I just wanted to say, as a former reddit dweller, I've gotten overly-used to argumentative debates and wanted to get away from that. Then, while I like the more considerate tone of Substack, I've grown weary of the other pendulum swing where I find a lot of LitStack to contain a lot of glad-handing and obsequious cheerleading of friends (an understandable impulse among friends, but can get tedious when I'm just a reader outside of the scene). Far too many Substack notes/comments that carry an unwelcome air of LinkedIn.
So with that preamble, I just wanted to say this was a really refreshing piece that dissects a friend's work. It's a spirited counter-argument to Marriot's book that doesn't bear the classic, now-banal Internet snark. This review/dissection broadened the questions posed by the book/original substack article. Even myself, who bemoans daily the constant reels and TikToks I see from others on my commute, have had niggling questions with Marriot's points (my go-to being "didn't the printing press kinda set off a bunch of religious wars and dodgy pamphlets?” lol). This kind of good-faith critique and rejoinder is what I've been craving and expected from Substack. I welcome more of it around these LitStack corners.
I’m not sure the argument that a decline in reading necessarily points to a decline in civilization really holds water. Europe became extraordinarily literate by the late 19th and early 20th centuries, yet that period also gave us nationalism, imperialism, two world wars, fascism, and some of the worst atrocities in modern history. Literacy and deep reading are obviously valuable, but history doesn’t seem to support a simple equation of more reading with a wiser or more humane society.
And how much does long-form reading really tell us on its own? Reading Fifty Shades of Grey or a John Grisham novel is still long-form reading, but the format itself doesn’t magically make the content profound.
Besides, I probably read more words now than I ever have. I read all day on my phone. It’s almost obscene how much short-form content I imbibe. What we’re really going through is a change in how we consume information, from books and print to digital media. The more important question seems to be the quality of the content, not the vessel it arrives in. If anything, good content has never been easier to access. Maybe quality, discernment, and depth of engagement should be the focus rather than modality itself. But I get it you have a provocative title to engage users on clicking your content. Cheers
I suspect the real literacy issue facing us is more the decline of writing rather than reading. By which I mean the use of writing to focus, clarify and communicate our thinking. Larry McEnerny at the Chicago School of Writing has wonderful lectures (now on YouTube) which emphasise the importance of writing in deep, sustained thinking. AI cannot read for us, but increasingly it’s being used to leapfrog over the crucial steps between having a general thought in your head that feels vaguely coherent and being able to construct it from all the complex parts so it fits together solidly when put down in the harsh light of day. In the words of the much-missed Tom Stoppard, we need literacy to be able to write cricket bats.
I am concerned about reduced reading in terms of its effect on the ability to of people to write and even speak, using the richness of language. My family, including my children and grandchildren are readers, but I am starting to see more use of incorrect words to describe things, and in business, so many people who have poor writing skills including vocabulary, grammar and spelling. Good communication requires that the transmitter and receivers of information are on the same 'page'. Many problems in the word can be caused by poor communication and misunderstandings.
However I also note that we and our cultures and expression change. From cave drawing to days that only the clergy and intellectuals could read and write, and could in fact easily control the messages, to now the mass adoption of the use of AI. If we are losing skills including the ability to ask the right questions and understand the answers, AI may not be a lot of help. Could this lead us full circle to where reading, writing and effective communication become the tools of an enlightened class, who represent a small subset of society. I wonder what that would look like, especially given how disinformation is also becoming rife everywhere you look.
I’m reminded of the line from Max Beerbohm: “Formerly the illiterate could not read.”
What I find surprising is how many people refuse to engage with any books before, say, Jane Austen. I would attribute much of that to the abandonment of the King James Version and the classics.
I’m hopeful that the onslaught of AI will encourage a larger, more consciously literary minority.
The King James Version was an extremely flawed translation and deserved to be abandoned. Holding on to something that is wrong simply because it feels comforting or sounds pretty is silly.
