LA Meetup? Andrey Mir book discussion?
let me know if you are interested
Leave a comment if you would like to meet up in LA this week, next weekend, or the following weekend.
Also, leave a comment if you would like in January to discuss Andrey Mir’s new book. I am about half way through. He makes the reader wade through a thicket of jargon. At this point, I am inclined to believe that the reward/effort ratio for reading it is favorable, but I will reserve judgment until I have gotten closer to the end.
He writes,
This book is about orality, which once was obsolesced by writing, and about literacy, which is now becoming obsolesced by digital media.
Mir might say that it is no coincidence that we are turning away from meritocracy and the pursuit of truth in the age of digital media. Some sample quotes:
The verbomotor and emotional intensity of digital orality suppresses rationalism, tends to disregard content, and contributes top olarization.
For a person with the mindset of primary orality, it is impossible to say, “Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth.” Plato is dear to me – and that’s it!
Literacy, by default, due to its technical affordances, is selective and elitist.
Consider what Noah Smith wrote recently.
test scores have been falling all over the developed world since around 2010:
The timing of the dropoff makes it pretty clear what the chief suspect is here: Smartphones.
Test scores reward literacy, but if Mir is correct we should be seeing literacy lose its salience as we transition to digital culture. The new culture looks bad to those of us who are heavily into literacy. But perhaps it has some offsetting strengths. It certainly will be different.
I reviewed Mir’s previous book favorably.
A book discussion will probably be limited to paid subscribers.
A week ago, I had the biggest spike in unsubscribes (all of whom were unpaid) in the history of this substack. I kept looking at what I posted around that time to see what provoked it, but my posts were less outlandish than usual. I suspect that Matt Taibbi had the explanation: an Atlantic writer published a scare screed about substack in general, leading to an organized campaign against it. So even though in gross terms I added about 20 subscribers over two days, on net I lost 10.
As of this writing, there are still 5737 total subscribers. That is double what it was a year ago. I bet that The Atlantic has not doubled its reader base in the past year.
substacks referenced above:
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Marshall McLuhan began writing about the possibility and speculating about the character of a "post-literate society" 60 years ago. He had sent his "The End of the Gutenberg Era" outline about it to Ezra Pound in 1951(!). When he finally got started, it only took him a month to write The Gutenberg Galaxy, with an old mechanical typewriter but mainly by hand. Yes, once upon a time everybody used to do that as mere routine, but, how impossible does that seem to us now? "There were giants in the earth in those days."
Arthur Miller began worrying about the same thing around the same time especially in terms of modes of communication and performances by politicians, and I suspect the closer a highly-literate intellectual's connection to the theater and entertainment sectors, and also to the commercialized aspects of which in Baby Boomer youth culture, the more apparent the emerging trends would seem.
Patrick Tucker wrote about it 14 years ago at the dawn of the smartphone age in The Futurist and, amusingly, quoted another article from The Atlantic:
"In a July 2008 Atlantic article entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr beautifully expresses what so many have been feeling and observing silently as society grapples with the Internet and what it means for the future: “Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory…. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.… My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”"
My guess is that if you restricted your search to substack the first mention of the term would be, um, well, me, in the comments here a few years ago.
Everybody with kids around that age where they should be rapidly advancing in reading skills knows that the kids these days are *years* behind previous generations in the development of those skills. Even most adults under 40 have lost significant practice and patience for long-form reading, in the manner of those who were once fully capable of navigating whole large cities by memory and paper maps but who know that whole skill-set has atrophied and disappeared after years of total GPS-dependency.
I don't buy the whole "Axial Age Magnitude Reversal and De-Rationalization" these about it, but I have no doubt whatsoever that post-literacy is doing very bad things to our brains, especially to young brains.
The Atlantic isn’t as interesting as your Substack..