James Marriott: The Dawn of a Post-Literate Society

Are we doomed? Yes, well, I've often said that we are.

If doomed is going too strongly, I think the subject of my book tackles, which is the decline of reading and the decline of a culture of reading and writing.

is a really major moment in our society and in our culture.

And I think it's easy to miss how big it is, partly because, as I argue in the book, it's been in train for a long time now, I think more than 50 years, where we're beginning to reach the end of a story that's not quite old in our culture in terms of the decline of reading.

I also think because we easily tend to underrate what reading means and what we get out of reading.

And I think I was just talking to you before we started recording about the sort of puzzle over the subtitle that I was having with my publisher.

And I'm aware that the end of reading just sounds like the end of a pleasant hobby, like the end of fly fishing or the end of basket weaving or something.

And Which we'd all welcome.

Yes, which we'd...

Well, I don't know.

I don't want to alienate you from any fly fishers in the Spectator podcast.

But I think we'd agree those things maybe feel a little bit less dramatic.

And I guess one of the humps to get over with the argument I make in my book to try to get into earlier is that I think... reading and writing are much more than pleasant hobbies and activities that are extraneous to our life and our culture and our politics, and ones that have been central to it, and which we're now losing, and we really shouldn't underestimate what losing them might mean.

And that centrality, I mean, you make the case quite early on in the book that it's not about the activity of reading so much as what that does to our cognitive faculties and how it's shaped our societies now.

I mean, what does it do to our brains to read? Because you quote Marianne Wolfe, the neuroscientist on this.

It does a lot.

I mean, it's maybe worth saying that every skill that you learn, neuroscientists will tell us, will reshape the architecture of your brain.

So it's not like in reshaping the architecture of your brain, which we know reading does, it's doing something that nothing else will do.

Learning the violin will reshape your brain.

I guess the neuroscience is interesting because reading seems to reshape your brain in particularly powerful ways.

It also vindicates arguments that have been made about reading by media theorists who I've long been obsessed with and who are now very fashionable in the air, people like Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong, who were arguing since the 1950s, 1960s, that... communicating through written language and through reading isn't just another way of communicating and isn't just an alternative, equally as good as a means of passing information backwards and forwards between people as talking might be or communicating in sign language might be.

Their argument was that reading and writing... create whole kinds of knowledge.

So there are whole ways of thinking that you can't do without reading and writing.

Things like philosophy, things like logic.

History as we know it is completely unimaginable without reading and writing.