Mass-produced books changed the way people thought. The technology of printing expanded the number of words available, from about 50,000 words in Old English to a million today. More word choices enlarged what could be communicated. More media choices broadened what was written about. Authors did not have to compose scholarly tomes only, but could “waste” inexpensively printed books on heartrending love stories (the romance novel was invented in 1740), or publish memoirs even if they were not kings. People could write tracts to oppose the prevailing consensus, and with cheap printing an unorthodox idea might gain enough influence to topple a king or the pope. In time, the power of authors birthed the reverence for authors, and of authority, and bred a culture of expertise. Perfection was achieved “by the book.” Laws were compiled into official tomes, contracts were written down, and nothing was valid unless put into words onto pages. Painting, music, architecture, dance were all important, but the heartbeat of Western culture was the turning pages of a book. By 1910 three quarters of the towns in the United States with more than 2,500 residents had a public library. America’s roots spring from documents—the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and, indirectly, the Bible. The country’s success depended on high levels of literacy, a robust free press, allegiance to the rule of law (found in books), and a common language across a continent. American prosperity and liberty grew out of a culture of reading and writing. We became People of the Book.
But today more than 5 billion digital screens illuminate our lives. Digital display manufacturers will crank out 3.8 billion new additional screens per year. That’s nearly one new screen each year for every human on earth. We will start putting watchable screens on any flat surface. Words have migrated from wood pulp to pixels on computers, phones, laptops, game consoles, televisions, billboards, and tablets. Letters are no longer fixed in black ink on paper, but flitter on a glass surface in a rainbow of colors as fast as our eyes can blink. Screens fill our pockets, briefcases, dashboards, living room walls, and the sides of buildings. They sit in front of us when we work—regardless of what we do. We are now People of the Screen.
This has set up the current culture clash between People of the Book and People of the Screen. The People of the Book today are the good hardworking people who make newspapers, magazines, the doctrines of law, the offices of regulation, and the rules of finance. They live by the book, by the authority derived from authors. The foundation of this culture is ultimately housed in texts. They are all on the same page, so to speak.
The immense cultural power of books emanated from the machinery of reproduction. Printing presses duplicated books quickly, cheaply, and faithfully. Even a butcher might own a copy of Euclid’s Elements, or the Bible, and so printed copies illuminated the minds of citizens beyond the gentry. This same transformative machinery of reproduction was applied to art and music, with equivalent excitation. Printed copies of etchings and woodcuts brought the genius of visual art to the masses. Cheaply copied diagrams and graphs accelerated science. Eventually, inexpensive copies of photography and recorded music spread the reproductive imperative of the book even wider. We could churn out cheap art and music as fast as books.
This reproductive culture has, in the last century or so, produced the greatest flowering of human achievement the world has ever seen, a magnificent golden age of creative works. Cheap physical copies have enabled millions of people to earn a living directly from the sale of their art to the audience, without the weird dynamics of having to rely only on patronage. Not only did authors and artists benefit from this model, but the audience did too. For the first time, billions of ordinary people were able to come in regular contact with a great work. In Beethoven’s day, few people ever heard one of his symphonies more than once. With the advent of cheap audio recordings, a barber in Bombay could listen to them all day long.
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But today most of us have become People of the Screen. People of the Screen tend to ignore the classic logic of books or the reverence for copies; they prefer the dynamic flux of pixels. They gravitate toward movie screens, TV screens, computer screens, iPhone screens, VR goggle screens, tablet screens, and in the near future massive Day-Glo megapixel screens plastered on every surface. Screen culture is a world of constant flux, of endless sound bites, quick cuts, and half-baked ideas. It is a flow of tweets, headlines, instagrams, casual texts, and floating first impressions. Notions don’t stand alone but are massively interlinked to everything else; truth is not delivered by authors and authorities but is assembled in real time piece by piece by the audience themselves. People of the Screen make their own content and construct their own truth. Fixed copies don’t matter as much as flowing access. Screen culture is fast, like a 30-second movie trailer, and as liquid and open-ended as a Wikipedia page.
On a screen, words move, meld into pictures, change color, and perhaps even change meaning. Sometimes there are no words at all, only pictures or diagrams or glyphs that may be deciphered into multiple meanings. This liquidity is terribly unnerving to any civilization based on text logic. In this new world, fast-moving code—as in updated versions of computer code—is more important than law, which is fixed. Code displayed on a screen is endlessly tweakable by users, while law embossed into books is not. Yet code can shape behavior as much as, if not more than, law. If you want to change how people act online, on the screen, you simply alter the algorithms that govern the place, which in effect polices the collective behavior or nudges people in preferred directions.
People of the Book favor solutions by laws, while People of the Screen favor technology as a solution to all problems. Truth is, we are in transition, and the clash between the cultures of books and screens occurs within us as individuals as well. If you are an educated modern person, you are conflicted by these two modes. This tension is the new norm. It all started with the first screens that invaded our living rooms 50 years ago: the big, fat, warm tubes of television. These glowing altars reduced the time we spent reading to such an extent that in the following decades it seemed as if reading and writing were over. Educators, intellectuals, politicians, and parents in the last half of the last century worried deeply that the TV generation would be unable to write. Screens were blamed for an amazing list of societal ills. But of course we all kept watching. And for a while it did seem as if nobody wrote, or could write, and reading scores trended down for decades. But to everyone’s surprise, the cool, interconnected, ultrathin screens on monitors, the new TVs, and tablets at the beginning of the 21st century launched an epidemic of writing that continues to swell. The amount of time people spend reading has almost tripled since 1980. By 2015 more than 60 trillion pages have been added to the World Wide Web, and that total grows by several billion a day. Each of these pages was written by somebody. Right now ordinary citizens compose 80 million blog posts per day. Using their thumbs instead of pens, young people around the world collectively write 500 million quips per day from their phones. More screens continue to expand the volume of reading and writing. The literacy rate in the U.S. has remained unchanged in the last 20 years, but those who can read are reading and writing more. If we count the creation of all words on all screens, you are writing far more per week than your grandmother, no matter where you live.
In addition to reading words on a page, we now read words floating nonlinearly in the lyrics of a music video or scrolling up in the closing credits of a movie. We might read dialog balloons spoken by an avatar in a virtual reality, or click through the labels of objects in a video game, or decipher the words on a diagram online. We should properly call this new activity “screening” rather than reading. Screening includes reading words, but also watching words and reading images. This new activity has new characteristics. Screens are always on; we never stop staring at them, unlike with books. This new platform is very visual and it gradually merges words with moving images. On the screen words zip around and float over images, serving as footnotes or annotations, linking to other words or images. You might think of this new medium as books we watch or television we read.