we are not becoming illiterate

we are becoming post-literate

you can watch this piece on youtube :)

what do i mean by post-literate? i’m not making the argument that people are completely ceasing to read. they are not. more words are produced and technically consumed today than at any point in the history of civilisation. by the raw measures (things like words per day, text messages sent, articles published, characters typed) we are the most verbally active human beings who have ever existed.

what i’m actually describing is something subtler and, i think, more consequential than illiteracy. it is a change in the relationship between human minds and written language; and this looks like a shift in the cognitive habits and expectations that govern how most people encounter, process, and retain information expressed in words. you can be functionally literate in the conventional sense - able to read, able to write - and still be post-literate in the sense i mean. the question is not whether you can read. it is what happens inside you when you do, and whether that process still produces the effects that reading, historically, was responsible for.

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what literacy does to the mind

reading is not a natural cognitive capacity. this is the foundational insight of maryanne wolf’s decades of research on the reading brain.

unlike language, which is encoded in dedicated neural architecture that develops in virtually every human being exposed to social contact, reading has to be learned. and not merely as a skill, in the way that swimming or driving is learned, but as a neurological technology: a set of processes that, when practised with sufficient depth and regularity, physically rewire the brain. the “reading circuit,” as wolf calls it (the complex network of neural regions recruited for deep reading, including areas originally evolved for object recognition, language processing, and motor planning) does not come pre-installed. we have to assemble it, slowly, through years of practice, and it can be disrupted by changes in that practice.

what this circuit, once assembled, makes possible is extraordinary. not just decoding words, but the full cognitive architecture of what wolf calls deep reading: the capacity to make inferences beyond what is explicitly stated, and to inhabit a perspective radically different from your own, and to slow down inside complex argument and follow it to its conclusion. these are, wolf argues, the cognitive foundation of critical though and of the kind of sustained reasoning that produces both scientific advancement and moral progress.

and they are specific to reading. not to language, to reading. the oral transmission of information, which was the dominant mode for most of human history, produces different cognitive habits. the shift from oral to literate culture was therefore a reorganisation of how minds engaged with ideas.

walter ong, the philosopher and literary theorist who spent his career mapping this transition, showed how the internalisation of alphabetic writing transformed not just what people knew but how they thought. it produced the capacity for sustained solitary thought and the linearity and sequential logic that literate cultures came to regard as rationality itself.

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what is changing now

marshall mcluhan argued that “the medium is the message”, by which he meant that the form through which information reaches us shapes our cognitive habits far more fundamentally than the content does. television, he thought, was producing minds structured for television: fragmented, image-based, emotionally immediate, hostile to the sustained linear argument that print demanded.

he was right, and he was writing in the 1960s. the technology he was describing looks quaint now.

what the current moment has produced is not quite what ong or mcluhan anticipated, though both of them got closer than most. ong described what he called “secondary orality”, which he viewed as a return, through electronic media, to some features of oral culture: its communal participation, its present-tense focus, its emotional immediacy. but the secondary orality he described was still largely chosen and directed by humans. what we have now is something ong’s framework doesn’t capture: an information environment that is not only oral-participatory in character but algorithmically curated, in which the specific content any individual encounters is selected not by their own judgment or by a human editorial process but by a recommendation system optimised for engagement.

the result is a relationship with information that is structurally different from anything that has preceded it, and different in a specific way: it is optimised for the reader’s existing preferences and emotional reactions rather than for the expansion of them. the literate reader, moving through a book or an argued essay, is required to follow a sequence of thought not of their choosing. the algorithmic reader encounters, with every scroll, a succession of content items specifically selected to feel immediately relevant, emotionally engaging, and satisfying to encounter. it is content calibrated, at scale, to produce the neurological signature of interest without the cognitive labour that used to be required to generate it.

this is the post-literate condition as i understand it: not the absence of words, but the presence of an entirely new relationship to them; one in which the expectation of difficulty has been removed and the patience required for sustained linear argument has been systematically not reinforced. the reading brain, like any neural circuit that is not exercised, is slowly dismantling itself.

