The Fate of Writers and Readers in a Post-Literate Society
Wordcels in a world that's moved on
I think about Priests a lot. As an Irish person the central cultural/ historical event of my lifetime has been the collapse of the Catholic Church; I often wonder what it must be like to have graduated from seminary in the mid- to late-nineties. You went into training with the Church as a fading but titanic force; and you emerged to find the whole social structure that gave your vocation context had evaporated out from under your feet. Imagine being a person who has prepared for a task their whole life, and goes out into the real world and finds they are not needed, and viewed as an absurd and perhaps distasteful relic. This was supposed to be my life. What the fuck am I supposed to do now? Whenever I consider their situation I feel a flutter of panic in my chest; that flutter is not just empathy but a sense that the obliterating maw of progress might have turned its attention from the religious orders to people like me and you, dear reader.
News reaches us every day that the world places less value than it did even a few decades ago on reading and writing, and in turn on less value people for whom reading and writing is a skill and/or a compulsion. An article in The Atlantic in October highlighted that in the US “many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books… students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester”. A month later the New York Times agreed that “college professors report steep declines in students' willingness and ability to read on their own. To adapt, instructors are assigning less reading and giving students time in class to complete it…” There are a variety of explanations here, but the main one in its rat-like way, social media has gnawed through the rope of concentration that connected human beings with their ability and willingness to engage with anything longer than a post-it note, and we are now permanently unmoored.
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