In the 4th century BCE, Plato recounts (in the Phaedrus) Socrates’ thoughts on a “technology” that was then moving from specialized (administrative, commercial, religious) to broader (more literary and philosphical) use– writing. Socrates was not a fan. He worried that writing weakened the necessity (and thus, the power) of memory, and that it created the pretense of understanding, rather than real comprehension and mastery.
Still, of course, writing– and the reading that it enabled– became the dominant form of communication.
Today, reading (for anything other than business or formal study) is down. Way down. But not to worry, today’s champions of big tech argue: their streaming and AI will usher in a new golden age of learning and connectivity. Their critics, of course– in an echo of Socrates– suggest that they will do the exact opposite.
… in the middle of the eighteenth century huge numbers of ordinary people began to read.
For the first couple of centuries after the invention of the printing press, reading remained largely an elite pursuit. But by the beginning of the 1700s, the expansion of education and an explosion of cheap books began to diffuse reading rapidly down through the middle classes and even into the lower ranks of society. People alive at the time understood that something momentous was going on. Suddenly it seemed that everyone was reading everywhere: men, women, children, the rich, the poor. Reading began to be described as a “fever”, an “epidemic”, a “craze”, a “madness”. As the historian Tim Blanning writes, “conservatives were appalled and progressives were delighted, that it was a habit that knew no social boundaries.”
This transformation is sometimes known as the “reading revolution”. It was an unprecedented democratisation of information; the greatest transfer of knowledge into the hands of ordinary men and women in history.
In Britain only 6,000 books were published in the first decade of the eighteenth century; in the last decade of the same century the number of new titles was in excess of 56,000. More than half a million new publications appeared in German over the course of the 1700s. The historian Simon Schama has gone so far as to write that “literacy rates in eighteenth century France were much higher than in the late twentieth century United States”.
Where readers had once read “intensively”, spending their lives reading and re-reading two or three books, the reading revolution popularised a new kind of “extensive” reading. People read everything they could get their hands on: newspapers, journals, history, philosophy, science, theology and literature. Books, pamphlets and periodicals poured off the presses.
It was an age of monumental works of thought and knowledge: the Encyclopédie, Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Radical new ideas about God, about history, about society, about politics, and even the whole purpose and meaning of life flooded through Europe.
Even more importantly print changed how people thought.
The world of print is orderly, logical and rational. In books, knowledge is classified, comprehended, connected and put in its place. Books make arguments, propose theses, develop ideas. “To engage with the written word”, the media theorist Neil Postman wrote, “means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning.”
As Postman pointed out, it is no accident, that the growth of print culture in the eighteenth century was associated with the growing prestige of reason, hostility to superstition, the birth of capitalism, and the rapid development of science. Other historians have linked the eighteenth century explosion of literacy to the Enlightenment, the birth of human rights, the arrival of democracy and even the beginnings of the industrial revolution.
The world as we know it was forged in the reading revolution.
Now, we are living through the counter-revolution.
More than three hundred years after the reading revolution ushered in a new era of human knowledge, books are dying.
Numerous studies show that reading is in free-fall. Even the most pessimistic twentieth-century critics of the screen-age would have struggled to predict the scale of the present crisis.
In America, reading for pleasure has fallen by forty per cent in the last twenty years. In the UK, more than a third of adults say they have given up reading. The National Literacy Trust reports “shocking and dispiriting” falls in children’s reading, which is now at its lowest level on record. The publishing industry is in crisis: as the author Alexander Larman writes, “books that once would have sold in the tens, even hundreds, of thousands are now lucky to sell in the mid-four figures.”
Most remarkably, in late 2024 the OECD published a report which found that literacy levels were “declining or stagnating” in most developed countries. Once upon a time a social scientist confronted with statistics like these might have guessed the cause was a societal crisis like a war or the collapse of the education system.
