Literate communities have always looked different to their critics

I listened to a podcast episode earlier this week featuring James Marriott, a Times columnist, and author of an upcoming book entitled The New Dark Ages. He was making what I consider to be a moral argument about reading, literacy, and screens which I think is worth pulling apart.

The episode in question was Radical with Amol Rajan. The statistics that Marriott and Rajan discussed are, indeed, alarming. For example, between 2015 and 2024, a third of British adults said they have given up reading for pleasure. Global IQ scores, which rose year-on-year throughout the twentieth century, are now falling. A recent OECD report found that literacy skills have stagnated or declined in most developed countries.

I read a lot. I also listen to a lot of podcasts, follow long discussion threads, annotate academic papers, and spend a good chunk of each week doing what most people would call engaging seriously with ideas. So it rankled somewhat when a BBC podcast arrived at “because screens” conclusion as a causal answer to societal and democratic decline.

While listening, I found myself to be both sympathetic and impatient with Marriott's approach. After giving it some thought, I realised that, while the data points to something real, the explanation that Rajan and Marriott discussed didn't really touch on the underlying problem.

Literacy and democracy

Without spelling it out so succinctly, Marriott's view could be summed up by the equation: reading (books) = literacy = intelligence = democracy. His argument depends on this.

He's not the first person to do so. In Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), to which Marriott refers, Neil Postman made the case that the introduction of TV undermined democratic debate by encroaching on reflective, text-based discourse.

Also cited by Marriott is Benedict Anderson whose work on imagined communities suggests that “print capitalism” is the thing that made nations possible at all. In other words, shared print culture allowed people to imagine themselves as part of a community too large for them to ever know directly.

It's hard to argue against literacy and democracy growing up together: the spread of reading in the 18th and 19th centuries was indeed linked to the political emancipation of the working classes. Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy, which is quoted in the podcast episode approvingly by Rajan, discusses how books were a route out of poverty and a way of being able to argue on equal terms with people of a higher social class.

I'm not arguing against any of that. But none of this suggests that reading printed books is the only way humans have ever built knowledge, community, or the capacity for political agency.

What we talk about when we talk about 'literacy'

In The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin explores the invisible pathways criss-crossing Australia, through which Aboriginal Australians pass songs revealing the creation of the land. Songlines here are not metaphors. They are maps, legal documents, histories, spiritual practices, and mnemonic devices, all at once.

Chatwin drew on the anthropologist Walter Ong, whose work Orality and Literacy showed that oral cultures encode everything worth preserving in memorable forms. Using proverbs, narratives, songs, and rhythmic poetry are different communicative environments to printed text, but produce equally valid literacies. To be “literate” in an oral culture means embodying your community's knowledge, carrying it with you everywhere you go.

To be literate is to be part of a literate community. This involves sharing references, arguing about ideas, and having the knowledge to participate in discourse. As I know, you can be very widely read, but be functionally illiterate in the things that matter to a local community. This also has a generational element, which is, perhaps, why people feel “old” when talking to younger people: they are part of different literate communities.

Realising this was one of the things that led me to my doctoral research on digital literacies. At the time, I was an early-career teacher who was only a decade older than the young people I was teaching. They had grown up with the internet in a way I hadn't. This was before smartphones, so I was interested in the difference that we're talking about early social networks, broadband, forums, and the ability to look everything up meant to them.

These young people weren't less capable than previous cohorts; they were differently capable. They were increasingly fluent in ways that the curriculum largely ignored. I identified eight “essential” elements of digital literacies, of which the civic element is the one that I used to get the most pushback about. Not any more! The capacity to participate in and contribute to public life using digital tools is a form of literacy. It just doesn't show up in OECD reading comprehension tests.

Recently, I've worked with the Responsible Innovation Centre for Public Media Futures, based at BBC R&D on AI literacies for young adults aged 14–19. We found that most existing AI literacy resources tend to prioritise technical skills over critical evaluation. Frustratingly, they are disconnected from work around digital, information, and media literacies that already exists. It's the same problem around definitions that the field has had since the late 1990s.

“Because screens” is not an explanation

Although tempting, pointing at “screens” as the cause of cognitive and societal decline is like pointing at cars to explain traffic deaths. While it may describe the proximate cause, it doesn't discuss the wider issues. I'm a historian by background, so it's a bit like saying that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand “caused” WWI. Well, as any 13 year-old will tell you, it's a bit more complicated than that...

