-reading 

two or three books, the reading revolution popularised a new kind of “extensive” reading. 

People read everything they could get their hands on: newspapers, journals, history, 

philosophy, science, theology and literature. Books, pamphlets and periodicals poured 

off the presses.

As Postman pointed out, it is no accident, that the growth of print culture in the 

eighteenth century was associated with the growing prestige of reason, hostility to 

superstition, the birth of capitalism, and the rapid development of science. Other 

historians have linked the eighteenth century explosion of literacy to the 

Enlightenment, the birth of human rights, the arrival of democracy and even the 

beginnings of the industrial revolution.  

Now, we are living through the counter-revolution. More than three hundred years after the reading revolution ushered in a new era of human knowledge, books are dying. Numerous studies show that reading is in free-fall. Even the most pessimistic twentieth-century critics of the screen-age would have struggled to predict the scale of the present crisis.

In America, reading for pleasure has fallen by forty per cent in the last twenty years. In the UK, more than a third of adults say they have given up reading. The National Literacy Trust reports “shocking and dispiriting” falls in children’s reading, which is now at its lowest level on record. The publishing industry is in crisis: as the author Alexander Larman writes, “books that once would have sold in the tens, even hundreds, of thousands are now lucky to sell in the mid-four figures.” The average person now spends seven hours a day staring at a screen. For Gen Z the figure is nine hours. A recent article in The Times found that on average modern students are destined to spend 25 years of their waking lives scrolling on screens.

and prompted this article from Niall Ferguson

Earlier this month Dan Williams asked whether the social media wasn’t destroying 

democracy

Because algorithms and other platform features are designed to capture people’s attention and keep them scrolling, they amplify content that is sensationalist, bias-confirming, and divisive. This viral content then infects public opinion and political debate, driving large numbers of people to adopt misinformed and hateful ideas hostile to liberal democracy. I’ve criticised this narrative. Although social media platforms undoubtedly reward low-quality discourse, narratives that place significant weight on this fact to explain recent political developments are misguided. They rest on implausibly rosy pictures of legacy media and pre-social media history. They’re not well-supported by scientific studies. They overstate the public’s manipulability and underestimate organic demand for low-quality content. And they conveniently overlook more consequential causes of anti-establishment backlash, including the objective gap between the cultural preferences of elites and those of many voters. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to see no connection between social media and the rise of populism. To make sense of this connection, however, we should focus less on social media as a dysfunctional technology and more on its status as a democratising technology.

Nathan Witkin has a different view which he elaborates here

But the argument is best summed up in a video I came across recently which first beautifully summarises the plot of an older film set a couple of decades ago. The film portrays an America where the average IQ has sunk to an abysmal level not least through the influence of commercial advertising. 

I don’t particularly recommend its viewing but, for the masochists amongst you, the film itself is called “Idiocracy” and can be seen here