Post-Literate Society?

This is a phrase that I’ve heard bandied about quite frequently in the past three years. The idea seems to be that reading is now considered a “chore”, as well as something that is “too complex” for young people to grasp. It requires too much concentration, too much time, takes up too much space in people’s busy lives. Apparently, lecturers are now being asked to create short-form videos (5-8 minutes) that cover everything from syllabus content to major topics. Students (or ‘learners’ if you prefer the in vogue term) can then watch these at speed – playing them at more than x1 – and gain the information they need. This change fits student experience, which is based on social media and the prevalence of short-form videos that dominate this medium (I do this it’s time we started to refer to SM as just another medium amongst others).

There are two striking shifts here. The first is the radical change this indicates in regards being a student and being educated. This is not exactly surprising. As the businessification, therefore, marketisation of universities has gathered pace, the concept of education as the expansion of one’s ‘horizons’, as considering the justice and fairness of the societies we live in, of what we think needs to change in our societies, of encountering difficult concepts that require time to understand, of having to reconsider one’s standpoints, of how we can live good lives that are compassionate, of how we can maintain our integrity, has been displaced. Whereas education was about knowledge and (self) discovery, it is now about information and training, about how one gains the ‘skills’ to get a ‘good’ job (defined as one which pays well). In short, education has become something one consumes, dominated by “consumer satisfaction”. Education is consumed in order to get a “good degree” which, in turn, will enable one to get a “good job”. Modules, one can argue, are no longer about the subjects they introduce or expand upon, they are simply about the result one can obtain by demonstrating one’s ability to meet the “learning outcomes” and the terms of the “marking rubric”. Thus, modules become a means to an end, not as they used to be, an end in themselves. The “end goal” of this ‘education’ is employment. Thus, education becomes just another consumer item in the capitalist structure. Thinking is no longer required, displaced by demonstration of the accepted (something reinforced by the blind acceptance of AI in universities).

What I am suggesting here is that we should not call this ‘education’ at all. It is training: for jobs; to take one’s place in consumer society; to express one’s ‘individuality’ by being a better consumer than others.

The second shift is, to me, more interesting, particularly if one thinks of the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century. The novel requires all the ‘elements’ which are now considered at a premium: concentration; time; space. This is not just true of the novel, but applies to reading per se. The novel emerges as a moneyed middle-class wish to see people like themselves represented on paper. The novel is a concatenation of all that precedes it (as Lennard Davies argues): political pamphlets; newspapers; playbills; religious tracts…but it’s form is taken from the spiritual autobiography, works written by old men at end of their lives as guides for young men beginning their ‘journeys’. Following the standard Aristotelian form, the spiritual autobiography provides the reader with a central character who then guides them through the narrative, while providing commentary; we can either identify with this character, or in virtue of the form, become aligned with the character – in precisely the same way that this form works in mainstream film today. Therefore, we have a combination of first-person and third-person narration.

Another interesting factor here is the way the novel was thought of when it first appeared. Essentially, it was despised form. Real writers wrote poetry. Novelists were simple wordsmiths, writing for money. Real writers were also male. What then happens because of this snobbery is that women “take over” the novel in the eighteenth century. Inchbald, Burney and Heywood, to name three, all use the novel as a platform to highlight issues that have an impact on women, especially marriage and sexual assault. They effectively move the novel from mere story-telling to a form which discusses material reality. Their characters are empathic, the trials they face resonate with readers. They set the terms which carry into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The novel becomes a document that advocates for change on several levels.

However, what needs to be remembered here is what is required to read: a decision to take the time to concentrate and a space in which to read without interruption. For what we might call “the internet generation” (not an ideal term I know), these decisions can appear to have been taken out of their hands. Social Media operates on the basis that speed of consumption is vital, that while you’re watching this, there are multiple other videos to see…so finish this one as quickly as you can in order to move onto the next. It is not so much about what one consumes as how much one can consume. Thus, SM alters time; in effect, it deprives the consumer of time. Concentration is about quantity, not quality or ‘content’ – which effectively makes a farce of the traditional definition of ‘concentration’.

Reading a book – of whatever type – is a solitary activity: people’s reading speeds vary (people form book clubs I know, but these tend to be of dubious quality in my experience); a novel, say, pulls you into another world, constructed by you populated by characters imagined by you; reactions to characters vary by person; a novel ask for an individuated response; a novel insists on individuated concentration (as does any text).

How does this compare to SM? A video has a dictated length (the spectator is subjected by the machinery of SM), it can be watched with others, discussed as it is happening, is designed with a uniform intended response in mind (dictated, consciously or unconsciously, by its form), it seems – by its density – to give a complete picture immediately. The volume of SM enables users (subjects?) to choose those videos which accord with their own views; ‘comfort’ becomes a central consideration, allowing users to avoid those videos which are challenging. Users can also watch videos that provide them with the pleasure of being outraged, responding immediately in unreflective emotional outbursts. Of course, we can also argue here that these responses on the part of the user are designed.

In societies that are conditioned by SM use, the novel – or any text – is a foreign object, designed in the distance past, to serve a purpose which seems obscure in a world constrained by SM.

Does this mean that we now inhabit a post-literate society? No. We live in a society in which capitalism continues to enforce consumerism as the “end game of existence”. Its tawdry ideology may have invaded the university, education in general, spreading “consumer individuality”, but human persons are unique. For every one who succumbs to the idea of a “consumerist paradise”, there is another who resists, who sees through the ideas of uniform individuality, conformism as the easiest option and the claim that reading is a non-political act.

To put it in clichéd terms, the literate remain a concern and a threat to the capitalist class. A post-literate society is the dream of that capitalist class because this society is seen as one that will be acquiescent and docile, one that they control. Meta, Google, Til Tok and the purveyors of AI are working towards establishing this control…but the tools of oppression can, and are being, turned against the oppressors. Oh, and there are lots of books out there that expose precisely how this control is meant to work. Which means it isn’t…just read Yanis Varoufakis, Peter Fleming, Grace Blakeley, Shoshana Zuboff and Naomi Klein.