Wallace’s post-literate society is becoming a reality Screens are slowly killing our ability to think

In 1996 David Foster Wallace published his masterpiece Infinite Jest, depicting a society in collapse, ruled by autocrats and completely addicted to pleasure and distraction. In this dystopia, a lethal film, from which the work takes its name, makes the viewer totally dependent, satisfying all pleasures until they starve to death.
Wallace has always written ahead of his time, trying to analyze his contemporary world to understand its direction, and it seems he somehow succeeded. According to a theory circulating in Anglo-Saxon academic circles, we are indeed in a post-literate society that no longer needs to read, write, and think, but only to watch videos, reels, and memes.

The counter-revolution of new media

This theory argues that, with the decline of reading, society is radically changing: the spread of Internet and smartphones, and their content designed for immediate consumption, would be bringing society to a state of post-literacy where reading and writing are no longer necessary, let alone critical thinking.
James Marriott, columnist for the Times, discussed this in his newsletter, sparking debate: according to him, before the advent of the Internet, traditional media stimulated critical thinking. Now, however, new media are used more for watching and listening, and much less for reading, leading to a radical change in how we think, and thus in the evolution of society. In a civilization where the press is dominant, according to Marriott, «public discourse tends to be characterized by a coherent and orderly arrangement of facts and opinions», and the audience targeted by that discourse understands it and can reason about it.
Just as the contemporary world «was shaped by the reading revolution», now a counter-revolution has been underway for some time.

A society without books

Many analyses indeed show a decline in reading and a more or less steady crisis in the book and newspaper markets in various countries worldwide. In the last decade alone, according to an OECD survey, adults’ skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic have decreased or remained stagnant in most countries.
According to Marriott, it is increasingly difficult to ignore the role of Internet, social media, and smartphones at the root of these negative changes. In a recent article, journalist Andrew Sullivan wrote: «Speaking has replaced reading; images have replaced ideas; engagement has supplanted reflection; and the various cognitive skills that reading conferred on the masses since the printing press are rapidly degenerating».

Are we losing the ability to think?

And it is no surprise, then, what the Financial Times reports: the world IQ has, for the first time, decreased. Nor is it surprising that «the reading comprehension scores of American high school students are the worst since 1992».
On the contrary, a society based on the spread of the press, and thus of reading, is a society centered on the democratization of information, the development and progress of science and reason, because, as Neil Postman wrote in 1985, «engaging with the written word means following a line of thought, which requires considerable abilities to classify, deduce, and reason».

Perhaps, then, the dystopian world Wallace spoke of is not so far from our reality. Will we be able to escape our personal Infinite Jest, or, addicted to the screen, will we completely lose the ability to think?