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I’ll confess that I had a hard time staying focused on London Times columnist James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society. But, since I’d spent the previous two days inhaling a 450-page novel, I’ll venture that this wasn’t because my brain has been fried by TikTok and YouTube, as Marriott argues is happening to so many of us. Rather, I found my eyes glazing and my mind wandering because there isn’t a single thing in The New Dark Ages that I hadn’t already read—and written about—at least half a dozen times before over the past 25 years.
It’s not that Marriott is wrong. He isn’t. It’s just that everything in The New Dark Ages seems so obvious. Back in 2010, when Nicholas Carr published The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains—an expansion of a 2008 article in the Atlantic with the more provocative title “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”—he got a lot of pushback from the tech-positive pundits who were still fairly thick on the ground back then. These guys typically retorted that, in its glorious plasticity, the human brain was reshaping itself to encompass the abundance of the internet and the fluid multitasking it demands—in other words, get with the program, gramps. The internet, they said, would raise up a new generation of users who would glide effortlessly from one disparate idea or task to another, like Spider-Man making his webby way through the skyscraper canyons of Manhattan. Clay Shirky, a big booster of this notion, even cheekily mocked Carr for championing “literary reading,” such as long books by 19th-century novelists like Tolstoy. “No one reads War and Peace,” Shirky insisted. “It’s too long, and not so interesting.”
You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone willing to dismiss Marriott’s thesis as blinkered Luddism these days. Pretty much everyone seems to concur that smartphones are addictive and distracting, that reading from screens encourages superficial skimming, and that A.I. and short-form video are actively corroding the literacy of young people in particular. “The End of Reading Is Here,” an essay by Rose Horowitch published on the cover of the Atlantic this summer, presented a similarly declinist narrative to that in The New Dark Ages, using the same alarming data. Marriott’s book is polemical, sure, but who exactly is he arguing against? Much of The New Dark Ages consists of a defense of reading, an activity not notable for its detractors, and a history of the print book, the wide dispersion of which led to the Enlightenment in the 18th century and much of the science and philosophy—as well as novels like War and Peace—we cherish today. Democracy, Marriott asserts, depends for its functioning on an informed electorate with the sustained rational capabilities that only competent reading can instill. Without literacy, we teeter toward autocracy.
This idea—that the technology with which we communicate shapes both what we are able to communicate and how we think—was popularized by the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan in the 1970s. (This is the meaning of his phrase “The medium is the message.”) In 1985, Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, a critique of the effect of television on Western culture, attached a moral argument to McLuhan’s concept by warning that TV had shifted the discourse from a “coherent, orderly arrangement of facts and ideas” to a firehose of information and images in which “what one has just heard or seen has no relevance to what one is about to hear or see, or possibly to anything one is ever likely to hear or see.” Although Postman, who died in 2003, never got to witness the full flowering of the internet or social media, what contemporary content consumer can’t recognize their current plight in that description?
If Marriott develops these ideas further, it’s to maintain that the increasing dominance of short-form video is making the world less literate—that is, less capable of following a complex argument or evaluating its soundness. Anyone remotely interested in this issue will have already read laments by college professors that their students struggle to read whole books, as opposed to excerpts. Furthermore, video, Marriott asserts, introduces irrational factors like the charisma or the visible emotions of a speaker—qualities that are the characteristics of oral cultures. This has brought about what the historian Walter Ong called “secondary orality,” a form of oral culture that coexists with and is dependent on literacy. As a result of the increasing dominance of these technologies, Marriott claims, we are reverting to the superstition, tribalism, and despotism characteristic of oral cultures.
To be fair, not every reader has been following these debates since the internet came along, so perhaps some will find the historical survey of print culture that makes up much of this brief book illuminating. Marriott seems unaware, though, that when he praises the widespread literacy of the 19th century as a democratizing force, writing that “print puts the voices of everyday people on a more equal plane with those of their social superiors,” he is replicating exactly the same arguments once used to champion social media. When he arrives at our current moment, announcing that “the smartphone is to information what fast food is to nutrition,” and observing that the internet provides fertile territory for “superstitions, conspiracies and anti-scientific fantasies,” Marriott returns to observations so commonplace as to verge on cliché. Who, apart from the stray crankish outlier, even needs to be told this today?
What we need, rather, is remedies for our addiction to the algorithmic charms of these profit-driven new technologies, and strategies for resisting their allure. The New Dark Ages is notably short on either of those, which makes it an exercise in Spenglerian gloom in which the past 500 years of literate civilization amount to merely “the Gutenberg Parenthesis” (as one of the few remaining tech cheerleaders has called it) before we sink back into a form of orality. The alarm has been raised more times than I can count. Now what do we intend to do about it?
