I think that Harvard scholar Danielle Allen has lurched uncontrollably on to a point I’ve been making here at The Glittering Eye for the last decade in her recent Washington Post op-ed. Most people are no longer literate; the way they obtain new information is primarily visual. However, I think she’s wrong in attributing political discord to that:
My hypothesis is that, as of summer 2015, the conversations in TV and radio land were barely visible within text-based journalism. Some of those conversations involved sustained criticism of the cultural authority of newspapers and universities. That criticism targeted the professional norms of these sectors, which now include a widespread commitment to gender and racial equality as well as to social equality in relation to sexual identity. That TV and radio land conversation also stirs up great attraction for towering figures of that landscape — Trump, for instance.
In launching his campaign, TV-titan Trump routinely exhibited disdain for the professional norms of newspapers and universities that require respectful language. He got away with it. A sizable number of Americans answered his call.
In the primary, his campaign tried to deploy the idea that he was puncturing a spiral of silence. They made widespread use of posters and signs claiming that Trump spoke for a “silent majority.†But those who answered Trump’s call throughout the primary were neither silent nor a majority. In the primaries, he crossed over the threshold to victory by means of a plurality, not a majority. And his supporters do participate in a big, public conversation — whether through Fox News or on talk radio or by passing pieces of the Drudge Report and Breitbart through social media.
In this campaign, we haven’t seen a silent majority suddenly awoken. Instead, we’ve seen a coming-of-age of a vocal minority that was nearly invisible to another vocal minority, the community of readers of traditional text-based journalism, a community dominated by the professional classes. Over the past nine months, these two minorities have been battling for the country’s soul.
While I agree that those who obtain information from the written word live in a different world from those who don’t, I don’t think that those are the worlds that are clashing. I think that two different primarily visual worlds, occupying the same landscape but viewing the events that occur completely differently and rarely intersecting, are colliding and the small remaining literate world has just now realized that the social and political landscapes are very different from what they thought they were.
Since coming back into the corporate world after decades in my own, cozy little company, one of the things that has been impressed on me is how few people are functionally literate. Being literate doesn’t just mean you can read the words in an email or on a page. It means you obtain information from reading. The differences between the literate world and the visual one aren’t superficial. They’re basic, as I’ve discussed at length. See my “Visualcy” subject for more. Communicators in an oral society tend to be additive, agonistic, redundant and repetitive, empathetic, and situational. Communicators in a literate society tend to be subordinative, analytic, objective, and abstract. My thesis is that a visual society more closely resembles an oral one than it does a literate one.
In today’s world we have virtual communities that rarely interact. When these societies are forced together, that they are both agonistic, empathetic, and situational makes an enormous difference. The interactions are unsettling and that’s what we’re seeing now.
It’s not either/or, it’s all of the above. I pay some attention to the media environment of teens, both because it’s part of my job and because I have kids of my own. What’s happened is not that the visual (emojis, memes, TV, YouTube, etc…) has replaced the written, but that a person today wishing to communicate has a much wider array of possibilities.
I’ve had to do a fair amount of research to write the trilogy I’m wrapping up, which is set in WW2. Books are part of that, but so is the internet which gives me data I simply cannot get from a book – information superior to what I’d get from a book. At one point I have my characters learning to aim and fire an M1. My source was not a book, but the original US Army training film which I found on YouTube. If I were writing this trilogy 20 years ago I’d have a fraction of the sources. The datasphere (I assume that’s a Gibson word) is infinitely richer than it used to be, and it calls for skills beyond the close reading of text.
But interestingly this has not caused some huge drop-off in the reading of books. My GONE series is six books totaling 3000 pages. I’ve sold 4 million of them, which is nice, but a drop in the bucket compared to the HUNGER GAMES or DIVERGENT series, which are also long books. My wife’s gorilla book has been on the bestseller lists for three years. Kids are buying books. They read those books, then they text a happy face emoji to a friend, write a review on Goodreads, go on Twitter and chat with other readers. . . This is not some dire dystopian scenario of declining literacy. On the contrary, it’s kids coping with a proliferation of sources of data, learning to use each, and all with no help from the school systems which are currently in thrall to the STEMies and believe the future is all about creating more engineers. Fighting the last war, as always.
Something else to consider: World War 1, the Great Depression, the Bolshevik revolution, the Holocaust, the Cultural Revolution and many other exciting developments were brought to you by people who read lots and lots of books, digested lots and lots of text, and never even imagined an emoji. And today the text-dominant portion of the American population – old people – are doing their best to elect a mentally unhinged, sexually predatory imbecile to the presidency. I don’t think there’s a case to be made that the written word is inherently superior to the more varied data environment we now enjoy. In fact I think I could make the opposite case.
A) Who was surprised by Trump except moderate Republicans? Michael Reynolds has been calling the GOP base racist and misogynistic ever since I went to OTB, and he’s not offering an esoteric interpretation of what was out in the hinterlands. Lots of people understand; few were surprised.
B) Trump voters get tons of information through literate means. They hear about the Muslim Brotherhood infiltrating the White House, about Sandy Hook being an operation run by the government, about chem trails and Obama plotting against whites and vaccines and transgender bathroom plots.
C) What they are lacking is not literacy but a narrative. The one they had relies upon ideas that make most everybody, including the children of Trump voters, uncomfortable. Also, it no longer works at all and is completely undesirable by anybody who has power in their lives.
D) There are fewer autodidacts in the world than there used to be, especially amongst the young. I think that has more to do with literacy and the expectations about what words can reveal than anything else.
Modulo:
If there’s an educational gap revealed by Trump’s popularity it’s in history and logic and philosophy – three courses schools carefully avoid. We are not teaching people how to think. In fact in the usual school district any attempt to teach kids to think rationally would be actively opposed by parents.
Teach kids to think and you grow a generation of agnostics and atheists, and parents won’t have that. So despite the astonishing fact that we now have the sum of all human knowledge instantly available everywhere to everyone, we are making no effort to teach kids how to exploit that new reality.
This isn’t the fault of millennials or any of the other generations we old people like to blame, it’s on us, on baby boomers. We have the votes, the money, the numbers. We have reacted to the greatest explosion in data dissemination by retreating into superstition. It’s failure on an epic scale, a failure of our civilization to adapt.