A Farewell to Literacy?
By: Alvin Kernan
From: The World And I, Washington Times Corporation, 1993
J. Geffen
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1.
Shifts in the primary means of production mark the great turning points in
society, and, within these larger historical movements, changes in the primary mode
of communication have been especially disruptive in all areas of social life. The
transition from orality to literacy in fifth-century B.C. Greece, from Homer and the
dramatists to Socrates and the philosophers, brought new ways of understanding and
organizing social life that are dramatized in the Platonic dialogues and lived out in the
great Mediterranean empires based on written records.
2.
The Gutenberg revolution beginning in the 16th century transformed manuscript
to print society, extending the esprit de système and iconicity of the printed book into
all areas of life. Marshal McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy describes the complex ways
in which the essential characteristics of print invaded and shaped all areas of life and
thought, as, for example, printed Bibles in the vernacular destroyed the old religious
hierarchy and created religions based on communication between God and man
through the medium of holy scripture.
3.
All modern institutions have been deeply affected by print. Imagine evangelical
Protestantism without the Book? Or the law without printed statutes? But the changes
wrought by the printing press are most apparent in a number of print-centered
institutions that developed in modern Europe along the lines of print logic:
newspapers and magazines, educational systems based on reading and writing, book
publishing, libraries, and literature, by way of obvious examples.
4.
Of course, no human mode of communication, once used, ever disappears
entirely. Oral and handwritten communications did not disappear with the appearance
of print; they may even have been enriched and expanded as in – a small but elegant
example – the epistolary novel in the world of print. Or, once they began to read
widely, people had more to talk about, and conversation became a highly prized social
skill. No more will reading disappear in the age of TV and electronic
communications. But, in a given era, one mode of communication tends to dominate
epistemologically as the most authoritative form of knowledge, and, for the last five
centuries, that dominant mode of communication has been the printed word. “What is
printed is true,” as the old saying goes.
5.
But now, in the mid- to late-20th century, the old institutions, having reached
their full potential about 1950-60, are all in big headline-making trouble.
Interestingly, though the electronic hand, or, more aptly, screen, is usually visible
somewhere, technology seldom appears as the main issue in the trouble. In the case of
newspapers, the preeminent print institution, the new electronic technology that
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makes it possible to set the paper and print it (even eventually to distribute it), along
with the word processors in the editorial offices, has revolutionized the business and
made redundant large numbers of staff, particularly in the composition and press
rooms which were formerly the mechanical centers of newspaper publishing. But,
though these technological realities are understood by everyone, the leading public
issues, fought out on the picket lines and in the headlines, are gut values such as the
right to work, living wages, the necessity of making a profit, freedom of the press, and
sanctity of contracts.
6.
However masked, the disruptions proceed relentlessly. Less than 40 percent of
Americans read a newspaper, though they spend an amazing average of seven hours a
day in front of TV. Newspapers die every month as old names like the Arkansas
Democrat and the Dallas Times Herald disappear. Morning papers swallow the
afternoon papers in the same city, making them late editions of the same paper. More
than half of newspaper advertising income has vanished as national products like
soap, toothpaste, beer, and cars have departed print for TV.
7.
Changes of this magnitude generate social conflict, and the newspaper wars of
New York City exemplify what can happen when the primary medium of
communication changes. In 1963, when a newspaper strike began, there were nine
papers in the city. Two years later, there were only three. In recent years, there have
been five, but two of these, the News and the Post have been devastated by problems.
When bankruptcy loomed, there were buyouts by collectors of bad debts and financial
pirates, looted pension funds, contract negotiations under threat of closure, and
wholesale firings of the members of ancient guilds and chapters. No wonder that one
of its valedictorians speaks of the newspaper as “the dove sent from the ark of
mechanical society to test the waters of computerization.”
8.
Libraries, the cathedrals of print culture, are quieter than the newspaper world,
and here the computer even seems to be the friend of the book, helping to catalog and
locate the flood of printed materials. But even with these electronic aids, the great
book repositories are becoming increasingly expensive to operate and inefficient in
managing their bulging collections.
