Post-literate, Post-numerate: Where will it End?

With the internet, with a smartphone in your back pocket, with social media and YouTube and all the rest, we now have two-way, many-to-many communication. For the first time ever.

Christopher Chantrill | July 13, 2026

This week, all the advanced thinkers agree that kids are reading less and we are entering a post-literate age. It must be true; the Atlantic says so.

Kindergarten teachers say that many of their students don’t know nursery rhymes or fairy tales[.]

Kindergarten teachers say that many of their students don’t know nursery rhymes or fairy tales[.]

But I am far wiser than the blurters of conventional wisdom at the Atlantic. I say that the two-way internet age has reduced the value of being a sophisticated reader and writer. Today, anyone with a smartphone can communicate with the world on YouTube or Instagram. He can change the world like Nick Shirley.

Now I come at this from Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public. He has a Five Wave theory of communication. Back in the day, people engaged in two-way one-on-one conversation. Or they listened to bards singing the ancient epics of an evening. Then came four waves, each of which transformed the world:

Invention of the alphabet

Invention of printing

Invention of mass media

Do you see that all these inventions were exponential improvements in one-way, one-to-many, communication?

Mass media, we can now see, enabled world wars and communist revolutions because it became a tool of political propaganda. Our beloved mainstream media is........

© American Thinker