What happened was the smartphone, which was widely adopted in developed countries in the mid-2010s. Those years will be remembered as a watershed in human history…
[Marriott explores the impact and some if its implications…]
… This draining away of culture, critical thinking and intelligence represents a tragic loss of human potential and human flourishing. It is also one of the major challenges facing modern societies. Our vast, interconnected, tolerant and technologically advanced civilisation is founded on the complex, rational kinds of thinking fostered by literacy.
As Walter Ong writes in his book Orality and Literacy, certain kinds of complex and logical thinking simply cannot be achieved without reading and writing. It is virtually impossible to develop a detailed and logical argument in spontaneous speech — you would get lost, lose your thread, contradict yourself, and confuse your audience trying to re-phrase ineptly expressed points…
The classicist Eric Havelock argued that the arrival of literacy in ancient Greece was the catalyst for the birth of philosophy. Once people had a means of pinning ideas down on the page to interrogate them, refine them and build on them, a whole new revolutionary way of analytic and abstract thinking was born — one that would go on to shape our entire civilisation. With the birth of writing received ways of thinking could be challenged and improved. This was our species’ cognitive liberation…
Not only philosophy but the entire intellectual infrastructure of modern civilisation depends on the kinds of complex thinking inseparable from reading and writing: serious historical writing, scientific theorems, detailed policy proposals and the kinds of rigorous and dispassionate political debate conducted in books and magazines.
These forms of advanced thought provide the intellectual underpinnings of modernity. If our world feels unstable at the moment — like the ground is shifting beneath us — it is because those underpinnings are falling to pieces underneath our feet…
[Marriott explores what a return to an “oral” society might mean, then contemplates what he fears will be “the end of creativity”– If the literate world was characterised by complexity and innovation, the post literate world is characterised by simplicity, ignorance and stagnation. He turns then to its impact on civil society…]
… Amusingly from the perspective of the present the reading revolution of the eighteenth century was accompanied not only by excitement but by a moral panic.
“No lover of tobacco or coffee, no wine drinker or lover of games, can be as addicted to their pipe, bottle, games or coffee-table as those many hungry readers are to their reading habit”, thundered one German clergyman.
Richard Steele feared that “novels raise expectations which the ordinary course of life can never realise”. Others fretted that reading “excites the imagination too much, and fatigues the heart”.
It is easy to laugh at these anxieties. We have spent our whole lives hearing how virtuous and sensible it is to read books. How could reading be dangerous?
But in hindsight, these conservative moralists were right to worry. The rapid expansion of literacy helped to destroy the orderly, hierarchical, and profoundly socially unequal world they cherished.
The reading revolution was a catastrophe for the ultra-privileged and exploitative aristocrats of the European aristocratic ancien regime — the old autocratic system of government with almighty kings at the top, lords and clergy underneath and peasants squirming at the very bottom.
Ignorance was a foundation stone of feudal Europe. The vast inequalities of the aristocratic order were partly able to be sustained because the population had no way to find out about the scale of the corruption, abuses and inefficiencies of their governments…
… you do not have to believe print is a perfect and incorruptible system of communication to accept it is also almost certainly a necessary pre-condition of democracy.
In Amusing Ourselves to Death Neil Postman argues that democracy and print are virtually inseparable. An effective democracy pre-supposes a reasonably informed and somewhat critical citizenry capable of understanding and debating the issues of the day in detail and at length.
Democracy draws immeasurable strength from print — the old dying world of books, newspapers and magazines — with its tendency to foster deep knowledge, logical argument, critical thought, objectivity and dispassionate engagement. In this environment, ordinary people have the tools to understand their rulers, to criticise them and, perhaps, to change them…
… Politics in the age of short form video favours heightened emotion, ignorance and unevidenced assertions. Such circumstances are highly propitious for charismatic charlatans. Inevitably, parties and politicians hostile to democracy are flourishing in the post-literate world. TikTok usage correlates with increased vote share for populist parties and the far right…
… The big tech companies like to see themselves as invested in spreading knowledge and curiosity. In fact in order to survive they must promote stupidity. The tech oligarchs have just as much of a stake in the ignorance of the population as the most reactionary feudal autocrat. Dumb rage and partisan thinking keep us glued to our phones.
