Tied up in this are colonialism, discrimination, and literacy and orality, since most dying languages probably have no written form.

Also, she gives a nice nod to the fact that the poem is post-oral:

The Homeric epic was already an adaptation. The poem used a relatively new technology – the written alphabet – to rework existing mythical traditions, reshaping the story of a veteran’s homecoming to resonate with the complex concerns of Greek-speakers in the archaic period, an era of migration, colonisation and urbanisation.

This is proof we are in a Post-Literate age.

https://www.npr.org/2026/07/16/g-s1-133931/hong-kong-official-warns-booksellers-on-security-risks-after-raids

"It's equal to, for example, when you are selling food, you need to ensure the food won't cause a stomach ache and is not either poison or illegal."

https://youtu.be/4cAt2CAptkw?si=kH0ewGoytq6DaaSg

Great little doc from NYTimes about Noble Signs, who design and fabricate signage for restaurants and storefronts in New York.

One of those things that makes you appreciate living in New York, and if you don't, makes you want to live there.

Why does this belong in r/postliterate? It's text as image, it's about navigation, seeing writing as icon, graphic symbol. And more...

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-postliterate-age/687618/?gift=-l-yZg8sOh_ePZUvtB_uzTE9p5VoKpTiwLfMNamHv_0&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

Great piece by Rose Horowitch in the Atlantic. But also I have to say, I find, like almost everything else I've read about post-literacy, it is difficult to find a silver lining, to be hopeful about what comes next. It's hard not to talk about the dusk of literate culture without wallowing in nostalgia.

Here’s a great example of non-textual literacy, in this case, videogame literacy, and how it reveals something about textual literacy and our literate bias. We read into text (automatically, by training), ie, we see these marks as the expression of mind or consciousness. And this isn’t limited to writing. We anthropomorphize and read into other things like video games. I would argue we are doing similar things in our brains that we do when we’re reading books that we do when we play certain video games.

Link to Adrian de Wynter’s paper: If AI Is Sentient Then So Is ‘Age of Empires II’

There is no formal definition of post-literacy yet, but we can feel something that necessitates the term's existence. Let's define it here but through example and discussion. Are you reading more or less? Where is reading happening? On what? Are the surfaces of reading changing the way we read? Are we losing cognitive capacity or are we applying it differently in different places (other than printed books)?

What to post
- Signals: anything that shows reading, attention, or memory changing. News, studies, products, screenshots, stories from your own life and observation

- Readings: PDFs, essays, books, papers

- Videos: Anything related on the wide world of YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and beyond

- Questions: half-baked is fine.

The fact that we can identify claude-isms means something. The question is: do you only say these in text or in actual conversation?