After Literacy
Debating Literacy, in Print
Two essays recently came across my feed, each circling the fate of literacy in our digital environment. In https://hybridhorizons.substack.com/p/why-you-cant-focus-anymoreWhy You Can’t Focus Anymore [https://hybridhorizons.substack.com/p/why-you-cant-focus-anymore], Carlo Iacono argues that we haven’t become post-literate so much as “post-monomodal,” suggesting that our challenge is not the death of books but the casino-like feeds that fracture attention. In https://jmarriott.substack.com/p/the-dawn-of-the-post-literate-society-aa1The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society [https://jmarriott.substack.com/p/the-dawn-of-the-post-literate-society-aa1], James Marriott strikes a more elegiac tone, warning that the decline of reading undermines rational thought, culture, and even democracy. Both are thoughtful and well-intentioned. Both are also written artifacts—products of print literacy, hosted on a platform still overwhelmingly textual.
That irony is telling, and it points us back to Marshall McLuhan: the medium is the message, and here the message may be that print still frames how we talk about literacy, even as the cultural ground itself has already shifted beneath us. Print is no longer the air we breathe—it’s the Latin of our time, lingering as a prestige language of culture even as daily cognition moves elsewhere. Literacy has never been just about private reading habits; it has been bound up with access to power, governance, and cultural participation. To lose print as cultural ground is not just to mourn books—it is to undergo a civilizational shift.
Print literacy was never simply about decoding words on a page. It was the passport to cultural participation and political power. The Protestant Reformation spread not by sermons alone but by printed Bibles and pamphlets, giving ordinary believers access to sacred text without clerical mediation. The Enlightenment unfolded in coffeehouses, fueled by pamphlets and journals that circulated ideas of reason and democracy. Even the modern nation-state was built on print foundations: censuses, contracts, constitutions, and bureaucratic records. To be literate was to belong, to enter into the civic and cultural structures that defined modernity. When we speak of literacy losing its ground, we are not only talking about books—we are talking about the very operating system of citizenship.
Print as Cognitive Training, Not Human Nature
As McLuhan argued, no medium is neutral. Each one carries a cognitive bias, reorganizing how we perceive, process, and communicate. Print literacy trained us to privilege linearity, abstraction, and sequence—habits of mind that became synonymous with rational thought. The Enlightenment was a print effect, an intellectual revolution enabled by the habits of sequential, typographic reasoning. That training was so successful that we often forget it is historically contingent. What James calls a collapse of reason may be better understood as the waning of a particular media bias: the dominance of print as cultural ground.
Human cognition did not begin with print. Oral cultures structured thought through rhythm, memory, and performance—communal forms of knowledge that emphasized participation and immediacy. To equate intelligence with literacy is to ignore the deep history of human thought outside the page.
Print didn’t just elevate the eye, it extracted it from the symphony of the senses. Oral cultures integrated hearing, sight, touch, and memory in a collective rhythm of knowledge. Print isolated vision, abstracting symbols into marks on a page and training the eye to march line by line, left to right, detached from voice and body. This hyper-visual bias fostered abstraction and analytic distance—useful for reason, law, and science—but it also severed thought from its tactile and auditory anchors. In this sense, print was not a neutral upgrade but a profound narrowing of human perception, a tunnel vision that defined the modern age, which resulted in fragmentation, alienation, and a narrowed bandwidth of perception.
When Print Was the Content
McLuhan’s famous law was that the content of any new medium is the old medium. For over a century, electronic technologies carried print as their cargo. Radio read newspapers aloud. Silent films inserted dialogue and exposition through title cards. Early television borrowed the typography and layout of magazines and broadsheets. Even early digital platforms echoed print: blogs mimicked newspapers, while Facebook’s original “wall” replicated the public bulletin board.
What has changed in the digital environment is the shift in what counts as content. Platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Spotify don’t borrow from print—they borrow from broadcast television, recorded music, and film. Electronic media have become the content of digital media, while print is pushed another degree outward, a ghost of a ghost. This may be why the sense of decline feels so sharp now. For the first time in half a millennium, print no longer serves as the scaffolding of the next medium.
The Word “Literacy” Has Migrated
For centuries, “literacy” meant only one thing: the ability to read and write text. It was the gatekeeper to education, citizenship, and cultural participation. But as the twentieth century unfolded, new literacies emerged alongside print. Visual literacy developed through cinema, photography, and advertising. Mathematical and data literacies became essential in a world increasingly structured by statistics, finance, and computation. And now digital literacy—navigating networks, interfaces, and multimodal platforms—defines participation in contemporary life.
To speak of a “post-literate” society, then, may miss the mark. What we are actually entering is a poly-literate environment, one where multiple competencies coexist and overlap. Print still matters, but no longer as the cultural baseline. Instead, it is one mode among many, useful for certain cognitive disciplines but no longer the sole measure of intelligence.
The very expansion of the word “literacy” reflects this shift. We talk of media literacy, emotional literacy, financial literacy. We even say someone is “literate in code” or “literate in design.” The term has migrated far beyond print, signaling that culture itself recognizes the pluralization of how we read the world. If the book was once a cathedral, literacy is now a bazaar—an open field of overlapping symbol systems, each demanding its own fluency.
