Comment by TheOtherHobbes

A lot of people here concentrating on the peripheral details, and not so much on the core argument about basic literacy.

I'm not a lecturer but I have spent too much time on Threads recently, which is almost as bad. And two things are obvious about posters who are student age or thereabouts.

One is that they have a timid and uncurious view of the world which is bizarrely ahistorical. They know about Miyazaki, because Ghibli and anime are nice, but they know virtually nothing about the history of cinema, literature, art, or music.

Nothing made before around 2000 exists for them. Worse, many are actively hostile to it, because it's "problematic" for various reasons, all taken from a standard list of words like "colonial" and "elitist" which - having no functional knowledge of anything before 2000 - they don't entirely understand, but are sure they do.

The other is that many of them are completely colonised by corporate ideology, and completely unaware of it. Success, hustle, grift, attention-farming, social media strategising, personal branding, and the rest - it's their core morality. Even if they're nominally progressive.

So you get a weird kind of pseudo-morality which appears to be socially oriented, but is often just libertarian under a thin veneer.

Everyone was surprised by how Gen Z voted, but when you put these together it's not so surprising at all.

What's happening is that traditional written literacy has been replaced by a new kind of electronic literacy - moving images over text, shallow quick-hit emotional manipulation over deep insights, transience over permanence, and a kind of entitled transactional narcissism driving it all.