RECENT years have seen a surge of books and articles on the impact of technology on people’s lives and thinking. While communication technology has opened new vistas and opportunities it has also created its own problems in our digital age. Some works celebrate its benefits. Others warn of its damaging consequences especially those of social media. James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society joins this debate from another angle. The British journalist’s work falls within the genre that emphasises the harmful consequences of digital technology.
The book’s principal concern is that people aren’t reading anymore and that a screen culture is displacing a print culture. For Marriott, the spread of literacy and the kind of thinking nurtured by the world of print drove progress in economic development, scientific advancement, and the emergence of modern democracy. In a print culture, he argues, knowledge is organised, understood, and contextualised. “Books make arguments, propose theses and develop ideas.” This process, he contends, develops the power of reasoning.
For Marriott, this is getting lost in an era where the smartphone has taken over our lives and become the main reason for the decline of reading. There has never been a technology quite like the smartphone, which has so much distracting content that it keeps people’s attention endlessly on the screen. He maintains that a hostile environment for learning has been created by this digital distraction. Screens are changing human behaviour. Smartphones are shaping a “fragmented, trivialised and angry new world”, in which conspiracy theories and mad ideas are spread at terrifying speed. The spread of knowledge is impeded by this and is actually breaking down. Political discourse once grounded in logical argument now takes place “amid the moronic inferno of social media”.
