The dawn of the post-literate society - by James Marriott

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book because there would be no one who wanted to read one. — Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death It was one of the most important revolutions in modern history — and yet no blood was spilled, no bombs were thrown and no monarch was beheaded. Perhaps no great social transformation has ever been carried out so quietly. This one took place in armchairs, in libraries, in coffee houses and in clubs. What happened was this: in the middle of the eighteenth century huge numbers of ordinary people began to read. For the first couple of centuries after the invention of the printing press, reading remained largely an elite pursuit. But by the beginning of the 1700s, the expansion of education and an explosion of cheap books began to diffuse reading rapidly down through the middle classes and even into the lower ranks of society. People alive at the time understood that something m

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