'' THE NEW DARK AGES '' : MASTER HONOURS PRECIS

IS THIS what a post-literate era looks like? It's not the students/children who stopped reading. It's their seniors and their grandparents.

Few things are more intuitive about the smartphone era than the fact that devices have torpedoed our interest in reading and dragged down the status that books and their authors once seemed to enjoy.

You can tally the signs. Reading scores among both students and adults have fallen from where they were a decade ago, and it's hard to find a college professor who thinks freshmen are arriving in class as prepared as ever for the reading.

On the subway, people are always on their phones, and nobody appears to be reading anything on them. You probably have a hard time concentrating on books yourself, with so many distractions around.

Public discourse seems shaped by podcast clips and short-form video, and if you happen to find yourself reading something longer than an Instagram caption it might well be an essay, like '' The End Of Reading Is Here '' by Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic on July 6.

Studded with incisive observations about the shift from a culture of literacy to one defined by what's been called a digital culture of orality, in which charismatic narrators make sweeping emotional appeals to their audiences rather than through logical argumentation and careful citation.

In a forthcoming book, the essayist calls it '' The New Dark Ages.'' 

This Master and Honours Precis continues. !WOW! thanks David Wallace-Wells.