Fahrenheit 451 and Post-Literacy

I re-watched Francois Truffaut's film adaptation of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1966) the other day.  Its central conceit - of a future where books are banned and burned because of the dangerous ideas they contain - raises the question of whether a post-literate society is possible.  Obviously, before the advent of written language, we had a pre-literate society, but this existed in a far simpler world, without our current levels of technology or complex social structures.  It is these latter things that we think make literacy essential - it is how knowledge is disseminated and ideas communicated and developed.  Modern society requires all manner of complex interactions which involve the use of the written word and physical documentation.  Indeed, in both Bradbury's novel and Truffaut's film, the world isn't entirely literate - written road signs, for instance, still exist and newspapers stories are printed in the form of simple comic strips, with the sort of basic dialogue and captions you'd expect from them.  It is, in effect, a 'dumbed down' form of literacy.  Interestingly, in the real world, contemporary the film's production, the US Army found itself having to resort to issuing instruction manuals for their newly introduced M-16 rifle in comic strip form.  I've actually seen one of these - they were very crudely drawn, with the absolute minimum of text, but effectively showed users exactly how the rifle should be cleaned.  The M-16 was more complex than the M-14 it was replacing and, when first issued in Vietnam, suffered a high incidence of jamming due to soldiers, particularly draftees, not cleaning them effectively and frequently enough.  While an easy issue to rectify, the problem was that the low levels of literacy that the army found among a high proportion of its conscripts meant that a conventional written manual simply wouldn't be effective.  Hence the cartoon format.

Shocking though it might seem that, as late as the 1960s, one of the world's wealthiest countries harboured such levels of illiteracy, I doubt that it was confined to the US and I strongly suspect, from personal experience, that literacy levels remain patchy.  It isn't that the vast majority of people in the developed world can't read and write, it is just that a large proportion of them have very weak literacy skills.  Part of the problem is that, increasingly, we live in a world where this offers no disadvantage.  While the internet, for instance, might have started as a primarily text-based medium, visuals have subsequently become king.  Just look at the most popular apps: video nased You Tube and photo based Instagram.  Much social media also places a big emphasis upon posting images, with minimal text and Twitter is all about posting in the fewest number of characters and to Hell with spelling and punctuation.  Google increasingly pushes this aspect of the web in its responses to search queries - YouTube videos (YouTube being another Google property, naturally), frequently dominate the first half dozen results.  This is particularly true when searching for solutions to technical issues - the YouTube instructional video (usually made by amateurs) is now considered the 'best result'.  But it isn't just the web - in the workplace training is increasingly in the form of instructional videos or interactive, image-dominated, learning tools which can be delivered, via the workstation, at the learner's desk.  No need for those training sessions in a classroom with a live instructor and written handouts you could peruse at your leisure - just sit at your desk and follow the onscreen instructions for a set time period.

So, does this constitute a post-literate society along the lines of Fahrenheit 451?  Not quite, perhaps, but it does make the book and film seem highly prescient.  It feels more as if we're sliding back toward the pre-industrial era of literacy, where it was not universal.  Generally only the wealthy were fully literate because only they could afford the sort of education that taught it.  Most others were, at best, semi-literate, able to perform the most basic of literate functions.  With industrial revolution and its demand for more skilled workers, literacy levels had to rise, so that most workers had at least functional reading and writing skills.  But now, with work increasingly being de-skilled by technology, the functional requirements of literacy in the workplace seem to be much lower.  Of course, there is also a political dimension to all of this: literacy levels are dictated by educational standards which, in turn, are dictated by our elected governments.  The cynic in me might suspect that it is actually political policy to reduce educational levels: a less literate populace might well be easier to control - they wouldn't, for instance, be able to access those 'dangerous ideas' in books, relying instead upon the much simplified and manipulated moving wall paper of TV for information.  Could such a decline in literacy result in a revival of the oral tradition of story-telling, as posited in the climax to the film version of Fahrenheit 451,which sees the 'book people' memorising their personal choice of book, before burning them?  After all, the telling of stories and their memorisation and re-telling by other bards was, for thousands of years, the standard way of distributing fiction and knowledge.  Long before some scribe wrote them down The Odyssey and Iliad existed on this form, for example, while the Celts had no written tradition, relying instead upon oral histories, (with the result that what we know about them is frequently based upon what others, like the Romans, who had a written tradition, wrote of them).  The point being, of course, that both Ancient Greece and the various Celtic kingdoms functioned as complex societies without our extensive literary tradition.