New Book Is Grim Prognosis for the Post-Literate Future

New book is grim prognosis for the post-literate future

Supposed menaces multiply rapidly as technologies — smartphones, artificial intelligence — mutate. But the most menacing development involves no exotic technology, so it is disregarded.

A grim prognosis for the post-literate future

James Marriott's “The New Dark Ages” on the death of reading may not be sufficiently pessimistic.

The End of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society

Anthony Gottlieb at Literary Review: The rumoured demise of books has produced plenty of books. In 1985, Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death explained how the showy values of television menaced the calmer culture of the printed word. Nine years later, Sven Birkerts’s The Gutenberg Elegies rued the disruption of precious modes of reading by the advent of electronic media. Now, James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the D…