July 12, 2026
THE DAILY McLUHAN DIALOGUES™ • McDialogues™
Understanding the Grammars of Electric Culture and Propaganda Science™
An Exploration of Technology Ecology as an Anchor in a Sea of Change™ and Tactical Training in Counter-Propaganda Science™
by Nelson S. Thall, McLuhan Media Scientist, Former President/Director/Chief Archivist, Marshall McLuhan Centre On Global Communications, Toronto, Canada.
The Postliterate Age:
When the Page Goes Dark
A Student of Technology asks:
Mr. Thall, an essay in today's Epoch Times, "Just How Postliterate Are We?", argues that we have crossed a line. Its author writes that "we are not illiterate. We are postliterate," and he means that the skill survives while the habit dies. He points to the federal figures behind the claim: fewer than half of American adults read a single book in 2022, and only about 38 percent read any fiction, the lowest level on record. He mourns a shocking loss of vocabulary and of focus. But you have told me before that the book now survives as costume, bought to be displayed rather than read. If he is right that we are passing out of the age of reading altogether, what kind of man comes out the other side?
Nelson S. Thall replies:
He is right about the tide, but he misses one thing, and the thing he misses makes it worse than he fears. He counts the readers and finds fewer than half. But look at where the survivors read. A growing share of them read on lit screens, and a screen is not simply another page. It is another environment. The printed page is light falling upon paper. The eye moves along the line, one word after another, and that steady march is the very grammar that built the linear mind. The screen is light thrown through glass. You gaze into it as into a fire, and it pulls the eye toward pattern, simultaneity, and glow rather than sequence. A man reading on a tablet is not doing exactly what the printed page once did to him. Count honestly and the truly literate are fewer still than the mourner supposes. The line is thinning faster than he knows.
Weigh the loss by what it does. Print enhanced one power above all: the private mind, the man alone with a line of reasoning, following it link by link to its end. It obsolesced the tribe's older way of knowing, the thing heard in common and believed together. It retrieved, for five centuries, the solitary voice on the page speaking to one reader at a time. And now, driven to its limit by the electric surround, the whole arrangement reverses. The private reader dissolves. The tribe returns.
For this is the deeper truth beneath the falling numbers. Print did not merely give us books. It made a certain kind of human being: detached, private, and above all sequential, able to hold a long argument in a line and reason his way along it. That man is the one now fading. Marshall McLuhan foresaw that electric technology would draw the whole species into a single field of instant and total involvement, and he warned against the sentimental reading of it. The global village is not a village of peace. A village is a place of no privacy, where everyone is pressed against everyone, and closeness breeds not gentleness but friction. We are drawn bodily together while the private self that print built is stripped away. Men who have lost the ground of their own identity go looking for it, and the quest for identity, when it turns desperate, turns to violence. A world drawn close is not a world made kind.
So read the man who comes out the other side without cheering and without mourning, for he is already at the door. He is more tribal in his tastes, moving with the group, feeling in common what the group feels. He is quicker to the image and slower to the line, and the long sequential reasoning the page drilled into him loosens and goes. He does not think less; he thinks differently, in patterns and pulses rather than in chains of logic. Whether this is loss or only change is not for the scientist to decree. But the shape is plain. The private, patient, reasoning individual was a creature of the printed page, and as the page goes dark, so quietly does he.
All intellectual property contained herein was conceived, originated and authored exclusively by Nelson S. Thall. Artificial intelligence aka a pseudo-conscious machine (PCM) was not employed. We hired a stenographer. No intellectual contribution or creative authorship is attributed to the AI tool. All rights of authorship and ownership vest entirely and exclusively with Nelson S. Thall.
I can be reached at nelson@themediumisthemessage.com
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