# The dawn of the post-literate society - by James Marriott  ## Metadata - Author: [[Substack]] - Full Title: The dawn of the post-literate society - by James Marriott - Category: #articles - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Summary: The eighteenth‑century reading revolution created modern science, reason and democratic culture. Today books and deep reading are dying as screens erode literacy. Losing reading skills threatens critical thinking, innovation and democracy. - URL: https://jmarriott.substack.com/p/the-dawn-of-the-post-literate-society-aa1 - Source File: web-only ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > Philosophy cannot exist without criticism . . . **writing makes it possible and convenient to subject thought to a continuous and concentrated scrutiny**. Writing freezes speech and in so doing gives birth to the grammarian, the logician, the rhetorician, the historian, the scientist-all those who must hold language before them so that they can see what it means, where it errs, and where it is leading. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5kqde5ktz8kctq40qb7fn67)) - Tags: [[thinking]] > The classicist Eric Havelock argued that the arrival of literacy in ancient Greece was the catalyst for the birth of philosophy. Once people had a means of pinning ideas down on the page to interrogate them, refine them and build on them, a whole new revolutionary way of analytic and abstract thinking was born — one that would go on to shape our entire civilisation [[Writing/research/The aesthetics of graphic design 1/the aesthetics of typography/3. Fittingness]](https://jmarriott.substack.com/p/the-dawn-of-the-post-literate-society-aa1/#footnote-3-173338158) . With the birth of writing received ways of thinking could be challenged and improved. This was our species’ cognitive liberation. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5kqdnkacyna79htwhg63ef1)) - Tags: [[thinking]] > The world of print is orderly, logical and rational. In books, knowledge is classified, comprehended, connected and put in its place. Books make arguments, propose theses, develop ideas. “To engage with the written word”, the media theorist Neil Postman wrote, “means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning.” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5kpwaph1zbn3nzbwfhxae50)) - Tags: [[thinking]]