"It was just after 5:00 a.m., and I was wide awake in a hotel in Rome. Jet lag, certainly. I grabbed my phone, responded to a few messages, then opened Instagramand scrolled through it for the next hour. The slop had hypnotized me. After watching a video of a guy eating leftover Domino's Pizza and orange soda for breakfast and making himself a cheese sandwich with potato chips for lunch, I snapped out of it."
"There are fleeting moments of enjoyment, and then you feel slightly sick in mind and body afterward. Also, you feel dumber. Welcome to life in a Post-Literate Age. Have you noticed this term gaining traction, the Post-Literate Age? It broadly refers to the decline of the written word and the return, in some senses, to an oral culture in which knowledge was shared through speech."
A morning in Rome was spent scrolling Instagram instead of sleeping, exercising, exploring, or reading, producing a hypnotic, trivial feeling and mental malaise. People commonly substitute phones for books and favor fleeting audiovisual content that undermines sustained attention and intellectual depth. The Post-Literate Age denotes a decline of the written word and a partial return to oral culture, with knowledge conveyed through speech. Podcasts, video podcasts, and live streams increasingly displace books, and prominent political figures often operate as hosts and influencers rather than traditional writers. Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman anticipated comparable cultural shifts.
Read at www.esquire.com
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