The Visage of Literacy

How technology has embodied our contemporary hubris

Jean-Louis Earnest Meissonier, Young Man Writing (1852)

At its birth, the internet fueled a hysteria of alternating mythologies. This revolutionary communication technology would change the world, democratize the whole planet, make easily and widely accessible scientific information, marking the magnum opus of liberal truth based in evidence and reason.

A particular kind of hubris swept the intellectual and pop culture spheres on the back of the web that assumed that because the internet engaged in so many thinking and creative faculties, that literacy would boom and that from it a new intellectual world order would emerge — or the existing one, rather, would be reaffirmed by its discovery of the “truth.”

In the last 25 years, this simply has not happened. In fact, our definition of literacy has had to grow because of the induction of the internet. “You don’t need to be literate to use the Internet. Children, even infants, can use the Internet and social media at some level. Video news …