Today we have something so stupid only an intellectual could believe it.
(Reader beware: This is anti-intellectual content, from someone with an almost pathological anti-intellectual streak. It's my forte and guilty pleasure.)
Any-hoop, yesterday my friend was telling me that another friend of his is reading a book about how society is becoming more illiterate thanks to social media. I first saw this topic pop up about a year or so ago on UnHerd. My friend's friend is a Guardian-reading lefty-type person, so I'm guessing the discussion's now filtered into the wider mainstream.
(Having done a quick Google search it appears a book has just been released by the very same writer that appeared on UnHerd. The AI overlord, sorry, overview, tells me that it's bestselling, so this must be the very book. Oh, how predictable. It's also interesting that someone left wing is now, unknowingly, consuming content that's a little bit right wing coded, but we'll leave that for now.)
My friend - who doesn't read books, nor the Guardian - said he thought what his friend was telling him was nonsense. He pointed to social media itself - where everybody, from granny to bratty teenager, is commenting and arguing and communicating in text.
Of course, he's correct. It's a self-evident truth. People have never been more literate.
(As my friend doesn't read books he isn't as easily brainwashed by the ideas they contain. As I've said before, half tongue-in-cheek, books should only be read by anti-intellectuals like myself - i.e. people with the inherent ability to withstand their ideologies.
And I am only half-joking. Just look at religions. They all have their book(s). There are few people more dogmatic and detached from reality than book-readers. Whether it's the Quran or the Communist Manifesto. Or the latest bestseller. This reverence for words on a page. That somehow if something comes from a book it has more authority. It's very backwards. The scientific revolution - the focus on real world observation - should've put a stop to this, but it's barely made a dent. The book remains God.)
Returning to real world observation. How many illiterate people do you know in everyday life? And I don't mean people that have bad grammar or that are a bit dim - but actual illiterates. Be honest, it's basically zero. Every dimwit is on Facebook or Twitter spouting their opinion in English words and letters. As my friend pointed out.
Now, the people making the point will say, "Ah, it's not so much that people aren't reading, it's that they have reduced attention spans and aren't reading books anymore."
"They're not reading big books, like me, an intellectual."
(It's funny that these self-satisfied people are reading a book about how other people aren't reading books. They must have one hand turning the page and the other patting themselves on the back.)
Even this attention span argument is nonsense though.
Firstly, most people were never reading books anyway. Even the minority of people that actually owned a copy of War and Peace never actually read it.
(We still see these people every day online - in left and right wing circles:
"I'm going to read [insert philosophy book]"; "I really want to read [insert ancient text]."
A lot of time talking about books, and having pretty books sat on bookshelves. Not so much actual reading.
"If only I had more time I could read more.. 😢")
Secondly, before the advent of the Internet we had sixty-odd years of television, lol.
People sitting glued for hours. Passively. Zombified. All audio-visual. No text whatsoever.
Just look at TV today. Ant and Dec - essentially children's TV presenters, presenting shows for adults. So tell me again about dumbing down.
(I don't like slagging off TV too much. It can be good and bad. After all, it's just another medium. You can't seriously tell me the Internet is a step backwards for reading though.
In fact, marrying the two, I'm currently watching an old BBC series about chess called The Master Game. I'm rubbish at chess, but I do enjoy watching and playing it. Undoubtedly TV has made some brilliant and informative content, but at the same time I only have the opportunity to watch these old shows from the 70s and 80s because of YouTube. Likewise I can play chess (badly) against people from all over the world thanks to the Internet.)
Thirdly, (and finally - I don't want to make this too long, quite fittingly).
It's a total myth that people used to have the attention span for long books. It's a romanticised notion that people are projecting back onto some idealised past. Even in the 19th century people would generally read stuff like Dickens in instalments. They'd get Part I of Great Expectations delivered to their home as part of some weekly or monthly magazine, then they'd wait for the next episode the following week. A bit like TV.
No one wants to sit for twelve hours reading something. Not now, not ever.
You can get a sense of this if you read Shakespeare. Again, like TV, plays would've been an evening's entertainment. They were short. So when you buy a paperback version of a Shakespeare play they're really tiny - way tinier than a novel - and over half of that is the introduction and commentary on the text. If it was literally just the play it'd be a pamphlet (a quarto).
So the long novel is something of an aberration. It's not suited to the natural human attention span. Plus, long-form text is generally junk or waffle anyway. Like the long guitar solo. The beard-stroking intellectual may feign some appreciation of it, but most other people have better things to do.
The true Shakespeare is in the three-minute pop song.
Now yes, I get it, when you watch young people endlessly flick through TikTok videos it's a bit despairing, but they're basically just flicking through the TV channels looking for something to watch. It ain't much different to that.
They're certainly not as brainwashed as intellectuals that believe they're entering a "post-literate" age ..as they sit there surrounded by humans that are texting each other constantly.
