Post-Literate? What? Ughh… by Eray Erkek

 

Post-Literate? What? Ughh…

For the last couple of years I’ve been trying to push myself into the writing world. I wrote a considerably good amount of stories, took some lessons and workshops about creative writing, and have been volunteering as a first reader in a well-respected magazine. This short but consistent experience in the field showed me the very fact that people are avoiding reading when they get the chance. In The Atlantic’s August 2026 issue, Rose Horowitch wrote the now-famous article “The End of Reading is Here”, arguing that we entered a Post-Literate age and reading is no longer the main source of information. The new generation, especially kids born after 2012, find reading for fun alien to their lives. People are still reading, but not chunky paragraphs and pages and pages of novels and articles, instead they have micro-doses of reading: emails, comments, and Instagram posts. What interested me more was that someone had finally put a name to something we had been circling for a decade. I read the article, highly recommend you to read it too, and realize the fact that I’ve been dealing with this problems for a long time, both as a person who is interested in reading and writing and as a young person whose life fused to social media. At the end of this work, or somewhere in between, I putted something for your attention: If you are reading this, you will simply understand.  

I have my own evidence on this subject-evidence that is reliable and relevant to only myself, since it wasn’t gathered as research and was never meant to produce any results. In our art exhibition last semester, my work Pipe and Resume required a reading process of 5-15 minutes. It was structured as a fictional hiring exercise: visitors read CVs for fictional candidates for a fictional job, each containing a flash-fiction piece, and voted on who should get the job using their own moral senses of a “good person”. At the end of the exhibit, the election paper had more than 50 votes across seven different candidates. I spent a lot of time in the exhibit talking to people about how they’d chosen and what I found was a set of little confessions that barely anyone read the each CV. Some people said that they just looked at the page layout, while others only checked their work experience. Hardly anyone had read the flash pieces at all -and not just the flash pieces- hardly anyone had read the guideline for the work itself, which explicitly asked them to. I’m not saying nobody read them though. I saw many people reading and putting their full effort to understand the piece, sitting on the chair under the yellow desk light for like twenty minutes, reading each and every CV to decide. But the exhibit proved something to me that I already suspected: we lost too much of our attention span that now we cannot get through a little chunky paragraph without turning our face toward something else.

The second and quieter part of my work in that exhibition was a piece I tried so hard to disguise, to make it look more interesting and inviting. It was Kurgusallaştırılamamış Deney’meler, my Turkish I-don’t-know-how-many-words-are-there piece that is written onto a toilet paper. I threw the toilet paper on the floor next to the table and scattered it. It is too long to read in a single sit I admit. Most people looked at it and assumed it was some scrabble that I put there as a decoration. But I actually wrote an entire story onto that paper, a story about a writer who believes he has no reader, and who realizes that if no one is reading anyway, he can write anything he wants.

I never thought how it would relate to this contemporary reading problem while I was writing it, but it turned out to be the Horowitch’s essay in miniature. A writer freed and trapped by the same assumption: If there is no one reading it, then there is no meaning in writing, but if there is no one reading it, the writing might as well tell the truth. I think it is the condition most of us are writing in now, assuming no one is really reading, and writing anyway.   

Turning back to Post-Literacy -I think Horowitch’s article is a milestone for anyone who wants the world to stay literate. Her work shows that we are at an irreversible point for this generation and the next: I don’t believe there is a way to take our phones away and make people read again. That doesn’t mean that literature is over, I would even argue that it is in a strong position right now, with plenty of instant classics published ever year. However, I think we -as authors, writers, readers, and artists- need to reconsider the position and the value of the author again. The media keeps representing the artist as a poser, as someone too pretentious and falsely intellectual; while we go on undervaluing today’s Hemingways, Baldwins, Dickinsons by simply not reading their work. I admit that the writers and literature have never been mainstream and central to society, but they’ve always had an audience that would keep them alive. The danger is not that we will stop creating art. It’s that we will keep ignoring our contemporaries, exactly what we already regret having done.

You remember I said I’d put something in here for your attention? Here it is. If you’ve read this whole thing about Post-Literacy and the contemporary writing environment, I want you to do something to prove it. Of course, you don’t have to, but it would help me and my bedtime thoughts about the future. Comment, DM, email, whatever you want: tell me a novel you love. Not your favorite, just a novel that came up to your mind. You can comment on a Pax Americana instagram post, DM the account, text me directly, etc. Thank you for your effort, I can sleep well now, knowing that you also love Paul Auster.  

Post-Literacy will probably change how things are. In fact, it already has. However, human history is a living proof that art and literature will not die or end in any part of our life-time. The tradition of storytelling is changing -we now, telling our stories to a camera in under a minute- but I believe that if we actively engage with the traditional ways of writing, and keep our audience engaged with compelling, human stories, we can keep the literacy alive. At least for a couple more generations.