GoKawiilI had started my last post by promising to go into further detail on a paper I co-authored that explored a pedagogical framework for teaching English in the post digital age. I plan on continuing that, but before I did, I wanted to pause and zoom in on a distinction from my last post that I think deserves more elaboration, especially in light of some recently published Atlantic clickbait.
Literacy is having a moment. As someone who has spent a lot of time reading, writing, thinking, researching, and teaching about it, I’ve always wished more people paid attention. Now that they are, I’m realizing being in the spotlight isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Literacy isn’t just “having a moment” the way close reading is—it’s become the moral panic du jour. Everyone is weighing in, and many of the takes bubbling up in The Discourse™️ are, well, quite bad. So I’ve taken it upon myself to untangle some of the unexamined assumptions and outright misconceptions about the literacy/reading crises (so-called) everyone is up in arms about.
I don’t want to pick on Rose Horowitch but her recent cover story for The Atlantic, “The End of Reading Is Here,” is the Platonic form of pearl clutching clickbait about the decline of reading. If her viral 2024 piece fretted that elite undergraduates couldn’t finish a novel, this one goes civilizational: reading, she argues, is collapsing across every age, gender, and education level—even among the retirees, women, and graduates who used to read most—dragging us back toward the dark ages that came before the written word. She opens, rather ominously, on the ruined Library of Alexandria, and asks whether civilization can outlast a postliterate age. Strip away the overwrought first year grad-student grandiosity though, and you’re left with a fairly standard recipe for articles like this, albeit with her typical Horowitch twist.
“Something something NAEP scores! Something something screens! Something something leisure reading! Something something great books! Something something the humanities! Something something kids these days! Something something I’m not like those other Gen Z’s! I love Proust!”
I don’t want to totally wave away the issues these pieces are gesturing towards, but I’d argue the fear that we’re sliding into a post-literate society rests on a category error that feels endemic at this point. It collapses three distinct but intertwined phenomena into a single apocalyptic narrative that basically argues we’re on the precipice of civilizational collapse because people read Romantasy and Sally Rooney instead of Rilke. Never mind the fact that, as Jeffrey Lawrence discusses in his recent article, these narratives of decline universalize (alleged) trends in the Anglosphere by making sweeping epochal statements about technological change instead of grappling with more regionalized cultural, political, material, educational etc. issues that are actually influencing them.
To unpack these shifts—regionalized though they may be—I’ve boiled my swirl of thoughts into three theses on the so-called literacy crisis informed by my research on literacy, English education, and literary studies. Together, they aim to reframe the debate away from generalized decline and toward the more specific institutional, curricular, and disciplinary conditions that shape how literacy is practiced, valued, and measured.
Thesis #1: Literacy is changing in response to new technologies, institutions, and social conditions, and we need to understand those changes historically and materially rather than treating them as evidence of collapse or as an unqualified good.
A post from media and communication scholar Josh Shepperd making a similar claim to the one I’ll detail in my first thesis
Most people understand literacy to be the capacity to read and write the written word. That is a not-wrong-but-very-limited definition underpinned by cognitivist conceptions of literacy. In other words, it treats literacy as a limited set of cognitive skills that individual readers deploy to decode or produce written communication. For a long time this was the dominant definition within most scholarly circles, too. Starting in the mid-1980s, however, a series of studies from cognitive psychology, sociolinguistics, and anthropology emerged that problematized the assumptions that model was built upon.
Despite the different nature of these fields, they converged on some shared conclusions—the most foundational being that literacy is entangled in the discursive, cultural, and linguistic contexts in which it occurs. Literacy isn’t just something that happens in the head; it happens in the world. It is cognitive and social. We aren’t brains in vats decoding text. We are embodied beings embedded in communities that are themselves embedded in particular geographical places and digital spaces—and those contexts shape what meanings we make, how we make them, and whether or not they’re legible to others. In other words, literacy is not stagnant or singular. It is contextual, multivariate, and shaped by tools and technology we use to communicate.
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