"What can we expect of its economic and social consequences? In the first place, we can expect an abrupt and final cessation of the demand for the type of factory labor performing purely repetitive tasks. In the long run, the deadly uninteresting nature of the repetitive task may make this a good thing and the source of leisure necessary for a man's full cultural development. It may also produce cultural results as trivial and wasteful as the greater part of those so far obtained from the radio and the movies" (p. 219).
Nick Thimmesch, editor. Aliteracy. People Who Can Read but Won't.
Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Policy
Research, 1983. Proceedings of a conference held on September 20,
1982 in Washington, DC.
According to William A. Baroody, Jr., President of the American Enterprise Institute, the aliterate person scans magazines, reads headlines, "never reads novels or poetry for the pleasures they offer." He goes on to state that aliteracy is more dangerous because it "reflects a change in cultural values and a loss of skills" and "leads to knowing without understanding."
Marsha Levine, a participant in the conference noted that although educators are concerned with universal literacy, many people read less or not at all: "A revolution in technology is having an impact on education…they [technological means] increase the level of literacy, but they might undermine the practice of what they teach."
At the same conference, an anonymous participant posed a sequence of questions: "Exactly what advantage do reading and literacy hold in terms of helping us to process information? What does reading give us that is of some social advantage that cannot be obtained through other media? Is it entirely certain that we cannot have a functioning society with an oral-aural method of communication, where we use television and its still unexploited resources of communication? […] Is it impossible to conceive of a generation that has received its knowledge of the world and itself through television?" (p. 22).
John Searle. The storm over the university, in The New York
Review of Books, 37:19, December 6, 1990, pp. 34-42.
Plato. Phaedrus, and The Seventh and Eighth Letters. Trans.
Walter Hamilton. Harmondsworth: Penguin Press, 1973.
In Phaedrus, Socrates, portrayed by Plato, articulates arguments against writing: "It will implant forgetfulness in their souls [of people, M.N.]: they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling these things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks; what you have discovered is a recipe [pharmakon, a potion; some translate it as recipe, M.N.] not for memory, but for reminder" (274-278e. p. 96). (References to Plato include the Stephanus numbers. This makes them independent of the particular edition used by the reader.)
Claude Lévi-Strauss. Tristes Tropiques. Paris: Plon, 1967.
The author continues Socrates' thought: "It [writing] seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment" (p. 298).