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the evidence from the reading brain

what i find most striking about this is not a study about screen time or attention spans. it is an observation from wolf herself, one of the world’s leading experts on the neuroscience of reading, about her own mind.

after a year of immersion in digital reading (think: emails, articles, feeds; the normal texture of academic life in the twenty-first century) wolf sat down to read hermann broch’s the death of virgil, a novel she had read and loved, and found she could not do it at the pace she once had. the reading brain she had spent decades developing had been, through shifts in her daily practice, disrupted. the circuits were intact but the fluency had degraded.

she describes reaching the end of a page and realising she had retained almost nothing. she describes the experience that i think millions of people recognise from their own reading but rarely articulate clearly: the growing difficulty of staying inside a text that does not immediately reward you.

naomi baron at american university found similar patterns in her research on digital versus print reading: students reading on screens were more likely to skim, to skip to conclusions, to resist the effort of following sequential argument. when asked about their own reading behaviour, they reported knowing that they weren’t reading deeply but feeling unable to sustain the alternative. the habit and expectation had changed. the text hadn’t.

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what is being lost at the population level

i want to try to be quite precise here, because i think the imprecise version (“young people don’t read anymore”) is both factually wrong and analytically useless.

what is being lost, at the population level and at a pace that i think we do not yet have adequate language for, is the specific cognitive infrastructure that deep literacy built: the expectation that understanding requires effort and time and that difficulty is not a sign that the material is wrong for you but a necessary condition of genuine engagement with it.

this infrastructure is the foundation of the capacity for sustained critical reasoning. it allows for the epistemic patience that makes it possible to genuinely understand a position you disagree with rather than simply encountering a summary of it. these are not, and should never be viewed as academic luxuries, but instead as the cognitive machinery of democratic self-governance and scientific reasoning.

neil postman, in “amusing ourselves to death,” argued in 1985 that the shift from a typography-based public discourse to a television-based one had already produced a culture in which the complex, sequential, argued proposition (of the kind that could be expressed in a book or a serious essay) was losing its authority to the image-based, emotionally immediate, entertainment-oriented logic of television. And it has only worsened since.

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the irony that sits at the centre of all of this

the post-literate society is not a society without text, but a society drowning in it. more words are produced daily than the entire written output of several centuries combined and more information available to any individual than any previous generation could have imagined. we have access to more “content” than any one person could consume in a thousand lifetimes.

the problem is the quality of the relationship.

a society can be saturated with words and still have a post-literate cognitive culture, in the same way that a person can spend an hour in an art gallery looking at their phone and still claim to have visited the gallery. the engagement that the exposure was supposed to produce is largely absent.

what has happened, i think, is that the form of information has changed faster than our understanding of what form does. we have treated the shift from print to digital, and from chosen to algorithmically curated, as a change in delivery mechanism as if the difference between reading a book and scrolling a feed were roughly the same as the difference between a hardback and a paperback. it is not. the medium is the message. the form is producing minds structured for the form. and the form is not structured for the cognitive capacities that we continue to demand in our universities, our institutions, and our public life.

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why i think about this in the context of learning

i make content about learning. my entire project is, in some sense, built on the premise that the appetite for genuine understanding is still there and that it can be reached, engaged, and sustained, even in a media environment optimised for the opposite.

and i believe that. i have seen enough evidence of it in the responses i get, in the things people write to me, in the communities that form around serious intellectual content, to believe it genuinely rather than as an act of faith.

but i also think that the effort required to reach that appetite (by this I mean the effort to bridge between the cognitive habits that the information environment reinforces and the cognitive habits that genuine learning demands) is greater than it has ever been. and that it will continue to increase. the students i write for are the first generation whose primary relationship with information was formed in the post-literate mode, and they are being asked to perform acts of sustained, effortful, patient reasoning in institutions that were designed for minds formed very differently.

this is not a reason for pessimism. wolf is clear on one thing that i think matters enormously: the reading brain, once formed, is not simply lost.

it is disrupted. and disrupted circuits can be rebuilt.

the neuroplasticity that made deep reading possible in the first place - the capacity of the brain to rewire itself through practice - does not disappear in adulthood.

the question is whether enough people understand what is at stake to make that effort consciously, rather than discovering what they’ve lost only when the task demands it and they find themselves, like wolf with broch, at the bottom of a page with almost nothing to show for it.

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erin x