>Numerous studies show that reading is in free-fall. Even the most pessimistic twentieth-century critics of the screen-age would have struggled to predict the scale of the present crisis.
Marshall McLuhan, the media theorist, began his academic career as a scholar of Medieval history, but his attention soon turned to the Gutenberg press and the rise of literacy (over 3 centuries), and how it changed the way we think. He then applied his theories to radio, film, TV etc.
In the 1960s McLuhan was invited to tour the skunkworks at IBM, Xerox Parc, and Bell Labs where they were working on the early iterations and basic building blocks of what would become the internet we know today.
They showed him their vision for "Peer to peer electronic media", and McLuhan applied his theory of media to the not-yet-realized notion of social media.
He definitely saw it as something that would bring a death knell to the literary age, and recognized that social media was inherently tribalistic. According to McLuhan we would all be "marching to the beat of the tribal drums". And that brings us to today, wherein America is officially under the spell of state sponsored tribalism, and reading in the literary sense no longer holds court as the driver of our discourse and thinking.
The dude skated to the puck a good 30 years before it arrived, and he was extremely pessimistic. Mark Zuckerberg has claimed to be a McLuhan fan, but if he actually understands what McLuhan was saying, that's scary:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/amnesty-report-finds-face...
He didn't grasp that speech and text were the same in terms of arbitrariness, and he couldn't see that narratives are basically illusions in terms of their meaning-load. We know from neurosci any event has two dimensions of meaning, where it carries in past memories already formed, and how it creates local memory in formation. Both are probably limitless, yet narratives ascribe intent and cause and effect to essentially turn us into meaning zombies, forever revisiting the same unidimensional intents and meanings as if they are applicable to real events. They simply aren't. Literacy is dead for reasons McLuhan could not have imagined. He never reached the leading edge of demythologization, which is where we are, and how literacy dies.