James Marriott’s recent essay The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society struck a nerve on me. He mentions that we might be seeing the gradual decline of literacy as the basis for advanced cognition, which goes beyond the current state of books or reading habits. In my opinion, it indicates a more deep shift in the way societies make decisions, think, and eventually rule themselves.
As Marriott points out, the essay’s lengthy shape, deliberate pacing, and introspective structure are all acts of resistance in and of itself. Ideas may breathe when they are written, they require a pause before publishing or sending. A sentence can be altered, reexamined, and questioned over and over again, to make sure your right idea comes to life. Spoken words do not behave quite like it. Once something is said in a podcast, debate or televised interview, it disappears into thin air; there is no room for reflection, the only thing that is left is the response.
This capacity for self-correction, for building upon what was written before, is what made literacy one of humanity’s great democratic revolutions. When societies learned to read and write at scale, they learned to reason collectively and build on thought. The written word made it possible to record laws, challenge doctrines, and hold power accountable.
Literacy, as Marriott reminds, was the foundation of political modernity. The Encyclopédie, pamphlets, manifestos, and newspapers of the eighteenth century were instruments of emancipation for the working class. The French Revolution, for instance, was as much a revolution of ideas as of bodies, a triumph of the printed page over the royal decree. To write was to participate in the construction of reason itself. It’s almost impossible to imagine Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws or the idea of the social contract being debated on a podcast instead of on the printed page.
Richard Staunton Cahill’s painting, Reading the news, as reproduced by the Irish Times. The Guardian.
But if the written word lifted democracy to what it is today, its slow decline may weaken it. Today, information has never been more abundant…. and so unfiltered. The internet promises universality but lacks the gatekeeping of the literate. What once passed through the disciplines of editing, debate, and critique now circulates instantly, unmediated, unverified. Even fact-checking, once a basic expectation of public discourse, is no longer compulsory in much of the media. Knowledge is accessible but not necessarily meaningful. As Aldous Huxley warned
“perhaps we no longer need to fear censorship, because no one will care to read.”
The paradox of our age is that while humanity has achieved near-universal access to information, our collective capacity to interpret, evaluate, and synthesise that information appears to be declining. Empirical studies across education, psychology, and communication sciences confirm what cultural critics like Marriott and Postman mention: that the digital environment, though democratizing access, has profoundly reshaped the way we read, think, and reason.
Dostoevsky’s 1984 Saved Him from Our Brave New World. John Dyer.
Recent findings from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, 2024) show that literacy levels among adolescents in most developed countries are stagnating or declining for the first time in half a century. The 2022 PISA assessment reported a “marked decrease in deep reading comprehension,” with students showing reduced ability to infer, critique, and connect ideas across longer texts. These declines correlate strongly with the rise of digital consumption, suggesting that the format through which we engage with text shapes not only what we know but how we know it.
Cognitive research supports this connection. Studies in neuroscience and educational psychology have found that reading on screens often promotes “shallow processing”, rapid skimming and reduced comprehension, compared to reading on paper (Delgado et al., 2018; Kong et al., 2018). When information is encountered in fragmented digital formats, the brain tends to prioritize efficiency over reflection, undermining the sustained attention that complex reasoning requires (Wolf, 2018). This is not a matter of nostalgia for print, it is truly a measurable cognitive shift.
The dawn of the post-literate society. James Marriott.
Digital settings encourage immediacy and emotion over thought, as media theorists have long cautioned. Przybylski and Weinstein (2019) discovered that excessive smartphone use is associated with increased levels of cognitive tiredness and decreased concentration in a long-term investigation. High-frequency digital multitasking is linked to worse memory retention and diminished analytical ability, according to a different meta-analysis by Firth et al. (2019). When taken as a whole, these findings reveal that the foundation of democratic reasoning, the infrastructure of our attention, is being rewired for speed rather than depth.
According to sociologist Shoshana Zuboff (2019), digital capitalism monetizes interaction, resulting in a feedback cycle where anger maintains participation while comprehension shrinks. The issue is both technological and epistemological; complexity itself becomes an economic disadvantage when entertaining competes in the same market.
This diagnosis sounds oddly familiar right? We are already witnessing, in real time, how public life bends toward emotion and away from reason. Across democracies, politics increasingly resembles a dramatic theater play rather than a forum of deliberation. Academic research has documented this drift with growing concern where political communication now prioritises affective engagement over argument, identity over evidence. Mutz (2021) notes that voters are increasingly mobilised not by policy preferences but by emotional identification and resentment. The rise of populism, from Trump’s performative nationalism in the United States to the resurgence of far-right movements across Europe, reflects this transformation. Their language appeals to grievance, pride, and fear, bypassing the slow work of persuasion that literacy once cultivated.
In a culture of instant speech, ideas are no longer tested before they are released; they are inmediatly performed. The result is a form of politics that feels deeply participatory but not reflective, where engagement is measured not by understanding but by outrage. The ideal informed citizen, forged through reading and reason, risks being replaced by the reactive subject, driven by emotion and tribal belonging.
This abundance of noise poses a new kind of poverty, one of attention. In Marriott’s terms, the danger is not that the written word disappears, but that it ceases to structure thought.
That distinction matters deeply for how societies organise knowledge and power. A written constitution can be debated, interpreted, and contested across generations. A viral video cannot. To lose that habit of mind is to risk losing the very tools through which democracy sustains itself.
The constitutional order, the rule of law, and even the notion of accountability all presuppose a literate public able to navigate arguments, evaluate evidence, and distinguish rhetoric from reason.
Political theorists like Nussbaum (2010) and Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018) have long noted that democracies deteriorate gradually rather than in instant collapses, when public debate becomes too impatient for nuance and too distracted for the truth. Citizens may still talk about freedom in a postliterate society, but such words become meaningless without the literate practices that support it, such as critical reading, informed judgment, and interpretative care.
Think about it again, we frequently assume that coups, wars or catastrophes would bring democracy to an end, but the real threat is the silence in the agora, the slow loss of focus, the tolerance of the intolerable.
Like a plant that we denied sunlight to, it slowly dies. And as it fades, so too does our ability to recognise the difference between passion and reason, between noise and truth.
Look grandma, my plant died!
References:
Delgado, P., Vargas, C., Ackerman, R., & Salmerón, L. (2018). Don’t throw away your printed books: A meta-analysis on the effects of reading media on reading comprehension. Educational Research Review, 25, 23–38. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2018.09.003
Firth, J., Torous, J., Stubbs, B., Firth, J. A., Steiner, G. Z., Smith, L., … Sarris, J. (2019). The “online brain”: How the Internet may be changing our cognition. World Psychiatry, 18(2), 119–129. https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20617
Kong, Y., Seo, Y. S., & Zhai, L. (2018). Comparison of reading performance on screen and on paper: A meta-analysis. Computers & Education, 123, 138–149. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2018.05.005
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2024). PISA 2022 Results (Volume I): The state of learning and equity in education. OECD Publishing. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2022-results-volume-i_53f23881-en.html
Przybylski, A. K., & Weinstein, N. (2019). Digital screen time limits and young people’s psychological well-being: Evidence from a population-based study. Nature Human Behaviour, 3(2), 173–182. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0506-1
Wolf, M. (2018). Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World. HarperCollins.
Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Profile Books.
Levitsky, S., & Ziblatt, D. (2018). How Democracies Die. Crown.
Nussbaum, M. C. (2010). Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton University Press.
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