Some pretty noxious elitist fumes coming from the book. Equating the decline of literacy (debatable in and of itself) with the decline of democracy (also highly controversial) is kind of ridiculous. The vast majority of citizens in a modern democracy do two things politically. Vote and serve on juries. Each of which can be done with mostly an average high school education. I would include paying taxes, but that doesn't require much literacy in the academic sense. The political class and their close cousins, the activist class, are tiny little specks of the demos in most Western countries.
Now, if you are arguing that those people that will take the reins in a democracy aren't literate enough, that's much different. And that may have more traction. But most of these think pieces seem to center around people not reading the right kinds of books though. And so the right results aren't being reached. As determined by certain upper echelons of the creative/professional managerial class.
The other major bias here is that professional writers (who are any good anyways) are also professional readers by trade. Sophisticated literacy is the lifeblood of the profession. Not so for most of non-writer population. A nice to have (if there's time/inclination/opportunity etc.).
Nostalgia is fun, but ultimately, it is merely fashion. And the apocalypse always sells.
"O man full of arts, to one it is given to create the things of art, and to another to judge what measure of harm and of profit they have for those that shall employ them. And so it is that you, by reasons of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring, have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows."
I would disagree here. What a post Gutenberg Society means is that the nuisances of the arguments are blunted out and suppressed by popular voices. It is the suppressing of the marginalized, the villanification of the "others".
What we are observing in --previously thought of -- stable secular democracies is a barometer for the times to come. The rise of alt-right and radicalized ideologies can't be ignored or brushed under the carpet. We can't ignore these factors as separate from the intellectual discourse, or the “collective consciousness".
The anti-feminist movement in shape of toxic masculinity, manosphere and the incel movement is very much part of the post Gutenberg Society, and Techno Fuedalism.
The way a pre-democracy, pre-modernization debates are being flaunted around and very much part of the popular opinion or content on digital platforms controlled by the richest few in the World is by no means an accident. It is part of the overall package.
Furthermore, the rise of the anti-left rhetorics, the anti-trade unionist mindset, the anti-workers narratives are a hollistic package that comes with such a society.
Furthermore, the video games, YouTube videos, the social media algorithms, reinforce the " repackaged “ ultra Orthodox views of the alt-right in a new, subtle way. The result of which is the Tate brothers, Trumpism, AFD in Germany, and the trend of overall far right pull on the Western society, that has undone the democratic victories of the past.
Anti-intellectualism was the weapon of the elites. As Chomsky put it, the culture of reading " pulp fiction”, or trade unions having conversations regarding complex socio-political issues has been replaced by the cheap flak praded around by tech Fuedalism with the power of their algorithms.
The loss of reading and dwelling on complex topics by deep study, and through the lense of objective truth instead of rheotric is increasingly becoming the past. A society's narrative formed through Karma hording or rage bait is quite essentially going to become fragmented and populist in nature.
I think most people look at reading as strictly something either pleasurable or productive, rarely for personal enlightenment. Not that they deny it carries that function, or that that function is valuable to them, but that it simply isn’t worth the trouble of engaging in literature that places upon them too great a psychological burden to understand and apply it.
I speak of course from personal experience; that was very much my attitude in college and post college life. It wasn’t until I realized the desire for that enlightenment, that the burden was lifted and replaced by the thrill of a challenge. I want to grow. I read philosophy and novels nowadays, not so much because I’ll use them, but because through them I’ll become something greater at close of that last page than at the opening of the first.
For most people, the most pressing aspects of life—work and family—on their face require only a shallow experience in reading. Even moreso with classic literature. Digital entertainment is entirely sufficient for gaps in attention left in between. Of course, this entirely precluding the possibility that people use tech as mediums of enlightenment, as pointed out in the article. And, like you, I choose to be hopeful of the future, that there will always be those people who value the knowledge most keenly disseminated through the (digital or otherwise) printed word.
