For the literate elite—which includes everyone from Barack Obama to this spring’s MFA graduates—the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments over the demise of reading has become obligatory theater. Poets, writers, and teachers alike stand over the remains of a once-proud book culture like a Greek chorus gloomily crowded around a fallen king. How can it be that less than one-third of 13-year-olds are daily readers, or the percentage of 17-year-olds who read nothing at all for pleasure has doubled over a 20-year period (as measured by the NEA in 2007), or that 40 million Americans read at the lowest literacy level?
The answer that rises most immediately to meet this anguish is: the image makers. Television, the Pied Piper of the last century, has been joined in its march by video games, YouTube, and an assortment of other visual tempters that are ferrying Western culture further away from the nourishing springs of literature. The public appetite for images — scenes of war, staged or otherwise, music videos, game shows, celebrities roaming the streets of Los Angeles in a daze — seems both limitless in scope and apocalyptic in what it portends for the future.
To the literary eye, the culture of the image has grown as large as Godzilla, as omnipresent as an authoritarian government, and as cruel and erratic as the Furies. In our rush to blame the moving picture for the state of our cultural disarray, we’ve overlooked the fact that — as a carrier of data, thoughts, ideas, prayers, and promises — the image is neither as functional nor as versatile as text.
The real threat to the written word is far more pernicious. Much like movie cameras, satellites, and indeed television, the written word is, itself, a technology, one designed for storing information. For some 6,000 years, the human mind was unable to devise a superior system for holding and transmitting data. By the middle of this century, however, software developers and engineers will have remedied that situation. So the greatest danger to the written word is not the image; it is the so-called “Information Age” itself.