literacy Archives - Prindle Institute

The written word has never been as accessible as it is today; one estimate from 2016 puts the global literacy rate at around 86 percent, a figure that would have been unthinkable just a few centuries ago. But at the same time, The Washington Post found in 2018 that American adults seem to be reading less for leisure, and a recent study conducted by Stanford found that the pandemic had a strong negative impact on childhood literacy rates. Has that post-literate future already arrived, and if so, what will fill the void left by books?

While the omnipresence of social media has lent a new sense of urgency to these questions, the anxieties behind them are hardly new. In the post-war period, television, radio, and cameras invaded the American home, and began to insidiously reshape the way we interact with our world. In the 1970s, literary critic Susan Sontag wrote despairingly of this new visual culture in On Photography; in her view, language and the fine arts were being supplanted by photographs, which claimed to present an objective view of reality in a way that drops of ink and splotches of paint could only dream of.However, Sontag believed that an image-saturated world was a politically insipid one. She wrote that

The limit of photographic knowledge of the world is that, while it can goad conscience, it can, finally, never be ethical or political knowledge . . . The very muteness of what is, hypothetically, comprehensible in photographs is what constitutes their attractiveness and provocativeness. The omnipresence of photographs has an incalculable effect on our ethical sensibility. By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.

Sontag saw the post-literate world as a visual one, but another philosopher proposed a different view. Media theorist Marshall McLuhan explained in 1962 that before the advent of 20th-century technology, literate people in the Western world thought sequentially. Political treatises, newspapers, and novels that followed a clear structure (beginning, middle, and end), and contributed to a broad sense of progress, whether on a micro or macro scale. But technology, McLuhan argued, had swept all of that away. As scholar Mark Cuenco explains, McLuhan believed that “A society becomes post-literate when electronic media compresses its experience of literacy to such an extreme degree that the simultaneity of the oral replaces the sequentalism of the typographic as the dominant pattern of thought and sense-making.” McLuhan, who predicted the advent of the Internet decades in advance, believed that literate culture had already been supplanted.

Through radio and television, oral culture – not visual culture – became dominant, and Cuenco argues that this is still the case.

Though staring at a screen is technically a visual experience and there is reading involved—be it of a Tweet, a Facebook post, or a cable news scroll—the fundamentally dynamic, ever-fleeting, and disjointed character of the content on the screen delivers indigestible volumes of information all at once, without much sequence or structure.

Visual culture, he argues, “operates on the principle of focus or linear sequence,” much in the same way that the written word does. While we do read a Tweet or the caption on a TikTok, the experience is so radically different from that of reading a book (one locks us into an endless scroll, while the other has a definitive start and end point) that the two experiences are hardly comparable. If McLuhan is right, a post-literate oral culture may lose the ability to create sustained political change through sequential planning. The here-and-now immediacy of oral culture may, ultimately, pose the same dangers that Sontag saw in visual culture.

While Sontag and McLuhan provide compelling critiques of technological advancement, it may be too soon to sound the death knell for literacy. Americans may spend less time reading for pleasure, but online retailers like Amazon prove that there is still a market for books, shrinking though it may be. It might be more accurate to say that we’re in a period of transition, neither entirely literate nor entirely oral/visual, and with drastic educational reform, this trend is still subject to change.

This is the fourth in a series about American History and the Ethics of Memory. This post originally appeared on February 9, 2016.

It was a hotly contested presidential election, and the mudslinging was fierce. There were allegations of fiscal corruption, sexual impropriety, and—perhaps most damning of all—bad writing.

The Democratic candidate, it was rumored, spelled Congress with a K. Couldn’t construct a complete sentence. Had to hire someone to write his letters for him. Was almost entirely illiterate.

The charges went viral. They even inspired snatches of satirical poetry in the newspapers:

Then a nice writing-man I have hired for my use,

To hide the bad spelin I skrawl—

And them are as says how my grammar is bad,

Don’t know nothing of it all.

The man the poem was mocking, the one supposed to be guilty of these several crimes against the English language, now appears on the $20 bill. The John Quincy Adams campaign’s efforts to smear their upstart rival’s literacy did not stop Andrew Jackson from winning the White House.

Modern scholars have actually tried to figure out, “Could Andrew Jackson Spell?” The evidence is inconclusive, but the question doesn’t seem especially important for us now. What is relevant today is what the episode suggests about how we evaluate candidates—the role ideas about literacy play in political discourse, and to what effect. Left-leaning commentators’ gleefulness over Sarah Palin’s recent display of verbal clumsiness, in her speech endorsing Donald Trump, doesn’t look very different from the hilarity that ensued among Adams supporters when they heard about a 25-line letter by Jackson that included 23 misspellings.

Spelling Congress with a K doesn’t by itself seem like a disqualifier from the presidency. An effective chief executive must be able to do many things with Congress, but spelling is lower on the list than cooperating, negotiating, persuading, and maneuvering. The general idea behind the Adams campaign’s gambit was that by portraying Jackson, born in the backwoods of Tennessee, as illiterate, they could persuade voters he lacked the aptitude to manage the complexities of the national government—as the incumbent Adams, scion of one of the founding families of the republic, obviously could.

Arguably there was some truth to this. By all appearances, Jackson failed to comprehend the function and importance of the Bank of the U.S. when, with devastating economic results, he effectively destroyed it in the 1830s (one of the reasons many people would like to see an American woman replacing Jackson on the $20 bill, rather than Alexander Hamilton on the $10). But this may have been a coincidence. People who did grasp the ins and outs of central banking in the 1830s probably were highly literate, but the converse isn’t necessarily true. Plenty of people who knew the correct spelling of Congress still didn’t understand what the Bank of the U.S. was good for, just as many well-read and eloquent people in 2008 had no idea what a collateralized debt obligation was.

Besides, it didn’t work. Jackson beat Adams. The election of 1828 proved to be an early installment in the long American tradition of affection for politicians who are “regular guys” (or, in the lexicon of pollsters during the election of 2000, people you’d like to have a beer with). Not for the last time, a bookish and bespectacled candidate inspired more distrust among voters than a rough-edged, inarticulate one. Never mind that the supposedly effete Bostonian went on to serve nine terms in Congress and successfully defend the Amistad rebels, while the manly frontiersman earned a reputation for exterminating American Indians. Maybe the Adams camp would have done better for their candidate, and the country, by talking more about principles than orthography.

Which may be useful to remember in our own era. The whirlwind of attention paid to Sarah Palin’s recent speech has been dominated by derision of her odd phraseology and general incoherence—which is a perfectly legitimate (and certainly amusing) subject for Saturday Night Live (“She sounds like a greeting card from a Chinese dollar store!”). But even the venerable New York Times’s coverage devolved into a listicle called “The Most Mystifying Lines of Sarah Palin’s Endorsement Speech.”

The first question about that speech or any other politician’s shouldn’t be whether or not it’s a fluid sequence of grammatical sentences (as nice as that would be) but whether or not it’s bullshit—a word I use here in its technical sense to refer to indifference to truthfulness. Misused and made-up words are great fodder for social-media mockery (refudiate! squirmishes!), but they’re less outrageous than (to choose just one example from Palin’s speech) the claim that military veterans are not “treated better than illegal immigrants are treated in this country.” And they’re far less damaging than an attitude toward political discourse that doesn’t care whether that claim, or any other, can even be backed up. Sarah Palin may be inarticulate, but there is more important work to be done than pointing that out.

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