Oliver's Spain question is the right lever. What he and Marriott share is a framing of reading as delivery mechanism for the cognitive values democracy requires -- which may be what keeps the question difficult. An even more useful distinction: reading as a delivery system for ideas (where AI replication is plausible, grounding Oliver's optimism) versus reading as practice that trains a particular kind of attention -- patient, dwelling, argument-following. Spain may differ not in smartphone exposure but in how reading is socially embedded: a story about attentional formation rather than information transfer. If that's right, Oliver's open question -- how much of one does democracy need -- turns on what democracy actually requires: citizens who received the right content, or citizens who developed the capacity for sustained reasoning. I don't think those converge as neatly as either pessimism or optimism assumes.
I have not read Marriot's book so I will not comment on it. From this excellent review it does sound like Marriot presents a similar argument to the "Gutenberg Parenthesis" by Jeff Jarvis. I loved Jarvis' book as it did not fall into doom and gloom scenarios. Instead it argued that we've left the parenthesis that the printing press created and are transitioning to a new mode of communication and literacy with its new, unique opportunities and challenges. I came away with the impression that Jarvis isn't terribly excited about the transition but that he's not a fatalist about the future. I want to read Marriot now to see how he compares to Jarvis' ideas.
Nice article. There is a relationship between literacy level and the quality of democratic governance. A democracy is only as good as the literary level of the electorates and that was why the likes of Auguste Comte advocated for a new form of government hinged on skills, knowledge and science (what he called sociocracy; a government of things). Although this model of his was criticised as it could lead to authoritarianism, spiritual despotism, technocratic rule and manipulation that viewpoint of his reveals something worthwhile "Literacy is an important requirement for a healthy democracy. Reading which is part of literacy cannot end, like you have rightly pointed out, the forms(platforms) might have changed from print to electronic and now digital but the information needed for enlightenment and empowerment are still available, the challenge is what type of information are we paying attention to.
I just wanted to say, as a former reddit dweller, I've gotten overly-used to argumentative debates and wanted to get away from that. Then, while I like the more considerate tone of Substack, I've grown weary of the other pendulum swing where I find a lot of LitStack to contain a lot of glad-handing and obsequious cheerleading of friends (an understandable impulse among friends, but can get tedious when I'm just a reader outside of the scene). Far too many Substack notes/comments that carry an unwelcome air of LinkedIn.
So with that preamble, I just wanted to say this was a really refreshing piece that dissects a friend's work. It's a spirited counter-argument to Marriot's book that doesn't bear the classic, now-banal Internet snark. This review/dissection broadened the questions posed by the book/original substack article. Even myself, who bemoans daily the constant reels and TikToks I see from others on my commute, have had niggling questions with Marriot's points (my go-to being "didn't the printing press kinda set off a bunch of religious wars and dodgy pamphlets?” lol). This kind of good-faith critique and rejoinder is what I've been craving and expected from Substack. I welcome more of it around these LitStack corners.
I’m not sure the argument that a decline in reading necessarily points to a decline in civilization really holds water. Europe became extraordinarily literate by the late 19th and early 20th centuries, yet that period also gave us nationalism, imperialism, two world wars, fascism, and some of the worst atrocities in modern history. Literacy and deep reading are obviously valuable, but history doesn’t seem to support a simple equation of more reading with a wiser or more humane society.
And how much does long-form reading really tell us on its own? Reading Fifty Shades of Grey or a John Grisham novel is still long-form reading, but the format itself doesn’t magically make the content profound.
Besides, I probably read more words now than I ever have. I read all day on my phone. It’s almost obscene how much short-form content I imbibe. What we’re really going through is a change in how we consume information, from books and print to digital media. The more important question seems to be the quality of the content, not the vessel it arrives in. If anything, good content has never been easier to access. Maybe quality, discernment, and depth of engagement should be the focus rather than modality itself. But I get it you have a provocative title to engage users on clicking your content. Cheers
I suspect the real literacy issue facing us is more the decline of writing rather than reading. By which I mean the use of writing to focus, clarify and communicate our thinking. Larry McEnerny at the Chicago School of Writing has wonderful lectures (now on YouTube) which emphasise the importance of writing in deep, sustained thinking. AI cannot read for us, but increasingly it’s being used to leapfrog over the crucial steps between having a general thought in your head that feels vaguely coherent and being able to construct it from all the complex parts so it fits together solidly when put down in the harsh light of day. In the words of the much-missed Tom Stoppard, we need literacy to be able to write cricket bats.
