Criticism of "The dawn of post-literate society"

I enjoy reading as much as anyone, but I find these kinds of posts to be very short-sighted. First off, civilization precedes mass reading by millennia. To attribute the Enlightenment and modern industrial civilization to reading, and any counter-movement against the Enlightenment as anti-reading, is to fundamentally misunderstand most of history.

E.g., Romanticism was an explicitly anti-Enlightenment movement and arguably had more interest in poetry and literature than the forces it was reacting against. You could also probably make the argument that widespread reading via the printing press led to more anti-intellectualism culturally, as the onus of belief shifted from the elite priestly class to the popular individual.

Secondly, the vast, vast majority of people were not reading complex literature or scientific papers, they were reading the equivalent of Netflix series. Deep, intellectual reading has always been a niche thing reserved for a small percentage of the population.

Thirdly, and I think most importantly: reading is a historical technology. It's not the end-all greatest thing ever invented, never to be surpassed by anything new.

I personally think that audiovisual media is far, far superior to reading in many situations, especially for education - language learning, for example. The problem right now is that we're assuming that short clip-based media like TikTok is somehow the ultimate form of video. It's not, and short attention spans are more due to the economics of media consumption than anything inherent to the video format.

I think we're just very, very early in the development of a new media format that combines the best elements of text, audio, moving images, and other data in a way that is ultimately more compelling and effective than static words on paper. Video, like books, is ultimately a historical technology and not necessarily the end-all of future media.