Observation #15

Are we really, truly a literate people? Of course some things have improved since the times of the caveman, we can read, or else you wouldn’t be looking at this, but at what price? Has the influence of media and the new standard of technology brought down the intellectual capacity of the human mind by not stressing the importance of knowledge and answering the difficult questions of life? We are still asking and answering the same questions that have been asked since the Dark Ages. Instead of reading books back then, since they were expensive and unavailable, they used art, music and symbols to interpret and communicate allegorical and symbolic meaning. The book industry today is declining, not because we don’t have the money to buy books or the materials to make books, but because we don’t want to read books. Today we use spell check to conquer the homonyms and spelling errors, but in some cases its spelled write, but not used write, for example. Today’s society doesn’t search for knowledge; it doesn’t dig deeper than the surface unless it is required. Celebration of life and knowledge is being replaced with superficial, inept entertainment which is at the standard of everyday life. So, are we really literate, or have we lost the art?