A post-literate society is a hypothetical society in which
multimedia
Multimedia is a form of communication that uses a combination of different content forms such as text, audio, images, animations, or video into a single interactive presentation, in contrast to tradition ...
technology has advanced to the point where
literacy
Literacy in its broadest sense describes "particular ways of thinking about and doing reading and writing" with the purpose of understanding or expressing thoughts or ideas in written form in some specific context of use. In other words, huma ...
, the ability to read or write, is no longer necessary or common. The term appears as early as 1962 in
Marshall McLuhan
Herbert Marshall McLuhan (July 21, 1911 – December 31, 1980) was a Canadian philosopher whose work is among the cornerstones of the study of media theory. He studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of Cambridge. He began his ...
's ''The Gutenberg Galaxy''. Many science-fiction societies are post-literate, as in Ray Bradbury's ''Fahrenheit 451'', Dan Simmons' novel ''Ilium (novel), Ilium'', and Gary Shteyngart's ''Super Sad True Love Story''.
A post-literate society would differ from contemporary or historical oral cultures, which do not deploy writing systems and whose aesthetic traditions take the form of oral literature and oral history, aided by art, dance, and singing). A post-literate society would have replaced the written word with recorded sounds (Compact Disc, CDs, audiobooks), broadcast spoken word and music (radio), pictures (JPEG) and moving images (television, film, MPEG-1, MPG, streaming video, video games, virtual reality). A post-literate society might still include people who are Aliteracy, aliterate, who know how to read and write but choose not to. Most if not all people would be Media literacy, media literate, multimedia literate, Visual literacy, visually literate, and Transliteracy, transliterate.
The nonfiction books ''Amusing Ourselves to Death'' by Neil Postman and ''Empire of Illusion'' by Chris Hedges both observe a sudden rise of post-literate culture.
See also
*Asemic writing
*Cyberculture
*Daniel Bell
*Post-industrial society
References
Footnotes
Bibliography
The Dawn of the Post-literate Age by Patrick Tucker, THE FUTURIST Magazine, November–December 2009.
*''The Gutenberg Galaxy'', Marshall McLuhan, University of Toronto Press, 1962
*''Empire of Illusion'', Chris Hedges, 2009,
Literacy
Science fiction themes
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