As Sarah O’Connor observes, technology has changed the way many of us consume information, from complex pieces of writing to short video clips…
The year was 1988, a former Hollywood actor was in the White House, and Postman was worried about the ascendancy of pictures over words in American media, culture and politics. Television “conditions our minds to apprehend the world through fragmented pictures and forces other media to orient themselves in that direction,” he argued in an essay in his book Conscientious Objections. “A culture does not have to force scholars to flee to render them impotent. A culture does not have to burn books to assure that they will not be read . . . There are other ways to achieve stupidity.”
What might have seemed curmudgeonly in 1988 reads more like prophecy from the perspective of 2024. This month, the OECD released the results of a vast exercise: in-person assessments of the literacy, numeracy and problem-solving skills of 160,000 adults aged 16-65 in 31 different countries and economies. Compared with the last set of assessments a decade earlier, the trends in literacy skills were striking. Proficiency improved significantly in only two countries (Finland and Denmark), remained stable in 14, and declined significantly in 11, with the biggest deterioration in Korea, Lithuania, New Zealand and Poland.
Among adults with tertiary-level education (such as university graduates), literacy proficiency fell in 13 countries and only increased in Finland, while nearly all countries and economies experienced declines in literacy proficiency among adults with below upper secondary education. Singapore and the US had the biggest inequalities in both literacy and numeracy.
“Thirty per cent of Americans read at a level that you would expect from a 10-year-old child,” Andreas Schleicher, director for education and skills at the OECD, told me — referring to the proportion of people in the US who scored level 1 or below in literacy. “It is actually hard to imagine — that every third person you meet on the street has difficulties reading even simple things.”
In some countries, the deterioration is partly explained by an ageing population and rising levels of immigration, but Schleicher says these factors alone do not fully account for the trend. His own hypothesis would come as no surprise to Postman: that technology has changed the way many of us consume information, away from longer, more complex pieces of writing, such as books and newspaper articles, to short social media posts and video clips.
At the same time, social media has made it more likely that you “read stuff that confirms your views, rather than engages with diverse perspectives, and that’s what you need to get to [the top levels] on the [OECD literacy] assessment, where you need to distinguish fact from opinion, navigate ambiguity, manage complexity,” Schleicher explained.
The implications for politics and the quality of public debate are already evident. These, too, were foreseen. In 2007, writer Caleb Crain wrote an article called “Twilight of the Books” in The New Yorker magazine about what a possible post-literate culture might look like. In oral cultures, he wrote, cliché and stereotype are valued, conflict and name-calling are prized because they are memorable, and speakers tend not to correct themselves because “it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for”. Does that sound familiar?…
One recalls Plato’s report that Socrates lamented the introduction of writing (on the grounds that it would erode the centrality of the memory and memorization and the tradition of oral disputation). And one reckons that in retrospect, even as one acknowledges that Socrates wasn’t wrong, one is not sorry that writing came to play the foundational role that it has in scholarship, culture, and commerce.
So perhaps we’re just in the first steps of a transition on the other side of which a new kind of literacy has displaced the current one (and advanced our state of being in the same way that writing has). Perhaps. Even then, in the moment it’s anxiety-provoking: even if we are bound for a new (higher-order?) literacy, it’s the curse of the earlier phases of a tectonic cultural shift that what we’re losing is much clearer than what we may gain.
As we fumble toward the future, we might recall that it was on this date in 1992 that HAL 9000, the AI character (and main antagonist) in Arthur C. Clarke’s (and Stanley Kubrick’s) Space Odyssey series.
More specifically: In the film, HAL became operational on 12 January 1992, at the HAL Laboratories in Urbana, Illinois, as production number 3. The activation year was 1991 in earlier screenplays and changed to 1997 in Clarke’s novel written and released in conjunction with the movie.
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