And where the old European monarchies had to (often ineptly) try to censor dangerously critical material, the big tech companies ensure our ignorance much more effectively by flooding our culture with rage, distraction and irrelevance.
These companies are actively working to destroy human enlightenment and usher in a new dark age.
The screen revolution will shape our politics as profoundly as the reading revolution of the eighteenth century.
Without the knowledge and without the critical thinking skills instilled by print, many of the citizens of modern democracies find themselves as helpless and as credulous as medieval peasants — moved by irrational appeals and prone to mob thinking. The world after print increasingly resembles the world before print.
Superstitions and anti-democratic thinking flourish. Scholarship in our universities is shaped by rigid partisanship not by tolerance and curiosity. Our art and literature is cruder and more simplistic…
… As power, wealth and knowledge concentrate at the top of society, an angry, divided and uninformed public lacks a way understand or analyse or criticise or change what is going on. Instead more and more people are impressed by the kinds of highly emotional charismatic and mystical appeals that were the foundation of power in the age before widespread literacy.
Just as the advent of print dealt the final death blow to the decaying world of feudalism, so the screen is destroying the world of liberal democracy.
As tech companies wipe out literacy and middle class jobs, we may find ourselves a second feudal age. Or it may be that we are entering a political era beyond our imagining.
Whatever happens, we are already seeing the world we once knew melt away. Nothing will ever be the same again.
FWIW, your correspondent would note that while Socrates was surely right that writing diminished the power of memory and at least partially right that text allowed its readers to appear more knowledgeable about things than perhaps they were, it was the development of writing that provided the foundation on which the the print revolution Marriott celebrates was able to emerge.
I’d also note that the earliest days of printing (before the 18th century “revolution in reading”) were pretty fraught: from the publication of Luther’s 95 Thesis (and the religious and civil turmoil– both ideological and “bloody”– they occasioned) on through more than a century of conflict that included the Thirty Years War, The English Civil War, and ultimately, the American and French Revolutions– indeed, also the American Civil War. As Ada Palmer notes, “Whenever a new information technology comes along, and this includes the printing press, among the very first groups to be ‘loud’ in it are the people who were silenced in the earlier system, which means radical voices”… very like the our current situation, as Marriott describes it.
Again FWIW, I find Marriott’s take all-too-resonant with my own (geezer’s) sense of loss (as the epistemological and civic superstructure in which I came of age dissolve). I find his pessimism-unto-despair much more plausible than I’d like. But I hold onto the hope that in this transition– as in the transitions from oral to writing, and then to printing/publishing– we will, as societies, find ways to manage the chaos and establish new foundations for reason, creativity, and coherent, constructive civic life.
It starts with us wanting– and working hard– to find that new, more solid ground.
* Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
###
As we buckle up, we might spare a thought for George Grenville; he died on this date in 1770. An English politician who served as Prime Minister in the early years of the reign of George III, Grenville’s primary challenge was to solve the problem of the massive debt resulting from the Seven Years’ War. A centerpiece of his effort was a policy of taxing the American colonies more heavily, starting with his Sugar Act of 1764 and the Stamp Act of 1765– which began the train of events (much discussed in printed material of the time) that led to the American Revolution.
One punctuation mark in particular is having a moment… a not-altogether-welcome one…
Of the many tips and tricks people are coming up with to determine whether a piece of writing has been written with a little help from AI, the world seems to have homed in on the use of one particular punctuation mark: the em dash.
Though some writers have rushed in to defend the dash — the overuse of which sits alongside pizza glue and bluebberrygate in the pantheon of things people laugh at AI about — perhaps a key reason the prevalence of the punctuation mark seems so bot-like to readers is that, as writers, Americans hardly use it.
Indeed, per a recent YouGov survey, dashes are some of the least used pieces of punctuation in Americans’ arsenals, ranking just ahead of colons and semicolons, per the poll.
As you might imagine, the survey revealed that American adults who describe themselves as “good” or “very good” writers are more likely to use the rarer forms of punctuation on the list. However, for the majority of Americans, marks like the semicolon and the em dash remain mostly reserved for esteemed authors and English teachers… or those who aren’t above enlisting a chatbot for a little help to jazz up their communications.