I am concerned about reduced reading in terms of its effect on the ability to of people to write and even speak, using the richness of language. My family, including my children and grandchildren are readers, but I am starting to see more use of incorrect words to describe things, and in business, so many people who have poor writing skills including vocabulary, grammar and spelling. Good communication requires that the transmitter and receivers of information are on the same 'page'. Many problems in the word can be caused by poor communication and misunderstandings.
However I also note that we and our cultures and expression change. From cave drawing to days that only the clergy and intellectuals could read and write, and could in fact easily control the messages, to now the mass adoption of the use of AI. If we are losing skills including the ability to ask the right questions and understand the answers, AI may not be a lot of help. Could this lead us full circle to where reading, writing and effective communication become the tools of an enlightened class, who represent a small subset of society. I wonder what that would look like, especially given how disinformation is also becoming rife everywhere you look.
This is such a balanced and thorough counter-argument. Really enjoyed reading it.
A well-balanced counter argument.
I’m reminded of the line from Max Beerbohm: “Formerly the illiterate could not read.”
What I find surprising is how many people refuse to engage with any books before, say, Jane Austen. I would attribute much of that to the abandonment of the King James Version and the classics.
I’m hopeful that the onslaught of AI will encourage a larger, more consciously literary minority.
The King James Version was an extremely flawed translation and deserved to be abandoned. Holding on to something that is wrong simply because it feels comforting or sounds pretty is silly.
Thank you for this really thoughtful and nuanced appraisal. Much to think about here.
Some pretty noxious elitist fumes coming from the book. Equating the decline of literacy (debatable in and of itself) with the decline of democracy (also highly controversial) is kind of ridiculous. The vast majority of citizens in a modern democracy do two things politically. Vote and serve on juries. Each of which can be done with mostly an average high school education. I would include paying taxes, but that doesn't require much literacy in the academic sense. The political class and their close cousins, the activist class, are tiny little specks of the demos in most Western countries.
Now, if you are arguing that those people that will take the reins in a democracy aren't literate enough, that's much different. And that may have more traction. But most of these think pieces seem to center around people not reading the right kinds of books though. And so the right results aren't being reached. As determined by certain upper echelons of the creative/professional managerial class.
The other major bias here is that professional writers (who are any good anyways) are also professional readers by trade. Sophisticated literacy is the lifeblood of the profession. Not so for most of non-writer population. A nice to have (if there's time/inclination/opportunity etc.).
Nostalgia is fun, but ultimately, it is merely fashion. And the apocalypse always sells.
"O man full of arts, to one it is given to create the things of art, and to another to judge what measure of harm and of profit they have for those that shall employ them. And so it is that you, by reasons of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring, have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows."
I would disagree here. What a post Gutenberg Society means is that the nuisances of the arguments are blunted out and suppressed by popular voices. It is the suppressing of the marginalized, the villanification of the "others".
What we are observing in --previously thought of -- stable secular democracies is a barometer for the times to come. The rise of alt-right and radicalized ideologies can't be ignored or brushed under the carpet. We can't ignore these factors as separate from the intellectual discourse, or the “collective consciousness".
The anti-feminist movement in shape of toxic masculinity, manosphere and the incel movement is very much part of the post Gutenberg Society, and Techno Fuedalism.
The way a pre-democracy, pre-modernization debates are being flaunted around and very much part of the popular opinion or content on digital platforms controlled by the richest few in the World is by no means an accident. It is part of the overall package.
