By Kathryn Butler TGC. (Photo: Markus Clemens/Unsplash)
In a scene that horrified me in fifth grade, the protagonist of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine wanders through ruins of a museum and realizes the brown and charred rags hanging throughout a gallery are “the decaying vestiges of books.” Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 envisions an oppressive government that systematically burns books to squash critical thinking and independence. Even more unsettling, the government in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World electrically shocks infants to condition them against reading and keeps the Bible under lock and key, because “civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness” over God.
All these plotlines portray the haunting image of a world without reading—a world devoid of knowledge, virtue, and deep thought; awash in corruption; groaning for a sliver of truth and goodness; and divorced from worship of the One who made heaven and earth.
According to Rose Horowitch, journalist at The Atlantic, such chilling scenes are threatening to creep out of science-fiction stories and into our homes and schools. In her provocatively titled article “The End of Reading Is Here,” she issues a dire warning: If we don’t safeguard our culture of literacy, “the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history.”
Is reading really on the verge of extinction? What do Christians stand to lose in a world that prizes short-form videos over the printed word—and how can we walk faithfully? I spoke with several Christian experts in literature and technology who shared their hopes and fears for a postliterate society.
What Does Postliterate Mean?
Communications theorist Marshall McLuhan popularized the term “post-literate” in his 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy, in which he predicted electronic and visual media would eventually supplant the written word. But in some regards, we now read more than ever before.