The Decline of Reading in an Age of Ignorance

History has become a battleground of late, with the debate over the ins and outs of Australian self-analysis raising a lot of ruckus. However, there’s a war on another front which has been taking place for quite a while now just over the horizon, the thunder of whose guns will dwarf those of our own small skirmish. History—in fact, the transmission of culture in general—is under siege.

If the twentieth century was called the Age of Anxiety, the twenty-first should be called the Age of Ignorance. To coin (or rather, purloin) a phrase, never in human history has so much knowledge been available and accessible, and yet so little curiosity or effort been expended by so many in response to it. 

These are dark thoughts; and I think it is possible that darkness may be what we are talking about. The politically unreconstructed, such as myself, still call that period following the collapse of the Roman empire in the West, the Dark Ages (knowledge was lost, many major cities shrank to…