9.
There are symbolic representations of what is happening. The pages of books
printed after about 1870 on acid paper are browning and breaking up at a rate that will
make 40 percent of the books in major collections unusable in a few years, even with
expensive efforts at conservation. Columbia University closed its distinguished library
school – except for the rare books department – in 1993 with the argument that library
science no longer had a place in a research university, and 14 other major library
schools, out of 43, have closed in recent years.
10. Public libraries have been specially vulnerable to budget cuts in recent years –
though in the Depression during the 1930s, when there was no TV, they were kept
open – and the libraries of private universities have been getting ever smaller
percentages of the budgets. Journal prices have risen 400 percent in 20 years, while
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the price of books has increased 40 percent in 5. At a time when the number of
publications, especially the expensive journals in science that libraries want to buy, is
increasing astronomically, acquisitions have already decreased by 30 percent, and the
gap between publications and purchases increases exponentially, while cataloging
lags and the cost of building space to house the collections spirals. The recent nearcatastrophic efforts to build new national libraries in London and in Paris provide a
catalog of the woes of a major print institution in an electronic era. And, despite great
expenditures, it is not certain that either of these old-style libraries will ever open.
11. With the prices of books rising steadily, the publishing business ought to be in
good shape, especially with the number of titles published in the United States rising
from 11,000 in 1950, when television was new, to over 53,000 in 1989. But rising
prices and increasing numbers of titles are desperate attempts to deal with decreasing
numbers of readers and sales. Individual titles now sell an average of only 2,500 for
trade books and less than 700 for university press monographs, the latter sold almost
entirely to libraries, which are going broke trying to deal with the inflation of titles
and prices.
12. In a postmodernist culture of surplus rather than dearth, old things like printed
materials die not in scarcity but in their own too-muchness, like dying stars flaring up
as they expire. But, within the publishing trade, old quality printing houses like
Scribners, Pantheon, and Knopf are closing or disappearing into communications
conglomerates like Time Warner. In this setting, books become commodities with less
and less editorial attention. Seven-figure advances are paid for the outlines – not the
manuscripts of blockbuster best-sellers, which are designed for the big bookstore
chains, book clubs, movies, and videocassettes controlled by the conglomerate, along
with the needed reviewing media. After a short half-life, the books are remaindered or
sent to the shredding machine to save warehouse costs and taxes on inventory.
13. Print culture is, however, deteriorating most alarmingly in the educational
system. In oral antiquity and even in the manuscript Middle Ages, the educational
systems primarily trained orators in rhetoric, the art of speaking well. The new system
of humanist education that appeared in the Renaissance was centered, however, in the
library and based on the interpretation of printed texts. This system of education,
which flourished for four or more centuries and was gradually made available on all
social levels, was the pride of Western democratic governments, the training ground
for the high level of intellectual ability needed to operate a complex modern state, and
the way out of despair and ignorance for the poor who cared to study. Being able to
read became a primary intellectual rite of passage.
14. But now, schools are often scenes of crimes and violence. With increasingly
politicized education, time is spent not on the old Gutenberg skills of reading and
writing but on sexual instruction, multiculturalism, and ethnicity. The use of English
as the primary teaching language is under assault, and budgetary crises are endemic as
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citizens refuse to vote taxes for schools that outrage their sense of what is right and
useful. And still the time given to classroom instruction shrinks year by year.
15. These are the surface turbulences, but, as in the newspaper business, the root
difficulties run deeper in education, and they run back to technological changes. What
is called the “literacy crisis” extends across a population in which increasing numbers
of people cannot read at all or cannot read well enough to qualify as functionally
literate. Like most things, literacy is difficult to count, but according to surveys
between 10 and 13 percent of the U.S. population cannot read. And of those who can,
some 60 percent, the aliterate, read no book, magazine, or newspaper by choice. In
higher education, this shows up in steadily decreasing verbal test scores and reduced
abilities to read long assignments with comprehension. In all school grades, it appears
as a continuing reduction in the reading standards.