Interestingly, the vast majority of Americans said they do little writing outside of sending texts and emails, with journaling, nonfiction and fiction writing, and other forms of creative or academic writing all falling by the wayside in 2025, according to YouGov’s research…
As we muse on marks, we might that it was on this date in 1956 that Fortran was introduced to the world. A third-generation, compiled, imperative computer programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. Developed by an IBM team led by John Backus, it became the go-to language for high-performance computing and is used for programs that benchmark and rank the world’s fastest supercomputers.
In a 1979 interview with Think, the IBM employee magazine, Backus explained Fortran’s origin: “Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn’t like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701, writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs.”
To the item at the top, it’s worth noting that Fortran is a language with four uses for the dash– subtraction operator, negative sign, line continuation symbol, and range separator (in data processing)– but no em dash.
For a piece of Fortran’s pre-history, see here; and for an important extension, see here.
The next time you make a mistake in your writing, or pick up something you’ve published and instantly spot a typo (argh!), don’t fret, it wasn’t your fault! Instead of taking on the shame of not proof-reading your work thoroughly enough, you can just point to Titivillus instead!
Who is Titivillus, you might ask? Well, he’s a demon who has long been blamed for, according to Princeton University’s Medieval Studies department, “slips and sins in song, speech, and writing.” In fact, Medieval Studies scholar Jan Ziolkowski, from Harvard University, traces his origins back to at least 1200, when he began showing up in paintings and sermons in medieval Europe and beyond. And he’s definitely got staying power, as he’s still beloved today in some circles. Princeton University provides this helpful overview of his origins and reach:
Thanks to today’s dominance of English, Titivillus is regarded as especially particular to medieval England, but he became commonplace far beyond the Continent and survived past the Middle Ages to appear in Rabelais, the earliest Slovak literature, Anatole France, Herman Melville, and W. H. Auden, before finally having a novel devoted to him in 1953. He remains unforgotten, a curio beloved among calligraphers and role-play gamers…
As we correct, we might ponder a very specific path, recalling that today– and every June 16– is Bloomsday, a commemoration and celebration of the life of Irish writer James Joyce (whose typos may or may not have been typos), during which the events of his novel Ulysses (the modern classic set on this date in 1904) are relived: Leopold Bloom goes about Dublin, Joyce’s immortalization of his first outing with Nora Barnacle, the woman who would eventually become his wife.
The first Bloomsday was observed on the 50th anniversary of the events in the novel, in 1954, when John Ryan (artist, critic, publican and founder of Envoy magazine) and the novelist Brian O’Nolan organized what was to be a daylong pilgrimage along the Ulysses route. They were joined by Patrick Kavanagh, Anthony Cronin, Tom Joyce (a dentist who, as Joyce’s cousin, represented the family interest), and AJ Leventhal (a lecturer in French at Trinity College, Dublin).
Portrait of Erasmus of Rotterdam Writing (1523) by Hans Holbein
Like today’s large language models, some 16th-century humanists (like Erasmus) had techniques to automate writing. But as Hannah Katznelson explains, others (like Rabelais) called foul…
The Renaissance scholar and educator Erasmus of Rotterdam opens his polemical treatise The Ciceronian (1528) by describing the utterly dysfunctional writing process of a character named Nosoponus. TheCiceronianis structured as a dialogue, withtwo mature writers, Bulephorus and Hypologus, trying to talk Nosoponus out of his paralysing obsession with stylistic perfection. Nosoponus explains that it would take him weeks of fruitless writing and rewriting to produce a casual letter in which he asks a friend to return some borrowed books. He says that writing requires such intense concentration that he can do it only at night, when no one else is awake to distract him, and even then his perfectionism is so intense that a single sentence becomes a full night’s work. Nosoponus goes over what he’s written again and again, but remains so dissatisfied with the quality of his language that eventually he just gives up.