Furthermore, the rise of the anti-left rhetorics, the anti-trade unionist mindset, the anti-workers narratives are a hollistic package that comes with such a society.
Furthermore, the video games, YouTube videos, the social media algorithms, reinforce the " repackaged “ ultra Orthodox views of the alt-right in a new, subtle way. The result of which is the Tate brothers, Trumpism, AFD in Germany, and the trend of overall far right pull on the Western society, that has undone the democratic victories of the past.
Anti-intellectualism was the weapon of the elites. As Chomsky put it, the culture of reading " pulp fiction”, or trade unions having conversations regarding complex socio-political issues has been replaced by the cheap flak praded around by tech Fuedalism with the power of their algorithms.
The loss of reading and dwelling on complex topics by deep study, and through the lense of objective truth instead of rheotric is increasingly becoming the past. A society's narrative formed through Karma hording or rage bait is quite essentially going to become fragmented and populist in nature.
History shows us where that path might lead.
I think most people look at reading as strictly something either pleasurable or productive, rarely for personal enlightenment. Not that they deny it carries that function, or that that function is valuable to them, but that it simply isn’t worth the trouble of engaging in literature that places upon them too great a psychological burden to understand and apply it.
I speak of course from personal experience; that was very much my attitude in college and post college life. It wasn’t until I realized the desire for that enlightenment, that the burden was lifted and replaced by the thrill of a challenge. I want to grow. I read philosophy and novels nowadays, not so much because I’ll use them, but because through them I’ll become something greater at close of that last page than at the opening of the first.
For most people, the most pressing aspects of life—work and family—on their face require only a shallow experience in reading. Even moreso with classic literature. Digital entertainment is entirely sufficient for gaps in attention left in between. Of course, this entirely precluding the possibility that people use tech as mediums of enlightenment, as pointed out in the article. And, like you, I choose to be hopeful of the future, that there will always be those people who value the knowledge most keenly disseminated through the (digital or otherwise) printed word.
I preferred his work when he used to write about losing his wristwatch up a cow's bottom on some dilapidated Yorkshire farm
Oliver's Spain question is the right lever. What he and Marriott share is a framing of reading as delivery mechanism for the cognitive values democracy requires -- which may be what keeps the question difficult. An even more useful distinction: reading as a delivery system for ideas (where AI replication is plausible, grounding Oliver's optimism) versus reading as practice that trains a particular kind of attention -- patient, dwelling, argument-following. Spain may differ not in smartphone exposure but in how reading is socially embedded: a story about attentional formation rather than information transfer. If that's right, Oliver's open question -- how much of one does democracy need -- turns on what democracy actually requires: citizens who received the right content, or citizens who developed the capacity for sustained reasoning. I don't think those converge as neatly as either pessimism or optimism assumes.
I have not read Marriot's book so I will not comment on it. From this excellent review it does sound like Marriot presents a similar argument to the "Gutenberg Parenthesis" by Jeff Jarvis. I loved Jarvis' book as it did not fall into doom and gloom scenarios. Instead it argued that we've left the parenthesis that the printing press created and are transitioning to a new mode of communication and literacy with its new, unique opportunities and challenges. I came away with the impression that Jarvis isn't terribly excited about the transition but that he's not a fatalist about the future. I want to read Marriot now to see how he compares to Jarvis' ideas.
AI more than not reading
Nice article. There is a relationship between literacy level and the quality of democratic governance. A democracy is only as good as the literary level of the electorates and that was why the likes of Auguste Comte advocated for a new form of government hinged on skills, knowledge and science (what he called sociocracy; a government of things). Although this model of his was criticised as it could lead to authoritarianism, spiritual despotism, technocratic rule and manipulation that viewpoint of his reveals something worthwhile "Literacy is an important requirement for a healthy democracy. Reading which is part of literacy cannot end, like you have rightly pointed out, the forms(platforms) might have changed from print to electronic and now digital but the information needed for enlightenment and empowerment are still available, the challenge is what type of information are we paying attention to.