An unnerving argument, Sam, but difficult to contest. My eldest daughter has an encyclopedia knowledge of Greek mythology, wildlife, and scientific ideas that she owes largely to podcasts. But she is also such a voracious reader that she often carries a book or her Kindle with her into the kitchen while she gropes blindly in the refrigerator for her breakfast. There is, for her, a kind of seamless conversation across the genres. And she is presently at work on the first of what she claims will be a 7-part fantasy series. So it's perhaps too soon to say that literacy is dead. I hesitate to use the theoretical buzzword "hybridity," but it's clear that reading and writing are as much influenced by multimedia forms as in reverse. And what is the Substack phenomenon, if not proof of some enduring form of literacy, albeit at a less epic scale?
Your last line resonates with me. I became a writer largely because I could never get the words right in person. But you're making me wonder if this was so because I grew up without a television, necessarily found my escape and entertainment in books, and then as a result found my spontaneous utterances wanting by comparison.
I'll indulge one more observation -- that writing is always different from reading/listening/viewing. My students were saturated in audiovisual stories, but when I assigned a Moth-style performance at the end of a radio storytelling course, they struggled to hone their stories. And I wonder now if the refining capacity of literacy lay not in the medium so much as in the sense of craft, and that anyone who completes a long apprenticeship in craft (in whatever form) gains a kind of refinement as a result? But I suppose one can be an exquisite carpenter and still be terrible at self-reflection. So perhaps the craft must be at least adjacent to what we've known writing to be for it to have that transformative effect. (Now I'm wishing this could go on as a kind of Socratic exchange...)
It is hard to see how you are thinking biasedly here. Really are onto something here about craft. Also 12 old girls write simply the most startling scifi fantasy conversations, 'where are the conversations' Alice says. A friend of mine has a venue for her embarrassingly called Cream Scene Carnival.com.
Thanks Josh! All for Socratic exchanges! Yeah, I'm definitely being a bit dramatic here. The turn to genuine "post-literacy" wouldn't happen for a long time if at all. And there's no real reason, even if literacy (as opposed to audio/visual communication) drifts out of the 'center' of the culture, why some mode of hybridity, as you describe, wouldn't take its place. In a sense, the late 20th century was a golden age for hybridity - snobs and cognoscenti were supposed to be versed in film as well as literature. But, for the sake of argument, I do feel that something important is shifting. Humans are more naturally disposed to audio/visual communication (we can do that from the time we're around one years old, as opposed to, say, six or seven years old with reading). For a couple of millennia, literacy had this unique advantage in that it was relatively easy to reproduce and therefore facilitated mass communication. Suddenly, though, new tools have come along that are very powerful, very easy to disseminate, and, most critically, are now fairly cheap to produce. We can see how dramatically that's changed the culture - now, people who don't enjoy reading (which is a lot of people) can simply not do it. What that means, I think, is that for people who are partisans of reading and writing it's important to come up with an understanding of the value of reading that's no longer connected to seizing the center of the culture or having the most widespread appeal. That goal is simply unattainable now. Reading has its unassailable advantages in comparison to film and I think it's very important to hone in on exactly what those advantages are and to cherish those and make the most of them.
Why would literacy pass away instead of becoming, once more, an elite language? The trend in my daughter's very fancy school, which is attended entirely by tech workers kids, is to eschew screens--phones aren't allowed on campus, in the kids hands. It seems that the old bourgeois will once more need artificial distinctions to justify their preeminence, and literacy seems to be a very handy one.
Hi Naomi! Yeah, I agree with that. I think that certain guilds with vested interests in protecting their boundaries will continue to emphasize a jargon-y type of literacy as a badge for membership. Doctors and especially lawyers come to mind. But in the culture-at-large (in entertainment, communication, business, politics, the places where people really live), literacy is clearly becoming less and less central after having had a few good centuries. It's symptomatic that your daughter's school has to ban screens. (If kids had their way they would be on screens all the time.) So, yes, artificial distinctions can be imposed but they have a way of breaking down eventually. - Sam
Interesting presentation. I like general mood of the piece. The mourning without grief or tears. I am about to develop a couple of posts looking at the questions: Why write in the era of AI? And why read in the era of AI? I am currently digging into the scholarly literature about the cognitive impact of these two central human activities. It turns out that both activities provide us with critical cognitive stimulus that isn't easily replicated by other kinds of activities. So we shall see how it goes... I will probably be crying without tears as I write.
