I set this blog up to keep smaller chunks of writing on; like all online writing, which is interminably incomplete, I wait until I feel completely ready to start a piece completed.
This piece, the latest in the Mourning for Reading genre, popped up through MetaFilter, a place that has always felt a web-literate place for readers. The text jumps around, taking on McLuhanist ideas of oral and visual cultures (which I think have legitimacy), but this winds up berating the smart phone, linking screen-size to conceptual capacity. I am sat in a victorian library as I write this, with hardback A3 books around me; a reminder that privilege and the capacity for space, peace and solitude have historically characterised reading, things that have not subsequently proliferated as much as the availability of text. And while I suspect I read far more than I have ever done, much of it is more speech as text than thought as text, the vernacular writing of social media. In a way, the volume of text, typographic text (rather than handwritten text) has devalued it; beautifully typeset text is everywhere, but more of it is typo-strewn and transitory pabulum than ever. This is not a matter of discoverability. Digital typesetting has rendered what appears to be final, edited text to the same level as handwritten text once had, of drafthood. Typography no longer disambiguates the elevated from the base. As a medium emphasising only one sense, well-crafted long-form text prioritises the inward and the insular; the text can only be socially experienced in the way three blind people discuss an elephant, unlike other - pre-literate? - mediums. Song? Music? Theatre? These create a consensus of shared experience at a point in time; long-form texts are atemporal artefacts that can only be absorbed individually, and then collectively reflected only in fragmentary and interpretational manners.
The piece ends on the ‘post-literate’ society, the space shaped by short-form tiktok videos destroying the cognitive capacity for democracy to function within. The emergence of media production tools for video editing, captioning, and staging have accelerated it faster than any other medium, intertwined as it is with its digital materiality; video is almost lazy as a medium, whereas the meme, the interplay of layers of text and non-textual meaning invokes the craft of political cartoons stemming from Hogarth. Contemporary digital shorts are rapidly edited from devices with unlimited capacity for retakes, with AI layers statistically optimising a homogenised output, synthesising over cracks and shortcomings in facticity with fully realised simulation.
The question remains, however, why am I writing this at all? Partly to warm my own writing and reflectivity up, as distilling thought into structured text forces connections that are not immediately obvious to emerge; perhaps this piece is considering the loss of writing more than the loss of reading, in as much as it charts the decline of IQ and long-form structures of thinking.
We have a few hundred years of turmoil yet, if the Gutenberg revolution told us anything.