Literacy has had a good run as a definer of social status. But after over 5,000 years, from ancient Mesopotamia to today, the ability to read and write and its role as a signifier of class power might finally be passé.

This is predictable, I guess. Once something becomes universal – or nearly so – it ceases to be special.

In the earliest days of days of scratching something down on paper (or papyrus) writing was the crucial link between royalty and common folk. Rulers issued edicts that required some type of record keeping. One of the first examples we have of this is from 3100 BCE and is a clay tablet that tracked beer allocation with symbols and tally marks. This type of record keeping was entrusted to scribes and priests, making them both the messengers and recorders of gods and kings.

For the next 4500 years, literacy remained a gift restricted to the few. In 1440 AD, fewer than 10% of the population in Europe could both read and write. But then, a goldsmith in Mainz, Germany was about to change the course of literacy. Johannes Gutenberg invented the first commercially practical system of mass printing using moveable type. The first mass medium was born. But it’s impact on literacy would take a while.

In perhaps the first example of media technology being well ahead of its market, the first books mass printed tended to be aimed at the same audience as before the printing press. Books were expensive, tended to be either religious or legal and were intended for clergy, universities and wealthy household. Printing would take a few centuries before it would bring literacy to the commoner.

The way this happened is fascinating to consider when we look at the impact of mass media on society. Literacy was always a way to maintain control and was historically concentrated with the church, universities and government. But the advent of mass printing began to loosen that chokehold. It began to put pamphlets and other printed forms in more and more hands, providing a printed communication infrastructure that allowed – for the first time – the questioning of authority rather than the preservation of it.

Between the Protestant Reform movement (1500 – 1600s), the Scientific Revolution (1600 – 1700s) and the Enlightenment (1700s – 1800s), the traditional seats of power were held up for scrutiny. These interlocking movements that transformed western society were all powered by the printed word. Eventually, the Republic of Letters emerged; an international society of thinkers, scientists and philosophers that reshaped how we looked at the world. And this free-form exchange of revolutionary ideas was all communicated through the written word. Literacy began to trickle down to the common people.

In the 1800’s, we began to strive for universal literacy. Public education instilled basic reading and writing skills in much of the youth of Northern Europe but was spotty in the rest of the world. Reading for leisure began to take off, now that there was a market for newspapers, magazines and novels. Writers like Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Jules Verne, Jane Austin and the Brontë sisters became household names. Finally – it seemed – literacy’s day had come!

But now, after waiting in the wings for thousands of years, after two short centuries, literacy seems to be waning. In a recent Atlantic essay, Rose Horowitch cites some sobering stats from recent surveys: fewer than half of all adults read a book of any kind in 2022 (from the National Endowment for the Arts). And, according to the American Time Use Survey, the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day dropped from 28% in 2004 to 16% in 2023.

It’s not just that we’re reading less. We’re also reading dumber. Books are simpler, sentences are shorter and vocabularies are shrinking. Books are following the leads of movies, TV shows and video games – more sensation, less intellectualization. Many of the books that do end up on the best seller charts are actually written for young adults – aimed at those with a grade 9 reading level.

Reading anything in long form is in danger of disappearing. What has happened in this market is that the middle of the market has been squeezed out to both ends. There has been an explosion of short form content, designed to be scanned quickly and digested in bite sized pieces, ala social media. But in a weird counter to this general trend, there is still a market for long-form essays in prestigious publications. In this market driven development, numbers might be down, but engagement is up, with readers spending significantly more time with longer pieces, giving more opportunity for publishers to push ads to them.

What is generally true across the board, however, is that the golden age of the printed word appears to be over. As I myself have seen in looking at the results of hundreds of eye tracking studies, we are instinctively drawn to content that instantly piques our senses: images, sounds, moving pictures. From there it’s a coin toss where we might go next – on to the next bright shiny object or to partake in that drudgery called reading, where we actually have to think about what we’re looking at.