Print Absolutism vs. Rosy Multimodality
James Marriott’s warning about a post-literate society is animated by what might be called print absolutism. He equates the decline of reading with the decline of rational thought, treating literacy not as one cognitive bias among others but as the essence of human intelligence. He is right to note that print cultivates specific mental muscles—sustained focus, linear reasoning, and abstraction. But he mistakes those for universal cognition, overlooking the oral, visual, and digital modes that also shape how humans know. His analysis risks collapsing into nostalgia for a media environment that no longer holds the cultural ground.
Carlo Iacono, by contrast, emphasizes the promise of multimodality. He argues that we are not post-literate but post-monomodal, and that the real threat is the casino-like feed environment that fragments our attention. His optimism is refreshing, and his call for “attention gyms” acknowledges the importance of design and architecture. But he paints the picture too rosily, as if books and videos sit in an even balance. He underestimates the gravitational pull of algorithmic feeds and the way they restructure cognition at scale.
That gravitational pull is not metaphorical. It is engineered. Autoplay ensures that YouTube chooses the next video before you can. TikTok learns your preferences in seconds and refines them endlessly, tugging you deeper into a feed you never designed. Spotify nudges you toward algorithmic playlists instead of the albums or artists you might have chosen for yourself. These are not neutral conveniences—they are architectures that seize attention and rewire habits. What once required deliberation—picking a book, a record, a film—now happens as reflex. And at scale, reflex becomes culture.
The nutritional metaphor fits here: feeds are fast calories, engineered for craving, while print is slow food, metabolized differently. One is not better in every respect, but the diets they encourage could not be more distinct.
The Academy’s Blind Spot
James points to the struggles of today’s college freshmen with classic literature as evidence of decline, but here the academy’s own bias comes into play. Universities remain bastions of print culture, organized around linear argument, close reading, and the canon. To demand that students raised in a poly-literate environment collapse back into a single modality is less a fair assessment than a failure of adaptation on the institution’s part. What looks like deficiency may in fact be the mismatch between an older print-centric curriculum and a generation trained to think across modes—text, image, sound, and screen.
Academia does not simply lag behind; it polices literacy norms, often stigmatizing non-print sources of knowledge. Professors scoff when students cite YouTube or TikTok, yet for many, those are legitimate channels of learning. Seen this way, the problem is not that literacy is vanishing, but that our institutions have yet to catch up to the plurality of literacies already shaping how the next generation learns and thinks.
While the arguments of both James and Carlos have merit, they both miss the crucial environmental dimension that McLuhan helps us see. Print is not disappearing, but neither is it coexisting on equal footing. Its role is shifting: from cultural ground to counter-environment, from unconscious default to conscious choice.
Survival Literacies in an Age of Abundance
The erosion of print is not sudden. Electronic technologies have been reshaping our cognitive environment for more than a century, from the telegraph and radio to film and television. What feels distinct about the present moment is the way digital platforms subsume all prior media. Text, image, sound, and video circulate within the same interfaces, collapsed into feeds optimized for speed and engagement. This convergence makes the prospect of a post-literate society feel tangible in a way it did not even a generation ago.
But post-literate does not mean post-intelligent. It signals a shift in how intelligence expresses itself. Instead of privileging linear argument and sequential logic, digital environments train us in simultaneity, pattern recognition, and navigation across multiple streams. These are survival literacies in an age of information abundance—different cognitive skills, not lesser ones. The danger lies not in their existence but in their capture by attention economies that exploit distraction.
The problem is not only attention but comprehension. Studies show that across media—whether text, audio, or video—retention and understanding have declined in environments of constant interruption. Students skim novels but also half-hear podcasts, half-watch explainers, absorbing fragments without integration. The medium may change, but the underlying condition is the same: a culture of perpetual flow resists depth. It is not just that we skim the ocean’s surface instead of plumbing its depths—it is that the currents themselves are designed to keep us moving, never still long enough to sound the bottom.
In this context, print does not vanish but repositions itself. No longer the cultural ground, it becomes a counter-environment—a deliberate exercise in slowing down, isolating variables, and sustaining attention. Like a cold plunge for the nervous system, reading can serve as a chosen discipline, a corrective to the velocity of the feed. Its value lies not in ubiquity, but in contrast.
From Monoculture to Media Ecology
It is worth remembering that both James and Carlo are writing in good faith, shaped by their professional investments in print culture. Journalists and librarians are, by definition, custodians of the written word. Their anxieties are understandable, even necessary, as we wrestle with what comes next. I share their concern for the erosion of attention and the flattening of culture in the feed. But from a McLuhan perspective, what we are witnessing is not the end of literacy but the reconfiguration of literacy within a broader media ecology.
Print is not dead—it is repositioned. It no longer sets the baseline of cultural life, but it remains invaluable as a counter-bias, a training ground for habits that digital culture alone will not provide. To preserve print’s virtues does not mean resisting change, nor does embracing new literacies mean abandoning old ones. The challenge is to cultivate a poly-literate sensibility, one that can move between books, screens, and voices without mistaking any single medium for the sum of human thought.
That, perhaps, is the true task before us: not to mourn the passing of literacy, nor to idealize a frictionless multimodality, but to navigate consciously the plurality of literacies that define our moment. And if we are serious about that task, it won’t just be individuals who must adapt. Our institutions—schools, libraries, universities—must also evolve, restructured to support multiple literacies rather than enforce a single one. The last time literacy shifted this dramatically, we called it the Enlightenment. We may now be standing at the threshold of something just as consequential.
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