Nosoponus’s problem might resonate. Who has not spent too long going over the wording of a simple email, at some point or another? Today there is an easy fix: we have large language models (LLMs) to write our letters for us, helpfully proffering suggestions as to what we might say, and how we might phrase it. When I input Nosoponus’s intended request into GPT-4, it generated the following almost instantly:
Hey [Friend’s Name],
Hope you’re doing well! I just realised I never got those books back that I lent you a while ago. No rush, but whenever you get a chance, I’d love to get them back. Let me know what works for you! Thanks!
Nosoponus
But there was a solution in the 16th century, too. A humanist education on the Erasmian model could train its students to produce letters of any length, on any topic – quickly, easily and eloquently. The French humanist François Rabelais, a contemporary of Erasmus, appears to have understood these compositional techniques as automating the creating of text in a way that, retrospectively, looks a lot like how LLMs function. If we want to understand LLMs, and what they are and aren’t capable of, we can look at earlier versions of the same technology – like Erasmian humanism. We can also read authors like Rabelais, who is already thinking about automatic text-generation along these lines, as someone who appreciates the effectiveness of Erasmian generative technology, but at the same time sees it as vitiating the social force of language and, ultimately, ruining language as a tool for moral and political life…
[Katznelson recounts Erasmus’s efforts, Rabelais’s response, and unpacks the important differences between our own authentic speech language created to speak for us and their practical and moral implications…]
As we honor authenticity, we might recall that it was on this date in 1886 that three U.S. patents were issued to Alexander Graham Bell’s Volta Labs for “recording and reproducing speech and other sounds.” The Graphophone, was an improved (and the first practical) version of the Edison phonograph (from 1877), and became the foundation on which the speech recording (e.g., dictaphone) and recorded music (and spoken word) industries began to grow.
Matthew Zipf on how– in the hands of a true literay stylist– the humble comma is a matter of precision, logic, individuality, and music…
… The most conspicuous mark of Renata Adler’s style is its abundance of commas. In her two novels, Speedboat (1976) and Pitch Dark (1983), there are a few sentences that edge on the absurd: “For some time, Leander had spoken, on the phone, of a woman, a painter, whom he had met, one afternoon, outside the gym, and whom he was trying to introduce, along with Simon, into his apartment and his life.” A critic tallied it up, counting “40 words and ten commas—Guinness Book of World Records?” Each of those commas had its grammatical defense, but Adler’s style did not comply with the usual standards of fluent prose. She cordoned off phrases, such as “on the phone,” that other writers would just run through. One reader, responding to a 1983 New York magazine profile of Adler, wrote in a letter to the editor, “If the examples of Renata Adler’s writing … are typical, Miss Adler will never make it to the road. The way is ‘jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption’ blocked by commas.” The reader was quoting one of Adler’s own comma-laden critical phrases against her. The editors titled the letter “Comma Wealth.”
Adler’s comma usage differs from the balanced rhythms of 18th-century essayists, as well as from the breathless lines common among American writers after Hemingway. Her punctuation jars, and turns abruptly, like a skater’s blade stopping and sending up shards of ice. She likes to leave out conjunctions in chains of adjectives, as in her film review of “a leering, uncertain, embarrassing, protracted little comedy.” Certain lines of hers work almost entirely by carefully placed commas, which tighten the style, each one a rivet on the page: “But this I know, or think I know, that idle people are often bored and bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel.” A hesitation, a stutter, and then a swing into the qualification (“unless they sleep a lot”). Interestingly, no comma in “bored and bored people”: grammar sacrificed for rhythm and speed.
Not everyone saw the elegant precision in how she pointed her sentences. After one of her books came out, a critic wrote that “virtually every sentence is peppered with enough commas to make the prose read like a series of hiccups.” Another letter writer complained of her “muddled syntax and wandering, endless sentences.”
