Screens disconnect. But infinite scrolls manifest a deeper crisis of meaning.
A new moral panic is haunting the land: the rise of a post-literate society. The fear is that a world without reading is being forged by the prevalence of flighty, flashing screens and addictive social media.
Move over political fragmentation and psychological disorders. This crisis is indicated by a decline in the numbers of people who read for pleasure, or for study, or who want to take English as a degree: the collapse of the paragraph, the chapter, the book.
Infinite scrolls are blamed for freshers now needing courses on reading. The rewired brain has grown incapable of the cognitive skills that long-form arguments require. Democracy, too, is at stake as reason is replaced by reactivity, law by digital anarchy.
And there is no doubt much in this spike of concern. Catherine, Princess of Wales, this week called it an “epidemic of disconnection”.
Modern-day Romantics are on the case – currently led by the sharp-minded Timescolumnist, James Marriott. A devotee of the dumb-phone and lover of books (his Substack is Cultural Capital), he has collated the evidence, deepened the case, and unexpectedly become an activist.
But there is a deep irony in the fact that post-literacy is preoccupying believers in the power of literature, feeling and aesthetics. For at least some of these enlightened folk are implicated in what, I reckon, lies behind the literary decline: a crisis in the significance of words themselves.
Continue reading at my Substack, A Golden String…