16. There are many explanations for what has gone wrong with the schools, but
prominent among them must surely be the decrease of reading skills and the
increasing amounts of time that students spend watching the oral-visual medium of
television. It is not just that this takes time away from reading; it also offers a very
different, and a very efficient, way of obtaining information – especially the kind of
junk information that is standard network fare – and therefore a very different concept
of information itself. Reading is a difficult skill that has to be painfully learned, but
listening to and watching the flickering images on the screen come effortlessly, and
those who do so exclusively are not only less able to follow the complex arguments of
printed texts, they really don’t see why things have to be as intricate, complicated, and
difficult to get at as they are in print. Radical shifts in communications technology not
only change folkways and economic practices, they change consciousness.
17. The violent turmoil in all the major print institutions at the present time
constitutes irrefutable evidence that we are in the midst, once again, of a radical
change in our primary mode of creating, storing, and transmitting information. Our
moment is in this respect similar to early transitions from oral to manuscript and then
to print culture. The word processor, television, fax, compact laser disk, audiocassette,
telephone, and other electronic applications are everywhere sweeping the old print
world and its institutions away, changing human consciousness as well as economics
and business practices as they do so. The real question is not, any longer, whether
revolutionary changes are taking place in print institutions, but rather what is the best
way to respond to changes that are already well along.
18. Even if people know that technology is making their old ways of doing things
and earning livings nonfunctional, a natural assumption of the durability of the status
quo makes them continue to defend the old ways. In many places, the response to the
disruptions of print institutions has been, as in the great newspaper wars, a reactionary
defense of the status quo by whatever interests are vested, or, as in the politicization
of literature, a nimble opportunism or types of social activism that see a main chance
in a disintegrating ancien régime.
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19. But, in most areas, the response follows the familiar pattern of trying to use the
new technology to prop up what it is, in fact, making obsolete. The first type fonts
were copies of scribal hands, and steam engines were at first auxiliary sources of
power on sailing ships. This response pattern to technological change is obvious and
widespread in the print electronic shift. As printed materials proliferate, books
disintegrate on the shelf, and costs rise at an inflationary rate in the research library;
computers are used to catalog a collection in which it is increasingly difficult to locate
anything and to provide bibliographies that will make it possible to follow themes
through the growing swamps of printed material that the writer Jorge Luis Borges
called “the library of Babel,” a collection of all possible combinations of letters in all
possible forms.
20. In the short run it helps, but in the long run more and more of the library budget
goes to computers, draining money away from printed materials. Even more
ominously, the computerized catalog and bibliography make it increasingly clear that
libraries are a cumbersome business in which knowledge is tied to material objects –
heavy to move, likely to disintegrate, occupying huge amounts of space, expensive to
heat, cool, humidify, dehumidify, bind, preserve, find, and carry home. How much
easier it is in all ways to tap out commands on the key board of a word processor and
have the information appear on the screen, to track through an infinity of
combinations and possibilities in a short time, printing out instantly only what is
needed. And, as we become more accustomed to working in this efficient way, the
“library” of the future is glimpsed: an on-line, full-text database, in which information
occupies no space, elaborately indexed and available on command to any user
anywhere at any time. And on beyond that, a world where the fixed, unified locus of
knowledge, the book or the article, disappears into some kind of endless interactivity,
some vast, ongoing hypertext in which information is constantly being made, unmade,
remade.
21. The use of new technology as supplementary to obsolescent procedures is both
natural and inevitable. It becomes harmful only if persisted in so long that it blocks
the development of the possibilities waiting in the new technology. We are all, at least
those reading this article, Gutenberg people who love and revere the book. For us, its
replacement by the TV and computer screens appears as the triumph of barbarism.
But electronic media will not destroy civilization. They will radically change how
people act and think, but the new methods of communicating will in time offer
opportunities for organizing and understanding the world to make it a place fit to live
in.
22. But stubborn resistance goes on, and not surprisingly when we consider the
deep feelings and loyalties these changes threaten. The decrease of literacy and the
consequent breakdown of print institutions are seen not as the inevitabilities they are,
however surprising the change may be, but as some vile disease in the body politic.
