Nanohedron wrote: You have a hard time convincing me that reduced literacy is not an actual "thing".
What possible reason could you have for believing that?
Because what I see is that literacy has never been more important to a culture than it is to ours. If you look at net natives, practically all they do all day is send messages to each other. Where once the primary mode of communication was face-to-face speech, or at worst synchronous conversations by phone, now the predominant mode is asynchronous communication. Messages. Which are by nature a matter of literacy.
Yes, the norms have changed, but norms always change. A century ago the literate middle and upper classes all had to be proficient in
cablese, a condensed form of english for communicating by telegram. It had its 75 or so year run, and has now died out, but the culture as a whole didn't become more (or less) literate when it was adopted, and likewise did neither when the tech (telephones) moved on and it was abandoned. I'm sure at the time of its peak, there were cries, like yours, that cablese represented an assault on literacy or the dumbing down of society, but this is the precise opposite of the truth. Over that same span, literacy rates
spiked.
At school we both were taught the literary and linguistic norms of the movable type era. That era is dead, and we're the last generation who got that training. I was 20 years old and working for an antiquarian bookseller when he came up to my desk and announced, sadly, that the Clarenden Press (printers of the Oxford University Press) had just published the last book they were ever going to set in metal type. Nearly all the commercial publishers had already moved on. All the instincts I'd been trained in about what constitutes literacy or fine style belong to that era.
But my 19 yo niece and 17 yo nephew don't. They're digital natives, and plenty of the norms we were trained in don't mean much to them. Literacy to them means communicating via data, in all its forms: the web, texts, emojis, emoticons (poss already dying out), memes, hashtags and a ton of other stuff I ignore.
This stuff is all language, and they have to learn it to be literate in
their culture. They may not be as literate as you or I in
ours, but they don't live in a world in which movable type is the pinnacle of literacy, and neither any longer do we.
Similarly, all the norms of what constituted a book got tossed out when print came in to replace hand-written manuscripts. Brand new standards of spelling, of punctuation, of abbreviation and pagination all had to devised, because the old ones no longer served. Did all this change mean that society was becoming less literate? No, of course not: the arrival of print was the dawn of the era of mass literacy.
Those standards have had a good long run, but we're now at another inflection point, and just as happened when print displaced manuscripts, the standards that constitute literacy are once again ripe for redefinition. In fact, it's necessary.
Because literacy has never been more important, and our culture has never been more literate.