It may be true that older, traditional texts are hard to read, but that’s not a sign of illiteracy, that’s a sign of progress. Literacy is not dying out, it’s evolving. Just like the development of written language diminished the need to memorize oral tradition, digital texts are conditioning us to read on a backlit screen instead of in a heavy tome. It’s easier than ever before to access records, facts, and information on any subject. If you wanted to learn about World War II in the 1970’s, you would have to visit several libraries, read multiple books, and hope that your sources keep good records. Now, all it takes is a simple google search, and you can find the weather on June 6, 1944 at Normandy Beach.
The actual act of reading page, after page of solid text is no longer necessary. Language is constantly evolving, and scholars are worried about the future of the written word. But why worry about becoming literate in an outdated language? Like Latin, paper books may die, but from the ashes will rise visual, aural, and kinetic languages that can be massively accessible, as described by Steven Johnson in his New York Times Article. Today, we can access the accumulated knowledge of past generations on a three-by-six-inch rectangle. Such is the literacy of today.
As a child, I hated to write. I have shaky hands, so my handwriting was (and still is) atrocious. Reading didn’t do too much for me either. Nothing compared to the spectacle of actually seeing the amazing products of imagination. I did, however, love to draw. I drew on the back of every piece of paper I got my little hands on. When I was seven, my mom gave me a comic book, and it was the most amazing thing I had ever seen.
To this day, I own thousands of comic books, I have access to thousands more. That’s millions of pages, billions of words, and yet some scholars would refuse to call me an experienced reader. The thing is, though, that they only recognize their texts as important. They fail to recognize the constant evolution that brought their texts to them. But while they bask in the books of Hemingway and Eliot, someone else is using Facebook to evoke those same emotions in a fifty-word post.