Thank you for that Nick! I really appreciate it. That sounds like a great couple of posts you're working on! Nice to be in touch and look forward to reading them. Good luck in keeping the tears down as you cry!
I know young man who specifically watches nation states shifting their flags. Reading Brave New Worldfirst time. John Savage underlines your proposal. Those of us who dedicated whole half days at 10 toreading Tolkein can see it too. Ask them if you aren't one whether the rolling landscapes were not theheroic and epic star of that show. The ringbearers arenarrated as walking into semiconcealment by hedges fromthe pursuing Nazgul and the reader is off to the epic of exploring Middleearth . And what makes those stories videoable, for Jackson to take care of his own attachment to the epic feeling all he had todo wasswitch digitally across the boundarybetween a thousand footview and the up close and hairy of Dildo and Married and Poppette ugh trying to remember the jokenames in Harvard Lampoons Bored of the Rings satire..small masteries we achieved reading gave us wider horizons. That ismore clearly the case than what Tom Wolf proposed :: that language isfor skewering your opposition. In his book on language....
Thanks Nathan! Yeah, at some level, I'll always feel that reading is a more effective medium than film - simply because it's cheaper. All it requires is a person's imagination. But it's easy for us to get overawed by money, production values, etc.
“The obvious question would be whether that process can occur just as easily through film or digital, and Peter’s argument is not quite: that it’s such a peculiar, unnatural, strenuous operation for the brain to teach itself to read that that process of maturation can be done only in this particular way.”
I would err on the side of vast cultural experience, here. We have no tangible evidence that a childhood spent watching YouTube videos produces fluent competence in humanistic disciplines (your prodigious companion notwithstanding -- I’ll guess that his parents are traditionally-educated folks whose intelligence the kid inherited, irrespective of medium). We have enormous, multi-generational evidence that text-based studies transmit information and concepts very efficiently (efficiently enough to produce the very world we’re living in, one in which we can debate its very utility! How long of a video would your wunderkind have to record to produce the gist of what I’ve written here?)
Thanks Tardigrade! Yeah, it's all very complicated with no easy solutions. I guess the main point at the moment is that, through literacy, we've developed curriculae and various controls on what the path is to being educated. This whole visual/digital world is so new that adults basically have no input in what children take in. The good news is that these things probably get worked out with time - and maybe faster than we can anticipate. My wunderkind watches these videos (that I wouldn't know existed if not for him) that are made by strange, interesting nerds and distill history for kids and get millions of views. To some extent adults do need to be hands off and let this process happen. (I remember in my childhood adults trying very hard to force their unwilling progeny to read when their kids were playing computer and video games that actually might have given them skills that they would put to good effect in their future careers.) But, yes, at the moment it feels like a real wild west in whether kids consume junk online or things that will be good for them, and adults have an unenviable, almost unprecedented challenge in figuring out how their kids' minds are actually being shaped by digital media and how to steer them towards being educated.
Pretty interesting! For many cultures around the globe orality is the main and preferred form of communication and telling stories. They see writing as a lesser form and not enough. They believe that stories are always evolving and putting into paper makes that impossible. Even Socrates has been said to believe that writing was not an effective means of communicating knowledge. To him, face-to-face communication was the only way one person could transmit knowledge to another, exactly because of being impossible to change what was written.
Thank you Luiza! Good point. Yes, there are a lot of ways in which literacy is actually a debased form of direct communication. It's worth remembering that as we navigate a difficult era.
