Post-literate society
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
"Such a reverse perspective of the literate Western world is the one afforded to the reader of Albert Lord's Singer of Tales. But we also live in an electric or post-literate time when the jazz musician uses all the techniques of oral poetry. Empathic identification with all the oral modes is not difficult in our century." --The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) by Marshall McLuhan |
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A postliterate society is a hypothetical society in which multimedia technology has advanced to the point where literacy, the ability to read or write, is no longer necessary or common. The term appears as early as 1962 in Marshall McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy. Many science-fiction societies are postliterate, as in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and Dan Simmons' novel Ilium.
A postliterate society is different from a pre-literate one, as the latter has not yet created writing and communicates orally (oral literature and oral history, aided by art, dance, and singing), and the former has replaced the written word with recorded sounds (CDs, audiobooks), broadcast spoken word and music (radio), pictures (JPEG) and moving images (television, film, streaming video, video games, virtual reality). A postliterate society might still include people who are aliterate, who know how to read and write but choose not to. Most if not all people would be media literate, multimedia literate, visually literate, and transliterate.
See also
- Literacy
- Asemic writing
- Cyberculture
- Daniel Bell
- Film
- Multimedia literacy
- Oral history
- Post-industrial society
- Post literacy
- Radio
- Television studies
- Transliteracy
- Visual literacy