Electronic/World Wide Web>Internet Article: Marriott, James (Sep 19, 2025), The dawn of the post-literate society, Retrieved on 2025-09-20Source Material [jmarriott.substack.com]
Folksonomies: literacy illiteracy populism Memes
20 SEP 2025
The Screen Revolution is Breaking the Thread of Literacy
If the reading revolution represented the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history, the screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history.
Our universities are at the front line of this crisis. They are now teaching their first truly “post-literate” cohorts of students, who have grown up almost entirely in the world of short-form video, computer games, addictive algorithms (and, increasingly, AI).
Because ubiquitous m... 1 
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notes20 SEP 2025
Written Word Enabled Philosophy, Screen Content Unravels It
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 civilisation3. With the birth of writing received ways of thinking could be challenged and improved. This was our species’ cognitive liber...
1 While I find this essay goes a bit into alarmism in places, I do appreciate how it communicates the importance of long-form reading in the intellectual and social advancement of civilization. I appreciate the idea that the written word is a cognitive prosthesis that can enhance our intellectual capabilities beyond what was capable during the era of oral traditions. Screens have demonstrated the same potential, but the flood of highly addictive screen-content junk-food seems so much more destructive than the pulp novels of the past.
20 SEP 2025
Monarchies Depend on Illiteracy
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.
And the old feudal hierarchy was justified not so much by logical argument as by what Walter Ong might have recognised as very pre-literate appeals to mystical and emotional thinking.
This was what historians of the seventeenth centur... 1 notes
notes20 SEP 2025
Post-Literate Society
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 mor... 1 notes
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