An unnerving argument, Sam, but difficult to contest. My eldest daughter has an encyclopedia knowledge of Greek mythology, wildlife, and scientific ideas that she owes largely to podcasts. But she is also such a voracious reader that she often carries a book or her Kindle with her into the kitchen while she gropes blindly in the refrigerator for her breakfast. There is, for her, a kind of seamless conversation across the genres. And she is presently at work on the first of what she claims will be a 7-part fantasy series. So it's perhaps too soon to say that literacy is dead. I hesitate to use the theoretical buzzword "hybridity," but it's clear that reading and writing are as much influenced by multimedia forms as in reverse. And what is the Substack phenomenon, if not proof of some enduring form of literacy, albeit at a less epic scale?
Your last line resonates with me. I became a writer largely because I could never get the words right in person. But you're making me wonder if this was so because I grew up without a television, necessarily found my escape and entertainment in books, and then as a result found my spontaneous utterances wanting by comparison.
I'll indulge one more observation -- that writing is always different from reading/listening/viewing. My students were saturated in audiovisual stories, but when I assigned a Moth-style performance at the end of a radio storytelling course, they struggled to hone their stories. And I wonder now if the refining capacity of literacy lay not in the medium so much as in the sense of craft, and that anyone who completes a long apprenticeship in craft (in whatever form) gains a kind of refinement as a result? But I suppose one can be an exquisite carpenter and still be terrible at self-reflection. So perhaps the craft must be at least adjacent to what we've known writing to be for it to have that transformative effect. (Now I'm wishing this could go on as a kind of Socratic exchange...)
It is hard to see how you are thinking biasedly here. Really are onto something here about craft. Also 12 old girls write simply the most startling scifi fantasy conversations, 'where are the conversations' Alice says. A friend of mine has a venue for her embarrassingly called Cream Scene Carnival.com.
Thanks Josh! All for Socratic exchanges! Yeah, I'm definitely being a bit dramatic here. The turn to genuine "post-literacy" wouldn't happen for a long time if at all. And there's no real reason, even if literacy (as opposed to audio/visual communication) drifts out of the 'center' of the culture, why some mode of hybridity, as you describe, wouldn't take its place. In a sense, the late 20th century was a golden age for hybridity - snobs and cognoscenti were supposed to be versed in film as well as literature. But, for the sake of argument, I do feel that something important is shifting. Humans are more naturally disposed to audio/visual communication (we can do that from the time we're around one years old, as opposed to, say, six or seven years old with reading). For a couple of millennia, literacy had this unique advantage in that it was relatively easy to reproduce and therefore facilitated mass communication. Suddenly, though, new tools have come along that are very powerful, very easy to disseminate, and, most critically, are now fairly cheap to produce. We can see how dramatically that's changed the culture - now, people who don't enjoy reading (which is a lot of people) can simply not do it. What that means, I think, is that for people who are partisans of reading and writing it's important to come up with an understanding of the value of reading that's no longer connected to seizing the center of the culture or having the most widespread appeal. That goal is simply unattainable now. Reading has its unassailable advantages in comparison to film and I think it's very important to hone in on exactly what those advantages are and to cherish those and make the most of them.
Best,
Sam
Why would literacy pass away instead of becoming, once more, an elite language? The trend in my daughter's very fancy school, which is attended entirely by tech workers kids, is to eschew screens--phones aren't allowed on campus, in the kids hands. It seems that the old bourgeois will once more need artificial distinctions to justify their preeminence, and literacy seems to be a very handy one.
Hi Naomi! Yeah, I agree with that. I think that certain guilds with vested interests in protecting their boundaries will continue to emphasize a jargon-y type of literacy as a badge for membership. Doctors and especially lawyers come to mind. But in the culture-at-large (in entertainment, communication, business, politics, the places where people really live), literacy is clearly becoming less and less central after having had a few good centuries. It's symptomatic that your daughter's school has to ban screens. (If kids had their way they would be on screens all the time.) So, yes, artificial distinctions can be imposed but they have a way of breaking down eventually. - Sam
Interesting. Do they mandate cursive too? One of the local charter schools have that requirement.