But Adler’s style had its admirers, too. “Nobody in this country writes better prose than Renata Adler’s,” a critic wrote in a Harper’s review of her first novel. New Yorker staff writer Elif Batuman recently said that she could not think of a living stylist she admired more. But the most insightful comment might have come from a man splitting the difference. At The New York Times, where in 1968 Adler had become the daily film critic, editor Abe Rosenthal addressed a concerned colleague by first conceding that Adler was no great stylist, and then suggesting a metaphor: She’s olives. The readers will grow to like her…
… Adler sang of punctuation. In Pitch Dark, there is an associative run, typical of her novels, that reads: “And this matter of the commas. And this matter of the paragraphs. The true comma. The pause comma. The afterthought comma. The hesitation comma. The rhythm comma. The blues.” I wonder if everyone hears the music in that “riff,” as she calls it, with the rhythm of the short fragments and the satisfaction of the last monosyllable. There is also, within the musical list, a legitimate sorting of functions. The afterthought comma, Adler said, was when you wanted to add something, and there was no obvious way to do it. The true comma was the grammatical one, separating phrases or clauses. When spoken, it could function differently from other commas. To read out loud, “For some time, Leander had spoken, on the phone, of a woman …” you should not rest at each phrase. The true comma does not always require a pause.
Punctuation controls two things: logical separation and breath. In Adler’s words, “part of it is meaning, and part of it is cadence.” Writers weigh each role differently. Didion wrote that grammar was a piano she learned to play by ear, and she seems to have given priority to breath. Adler learned grammar in school, where she diagrammed sentences, and then at The New Yorker, which gave far more weight to logic. The magazine, where she began working at age 24, was alternately beloved and deplored for its commas. If a phrase was not essential to the sentence, the editors wanted it enveloped: thus “on the phone,” a wrapped-up appositive. (“May I offer you a comma?” the magazine’s editor, William Shawn, used to say to Adler in editing sessions.) Punctuation grew into a dogmatic inheritance, a passion, and a trademark of the magazine. E. B. White wrote that “commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.”
Knives are an apt metaphor. The first systematic survey of English punctuation, published in 1785, recorded that the Greek komma means “a segment, or a part cut off [from] a complete sentence.” The word comes from koptein, to cut. Precision, too, is a kind of cutting, a drawing of lines. It has a coincident etymology in Latin: praecidere means “to cut off.” Adding commas does not necessarily make your work precise, and you can write clearly without much punctuation. Precision might come, for example, in short declarative sentences. It relies on other things, too, such as diction, the mot juste. But the wish to separate accurately, to put different things into different cells, connects, at least in Adler’s case, to an actual grammatical usage. When she launches into one of her riffs, when she begins listing, or when she describes a phone call, her work suggests the old definition of thought as collecting and dividing: cutting between concepts as a good butcher slides his knife along the natural joints…
… In Writing Degree Zero, Roland Barthes described the “loneliness of style.” It is “the writer’s ‘thing,’ ” he wrote, “his glory and his prison, it is his solitude.” Adler is meticulous about her style. During her time as a film critic, she lost days to dealing with New York Times editors, who kept changing her prose, making edits that she had already thought of and decided against (“there was rarely the conception that in doing sentences a writer chooses among options,” she wrote about the experience). Her pieces for the Times sometimes appeared without her having seen the final version. She was happier at The New Yorker, where, though they might propose significant changes, the magazine’s editors made sure “not to attribute to the writer a single word, or a single cut, or a single mark of punctuation, which the writer had not seen and, in some sense, approved.” She has always cared about those things. For without the grand plot of a detective novel, without the large, vivid characters of Austen or Dickens, what Adler has is style. It is her solitude, her glory, her thing…
As we punctuate with passion, we might send farsighted birthday greetings to (a somehat more parsimonious, but still deft, user of commas) Alexander Herzen (Aleksándr Ivánovich Gértsen); he was born on this date in 1812. A Russian thinker and writer he was a key inspiration for agrarian populism and Russian socialism. With his writings, many composed while exiled in London, he attempted to influence the situation in Russia, contributing to a political climate that led to the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. Perhaps most notably, he published the important social novel Who is to Blame? (in 1845–46) and his autobiography, My Past and Thoughts (written 1852–1870), is considered one of the best examples of that genre in Russian literature.
You must be logged in to post a comment.