The infectious agents are variously identified as modern sloth, squalid populism,
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social leveling, the collapse of the family and the national fiber. Great campaigns,
headed by famous people, are mounted to raise money, start new programs, and stem
the tide of illiteracy that threatens civilization itself.
23. They don’t work, of course. We have already seen the high tide of universal
literacy in the early 20th century. There are momentary resurgences as one upwardly
mobile group or another comes intellectually on-line, but reading scores continue
relentlessly to go down, in the best schools and in the worst. Reading will continue to
be a required skill of the educated, and it should obviously continue to be taught to
those, and there are many, who still take to it. But does it make sense in view of the
obvious trend away from printed material to put all or almost all our efforts into lastditch attempts to teach reading and interpretation of printed materials? While
maintaining these socially vital activities, would it not make sense to begin to put
major efforts into developing not just computer literacy but new audiovisual materials
that would supplement instruction in the three R’s and begin to constitute the primary
way of getting information and transmitting it to others?
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Answer in your own words.
Answer the following question in English.
1.
At what period does the author think that literacy began?
Answer: _________________________________________________________
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Answer the following question in Hebrew.
2.
How did the Gutenberg revolution undermine the religious hierarchy?
(paragraph 2)
Answer: _________________________________________________________
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Answer the following question in English.
3.
How did the spread of literacy lead to the high status of an oral skill like
conversation? (paragraph 4)
Answer: _________________________________________________________
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Answer the following question in English.
4.
How have the new technologies affected the press? (paragraphs 5-6)
Answer: _________________________________________________________
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Answer the following question in Hebrew.
5.
What do the newspaper wars of New York city exemplify? (paragraph 7)
Answer: _________________________________________________________
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Answer the following question in English.
6.
What does the decision of Columbia University illustrate? (paragraph 9)
Answer: _________________________________________________________
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A Farewell to Literacy? / 8
Answer the following question in English.
7.
List some of the developments that illustrate the difficulties of the printing
world. (paragraphs 9-10)
Answer: _________________________________________________________
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Answer the following question in Hebrew.
8.
What social development does the information in paragraph 11 refer to?
Answer: _________________________________________________________
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Answer the following question in English.
9.
How do most communication conglomerates perceive the role of books in
society? (paragraph 12)
Answer: _________________________________________________________
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Answer the following question in Hebrew.
10. What form of government ideally presupposes universal literacy? (Why?)
(paragraph 13)
Answer: _________________________________________________________
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Answer the following question in English.
11. What phenomena in the schooling system reflect the radical changes society is
undergoing? (paragraphs 14-15)
Answer: _________________________________________________________
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Complete the sentence below.
12. The financial difficulties experienced by the local schools (paragraph 14) are to
be attributed to the fact that _________________________________________
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Answer the following question in Hebrew.
13. What do the new curricula introduced in American schools suggest about the
changing social climate in the U.S.A.? (paragraph 14)
Answer: _________________________________________________________
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A Farewell to Literacy? / 9
Answer the following question in English.
14. What facts provided in paragraph 15 would apply also to conditions in Israel?
Answer: _________________________________________________________
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Answer the following question in English.
15. How and why has the oral-visual medium of television affected people’s
intellectual tastes? (paragraph 16)
Answer: _________________________________________________________
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Answer the following question in Hebrew.
16. What are some social reactions that advanced technology is likely to arouse?
Elaborate. (paragraphs 18-21)
Answer: _________________________________________________________
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Answer the following question in English.
17. List some of the advantages computerized knowledge has over the written word.
(paragraph 20)
Answer: _________________________________________________________
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Answer the following question in Hebrew.
18. Do you the find the statement in paragraph 23 – We have already seen the high
tide of universal literacy in the early 20th century – accurate? Elaborate.
Answer: _________________________________________________________
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Answer the following question in English.
19. Why can the literary establishment be said to be fighting a losing battle?
(paragraph 23)
Answer: _________________________________________________________
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A Farewell to Literacy? / 10
Answer the following question in English.
20. Why may the educational establishment find the statements in paragraph 23
comforting?
Answer: _________________________________________________________
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