Interesting presentation. I like general mood of the piece. The mourning without grief or tears. I am about to develop a couple of posts looking at the questions: Why write in the era of AI? And why read in the era of AI? I am currently digging into the scholarly literature about the cognitive impact of these two central human activities. It turns out that both activities provide us with critical cognitive stimulus that isn't easily replicated by other kinds of activities. So we shall see how it goes... I will probably be crying without tears as I write.
Thank you for that Nick! I really appreciate it. That sounds like a great couple of posts you're working on! Nice to be in touch and look forward to reading them. Good luck in keeping the tears down as you cry!
I know young man who specifically watches nation states shifting their flags. Reading Brave New Worldfirst time. John Savage underlines your proposal. Those of us who dedicated whole half days at 10 toreading Tolkein can see it too. Ask them if you aren't one whether the rolling landscapes were not theheroic and epic star of that show. The ringbearers arenarrated as walking into semiconcealment by hedges fromthe pursuing Nazgul and the reader is off to the epic of exploring Middleearth . And what makes those stories videoable, for Jackson to take care of his own attachment to the epic feeling all he had todo wasswitch digitally across the boundarybetween a thousand footview and the up close and hairy of Dildo and Married and Poppette ugh trying to remember the jokenames in Harvard Lampoons Bored of the Rings satire..small masteries we achieved reading gave us wider horizons. That ismore clearly the case than what Tom Wolf proposed :: that language isfor skewering your opposition. In his book on language....
Thanks Nathan! Yeah, at some level, I'll always feel that reading is a more effective medium than film - simply because it's cheaper. All it requires is a person's imagination. But it's easy for us to get overawed by money, production values, etc.
“The obvious question would be whether that process can occur just as easily through film or digital, and Peter’s argument is not quite: that it’s such a peculiar, unnatural, strenuous operation for the brain to teach itself to read that that process of maturation can be done only in this particular way.”
I would err on the side of vast cultural experience, here. We have no tangible evidence that a childhood spent watching YouTube videos produces fluent competence in humanistic disciplines (your prodigious companion notwithstanding -- I’ll guess that his parents are traditionally-educated folks whose intelligence the kid inherited, irrespective of medium). We have enormous, multi-generational evidence that text-based studies transmit information and concepts very efficiently (efficiently enough to produce the very world we’re living in, one in which we can debate its very utility! How long of a video would your wunderkind have to record to produce the gist of what I’ve written here?)
Thanks Tardigrade! Yeah, it's all very complicated with no easy solutions. I guess the main point at the moment is that, through literacy, we've developed curriculae and various controls on what the path is to being educated. This whole visual/digital world is so new that adults basically have no input in what children take in. The good news is that these things probably get worked out with time - and maybe faster than we can anticipate. My wunderkind watches these videos (that I wouldn't know existed if not for him) that are made by strange, interesting nerds and distill history for kids and get millions of views. To some extent adults do need to be hands off and let this process happen. (I remember in my childhood adults trying very hard to force their unwilling progeny to read when their kids were playing computer and video games that actually might have given them skills that they would put to good effect in their future careers.) But, yes, at the moment it feels like a real wild west in whether kids consume junk online or things that will be good for them, and adults have an unenviable, almost unprecedented challenge in figuring out how their kids' minds are actually being shaped by digital media and how to steer them towards being educated.
Pretty interesting! For many cultures around the globe orality is the main and preferred form of communication and telling stories. They see writing as a lesser form and not enough. They believe that stories are always evolving and putting into paper makes that impossible. Even Socrates has been said to believe that writing was not an effective means of communicating knowledge. To him, face-to-face communication was the only way one person could transmit knowledge to another, exactly because of being impossible to change what was written.
Thank you Luiza! Good point. Yes, there are a lot of ways in which literacy is actually a debased form of direct communication. It's worth remembering that as we navigate a difficult era.