Post-Literate, Post-Numerate: Where Will it End?
This week, all the advanced thinkers agree that kids are reading less and we are entering a post-literate age. It must be true; the Atlantic says so.
Advertisement
Kindergarten teachers say that many of their students don’t know nursery rhymes or fairy tales[.]
But I am far wiser than the blurters of conventional wisdom at the Atlantic. I say that the two-way internet age has reduced the value of being a sophisticated reader and writer. Today, anyone with a smartphone can communicate with the world on YouTube or Instagram. He can change the world like Nick Shirley.
Advertisement
Now I come at this from Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public. He has a Five Wave theory of communication. Back in the day, people engaged in two-way one-on-one conversation. Or they listened to bards singing the ancient epics of an evening. Then came four waves, each of which transformed the world:
Do you see that all these inventions were exponential improvements in one-way, one-to-many, communication?
Advertisement
Mass media, we can now see, enabled world wars and communist revolutions because it became a tool of political propaganda. Our beloved mainstream media is the beating heart of the mass-media wave.
But now comes:
Advertisement
With the internet, with a smartphone in your back pocket, with social media and YouTube and all the rest, we now have two-way, many-to-many communication. For the first time ever.
We are now headfirst into an age where anyone can talk to anyone, face-to-face, anywhere in the world. Except Iran.
Advertisement
But do you see that the value of literacy, of reading all the best books, of spending years developing your writing skills so you can amaze the world, all that has suddenly become less valuable. So, of course, the tippy-top writers at the Atlantic are afraid and mourning a “post-literate” society in which they aren’t apex media predators anymore.
Except for J.K. Rowling. I just read this X-post:
Advertisement
My grandson, who is 7, is very bright, but we could not interest him in reading. Then I gave him the first Harry Potter book. He devoured it. The problem was the boring children's books we were foisting on him. He just finished book 3.
Harry Potter may not be a nursery rhyme, but it is certainly a fairy tale, complete with demons, wizards, and step-parents: everything a boy needs to scare the wits out of him.
Hey, the Atlantic and all the ships at sea! Whatabout the problem of a post-numerate society? Back in the day, I suspect, your average intellectual could understand what Isaac Newton was up to. Any of you ladies understand quantum mechanics and triplets? Grok:
The total spin operator S² has eigenvalues S(S+1)ℏ², so S=1 gives 2ℏ² for triplets and S=0 gives 0 for the singlet.
Me neither. But I do suspect that Murray Gell-Mann was trying to be a trickster when he came up with names like “quark” and “triplet” and “eight-fold way” in quantum mechanics. Not to mention Richard Feynman fiendishly cracking safes at Los Alamos.
The problem, of course, is not that kids are reading less. The problem is extinction. When something goes extinct, something is lost. Knowledge is lost. Suppose that Nvidia went extinct.
How do we preserve the old knowledge, just in case? When I went to Oundle School in England in the early Sixties, we spent a week in each term at the “workshops.” They included a wood-working shop, a pattern-making shop, a foundry, a metal-working shop, and a machine shop.
In fact, the world is full of quirky enthusiasts for woodworking, for hand-weaving, for printing presses, and all the old ways. And also full of people reluctant to give up the old ways. J.S. Bach went to visit his son in Potsdam, and Frederick the Great showed him his experimental fortepianos. Bach didn’t like them; he was a harpsichord guy. But he composed his Musical Offering anyway.
And whatabout violins? There’s never been anything like Stradivarius’s violins. The special knowledge of those Italian violinmakers is lost to history. And we chamber music fans have never stopped complaining about the decline in violin quality since that Golden Age.
Here’s physicist Michael Guillen. He’s making an AI movie.
Three years ago, I began writing my current movie, "The Invisible Everywhere." Inspired by my bestselling book, "Believing Is Seeing," the movie tells the story of how modern science shattered my atheism and opened my blind eyes to the existence of God.
Guillen made the movie in AI. Of course, he had to upgrade his desktop computer to a gaming machine. Then he bought Runway AI and made his movie. Check out the trailer.
What if we are entering a post-Hollywood era when people won’t know how to make movies by hand anymore?
Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.
Image: PickPik