“The analogy that’s often made [in comparison to ‘our slop-ridden, brain-rotting [postliterate] environment, as James Marriott, the author of, The New Dark Ages describes it], is the flooding of our nutrition environment in the ’60s and ’70s with junk food. It made a lot of people very fat. It also gave us marathon runners, gym bunnies, and a culture of people who are actively resisting it. And I think there will probably be a culture of active cognitive resistance [to the fact, as Marriott describes it, we’re reading long-form text less, we’re becoming less proficient in interpreting it, and we’re becoming less at home with it].
This
(Side note: I’m the dad of a dyslexic kid, and one of many wonderful eye-openers she has offered me, this one in the form of a learning assessment conducted in grade school, is that all forms of reading - sight, ear, touch - are equally valuable. There’s a fascinating discussion I won’t get into here about the various reasons we center sight reading and offer lesser assessments to other forms.)
The only part of it I’d love to have a quibble over with the author is his seeming assessment that modernity and the Enlightenment have proven unalloyed goods.
The portion I found most interesting - distressing, frankly, but also unsurprising - was Marriott’s description of how the shift away from written content towards visual is having a downstream negative on democracy.
It left me to wonder, though, about whether there might be ways for us to, rather than pressing for a return to reading - as Marriott observes, media never goes backwards - to instead seek ways to weave together the best of attributes and outcomes of both literate and postliterate - which rhymes in ways with preliterate, and pre-modern, society - discourse?
