A Look at A-literate America

“The current American relationship to reading and writing … is best described not as illiterate but as a-literate,” Susan Jacoby wrote in “Age of American Unreason.”

“That Americans inhabit a less contemplative and judicious society than they did just four decades ago is arguable only to the ever-expanding group of infotainment marketers who stand to profit from the videoization of everything. The greater accessibility of information through computers and the internet serves to foster the illusion that the ability to retrieve words and numbers with the click of a mouse also confers the capacity to judge whether those words and numbers represent truth, lies or something in between.

“The illusion is not of course confined to America, but its effects are especially deleterious in a culture (unlike, say, that of France or Japan) with an endemic predilection for technological answers to non-technological problems and an endemic suspicion of anything that smacks of intellectual elitism.”