[dartharva]

I can't fathom what kind of mental gymnastics one must go through to tout the widespread loss of functional literacy to be a good thing. I suppose you also believe we were all better off as cavemen and that humanity was a mistake?

[PrismCrystal]

Plenty of hypothesizing recently that literacy as we know it might have been a merely an intermediate phase in human civilization, between total lack of literacy and future human–human communication or human–computer interfacing through emoji-rich shortform text and voice. And even well before the rise of the smartphone, one might have occasionally heard in nerd circles that boring prose literature is superseded by manga: “look at what Japanese people are reading on the train, and their society is doing fine”.