postliterate
adjEtymology From post- + literate.
1
After the decline of literacy.
- Those who bemoan the self-absorption of the postliterate generation will be happy to know that before the self-indulgent, amateurish blog there was the self-indulgent, amateurish log.2008 January 20, David Kirby, “Pas de Deux”, in New York Times:
- There were noises made briefly, a few years ago, about the idea that we were living in a post-literate world, in which the ability to make sense out of written words was somehow redundant, but those days are gone: words are more important than they ever were: […].2013 October 15, Neil Gaiman, “Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming”, in The Guardian, →ISSN:
3 more examples
- Writing in The Financial Times, John Burn-Murdoch links this to the rise of a post-literate culture in which we consume most of our media through smartphones, eschewing dense text in favor of images and short-form video.2025 July 28, Mary Harrington, “Thinking Is Becoming a Luxury Good”, in The New York Times, →ISSN:
- This is a period that some people call post-literate. Reading is in decline. Standardized-test scores are in decline.2026 February 22, Derek Thompson, “The Orality Theory of Everything”, in Jeffrey Goldberg, editor, The Atlantic, Washington, D.C.: The Atlantic Monthly Group, →ISSN, →OCLC:
- All democratic politics assume a literate population; people who are willing to think in abstract terms about the kind of world they want to live in. […] A post-literate world will be unreasonable, irrational, full of anger and madness, and people eating each other in the streets.2026 March 19, Sam Kriss, “Politics After Literacy”, in Jacobin:
- Related terms
- postliteracy