For subscribers
Are we becoming a post-literate society?
Technology has changed the way many of us consume information, away from complex pieces of writing to short video clips.
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
Technology has diverted people's attention from longer, more complicated pieces of writing, such as books and newspaper articles, to short social media posts and video clips.
PHOTO: ST FILE
Sarah O’Connor
Follow topic:
“Human intelligence,” the cultural critic Neil Postman once wrote, “is among the most fragile things in nature. It doesn’t take much to distract it, suppress it, or even annihilate it.”
The year was 1988, a former Hollywood actor was in the White House, and Mr Postman was worried about the ascendancy of pictures over words in American media, culture and politics. Television “conditions our minds to apprehend the world through fragmented pictures and forces other media to orient themselves in that direction”, he argued in an essay in his book Conscientious Objections. “A culture does not have to force scholars to flee to render them impotent. A culture does not have to burn books to assure that they will not be read... There are other ways to achieve stupidity,” he wrote.
