Literacy, practical and functional, comes in all forms and is an adherent to all things considered skills and human maneuvers; however, it is something hewn and honed and not some hard-wired instinct. Just as the human body needs to temper its appetites against the abundant temptations of the modern diet and lifestyle, with greater or lesser degrees of success, because survival and perpetuation is neither subject to the etiquette of restraint nor aestheticism that goes against the grain, the ability to quickly skim and assess information without mediation seems certainly much more useful than the ability to comprehend the corpus of great literature.
It is something very tragic and regrettable to ponder the awfulness and base-depravity that this
article from the Washington Post portends: that a reversion to the reptilian-brain, spider-senses is coming because of a general shift in literacy, looking for what's interlaced, brief and flashy—the stuff of marketing and advertising to catch the eye and offer a non-committal engagement that requires little investment in terms of cognition. Often I find myself distracted and without the endurance needed to read something not only to its conclusion but to also build and reflect upon it and find that sort of fatigue to be very disheartening and not something that should be subsumed by shored up distractions. Nimbler processes, ways to impart a message, ought not be dismissed as illiterate or without nuance, since communication is about signals, symbols and short-hand, but the marksmanship of scrolling and trawling is not really on par with true comprehension or thoughtfulness. If the notion of being literate or competent is just an artifice, a function of the Parnassus, the towering heap of books that we’ve amassed, I wonder if there is the possibility that reading and understanding is conducive in two different gears—the idea of fostering bi-literacy as the article also explores by following one reformed, restored reader.
