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...)
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.
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.
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....
“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?)
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.
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...)
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.
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.
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....
“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?)
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.