Postliterate

Those who bemoan the self-absorption of the postliterate generation will be happy to know that before the self-indulgent, amateurish blog there was the self-indulgent, amateurish log.

There were noises made briefly, a few years ago, about the idea that we were living in a post-literate world, in which the ability to make sense out of written words was somehow redundant, but those days are gone: words are more important than they ever were: […].

Writing in The Financial Times, John Burn-Murdoch links this to the rise of a post-literate culture in which we consume most of our media through smartphones, eschewing dense text in favor of images and short-form video.

This is a period that some people call post-literate. Reading is in decline. Standardized-test scores are in decline.

All democratic politics assume a literate population; people who are willing to think in abstract terms about the kind of world they want to live in. […] A post-literate world will be unreasonable, irrational, full of anger and madness, and people eating each other in the streets.