What's actually happening with “screens” is helpfully explained by Cory Doctorow. Writing at Pluralistic this week, he points to a paper by economists which shows a direct, measurable link between cuts to public services and increased support for far-right parties in Britain. For example, when a GP surgery closes, the people it served don't just lose their doctor, they lose a bit of faith in the social contract. And, just as people have done throughout history, they become more susceptible to anyone with a story about who “stole” what was rightfully theirs.

Simple stories are appealing, but it doesn't mean they're correct. What I'm describing here is political literacy which is equally as important as the ability to read big books.

Just to drive the point home, between 2010 and 2019, nearly 800 public libraries closed in England. Youth clubs were cut by more than half, and Sure Start centres were decimated. This was the physical infrastructure through which people of all ages historically built reading communities. I grew up and have taught in deprived areas, and I know first-hand that children who don't grow up in bookish households only tend to encounter books outside the home.

You don't get to strip the infrastructure of reading and then blame the population for not reading. If Marriott is correct in saying that because fewer people read books and this has political consequences, then he should be pointing a finger at those who closed the libraries, rather than at the people who stopped going to them.

I'm sure Marriott is aware of some of this. However, I suspect that the audience he's writing for don't want this nuance. So the distinctions are flattened into the moral claim that people should read more books. That may well be true. But it is not, on its own an analysis. It's a conclusion in search of a cause.

Whose literacy? Whose democracy?

Let's dive deeper into the politics of the podcast episode. Rajan and Marriott have an engaging conversation about the link between the decline in reading and the rise of authoritarian populism. They name Donald Trump and Boris Johnson specifically as examples of this.

They do not, however, discuss Zack Polanski, Zohran Mamdani, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or anyone on the political left who have used social media to mobilise people and support progressive politics. The Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, and the #MeToo movement all involved “screens” to help organise, coordinate, and hold people in authority to account.

In contrast, Cory Doctorow's article names Polanski and Mamdani as examples of politicians doing (or promising to do) the opposite of austerity: fixing things, spending money on people, and earning trust through competence. I note that they do not appear in Marriott's story about how democracy is under threat.

I think that Marriott is describing a conservative view of the purpose of literacy. In this view, literacy is for producing citizens who share a common cultural reference point, which enables a sense of national cohesion – and this case, a version of “Britishness.” If Benedict Anderson showed us that every nation is, in effect, an imagined community, the question is who gets to do the imagining?

This is not a new argument. In my MA thesis (not online) I discussed the argument between Matthew Arnold and Thomas Henry Huxley. In the 1880s, Arnold argued that culture meant acquaintance with “the best that has been thought and said,” with a shared canon as some kind of civilising force. Huxley, on the other hand, argued that scientific and technical knowledge deserved equal standing, wanting citizens capable of interrogating the world they actually lived in.

Marriott is Arnold. I'm sympathetic, but I'll always come down on the side of Huxley. I'm a Pragmatist, so I believe in the cash value of knowledge and belief. There are multiple types of intelligence, and there are multiple types of literacy. IQ tests and literacy tests measure a fixed point in time. The world is more fluid than that.

New Dark Age(s)

Back in 2018, James Bridle (not Marriott) wrote a book called New Dark Age which does something far more interesting than mourn the decline of reading. Instead, Bridle argues that our problem is not too much technology, but too little systemic literacy. We don't have the capacity to see and interrogate the infrastructures that shape what we can know and do. He discusses algorithmic systems, data centres, recommendation engines, along with the legal frameworks that govern them.

This kind argument can scale to the size of the problem. “People aren't reading enough books” cannot.

The Civic element of digital literacies from my own work isn't about simply consuming content more wisely, but about understanding the structures that shape, produce and distribute that content. It also involves being about to act on that understanding. One of the reasons I got involved with Open Badges 15 years ago was because learning happens everywhere, but tends to only be recognised and accredited by book-centric institutions. There are forms of knowledge that deserve to be taken more seriously.

So, no, I don't think that the move away from a dominant book-centric elite is the beginning of a new dark age. To me, it's the same argument Huxley had with Arnold, but with more participants and more at stake.

Final words

If we want to defend democracy, we should be defending the conditions that make critical engagement with it possible. This means libraries, public infrastructure, economic security, and equity around access to education. We shouldn't be victim-blaming people for reading fewer books, nor mourning the specific medium of the printed page.

Marriott and Bridle share book titles, but Bridle's dark age is one in which we can't see the systems that govern us. Marriott's is one in which people watch too many TikTok videos. One of these is a diagnosis, and the other is a moral argument dressed in statistics.