A new dark age?

RECENT years have seen a surge of books and articles on the impact of technology on people’s lives and thinking. While communication technology has opened new vistas and opportunities it has also created its own problems in our digital age. Some works celebrate its benefits. Others warn of its damaging consequences especially those of social media. James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society joins this debate from another angle. The British journalist’s work falls within the genre that emphasises the harmful consequences of digital technology.

The book’s principal concern is that people aren’t reading anymore and that a screen culture is displacing a print culture. For Marriott, the spread of literacy and the kind of thinking nurtured by the world of print drove progress in economic development, scientific advancement, and the emergence of modern democracy. In a print culture, he argues, knowledge is organised, understood, and contextualised. “Books make arguments, propose theses and develop ideas.” This process, he contends, develops the power of reasoning.

For Marriott, this is getting lost in an era where the smartphone has taken over our lives and become the main reason for the decline of reading. There has never been a technology quite like the smartphone, which has so much distracting content that it keeps people’s attention endlessly on the screen. He maintains that a hostile environment for learning has been created by this digital distraction. Screens are changing human behaviour. Smartphones are shaping a “fragmented, trivialised and angry new world”, in which conspiracy theories and mad ideas are spread at terrifying speed. The spread of knowledge is impeded by this and is actually breaking down. Political discourse once grounded in logical argument now takes place “amid the moronic inferno of social media”.

Marriot attributes much of the 21st century’s disorder and unreason to the fading of the written word and the “colonisation of culture” by addictive screens. He sees the intellectual hollowing of society as a consequence of the decline of reading and the world becoming a less rational place. Public discourse today, he claims, has become trivial to the point of dysfunction. It has affected politics too as this environment encourages the rise of mediocre politicians with little understanding of history, whose appeals to the public are emotional and do not rest on rational propositions. Politics, Marriott argues, is growing “angrier, stupider and more obsessed with personality”. He laments the fact that the full ramifications of the onset of what he calls a post-literate society are not fully understood.

Marriot may be overstating his case and exaggerating the damaging impact of digital technology. But he is no outlier in this assessment. Last year in a compelling book Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, Nicholas Carr surveyed how digital technology — including smartphones, the internet, social media and artificial intelligence — is transforming both people and societies. He argued that instead of broadening minds, expanding empathy and fostering harmony, this technology has had the opposite effect. It is eroding understanding and trust and contributing to strife and social disharmony.

Communication technology offers immense opportunities but has serious unintended consequences.

For Carr, speed and intensity in the flow of information and stimuli compel people to rely on intuitive thinking based on biases. It deprives them of the ability to tap into deeper analysis. As a result, it has undermined reasoned analysis, methodical evaluation and contemplative inquiry. As he puts it “Attention splinters, understanding grows thin”. This results in mental shortcuts and shallow thinking. Thus “rather than levelling barriers to knowledge, it becomes a barrier itself”.

For both Marriott and Carr, the information spread through digital vehicles does not foster knowledge but detracts from it. “More informed does not mean better informed.” The fragmented nature of information provided by the screen makes much of it useless, according to Marriott. Social media further dumbs down the public conversation. Marriott sees social media and short-form videos producing junk content and misleading posts. He also finds a connection between video platforms like TikTok and increased vote share for populist and far right parties. That’s because feeds by such parties play on emotions and abjure reasoning.

Carr’s book devotes far more attention to social media. His criticism is unsparing. He also takes tech companies to task. In his view, social media amplifies falsehoods and hostility rather than promote facts and truth. Because it is shorn of communication barriers, it brings out people’s worst instincts. He also blames the “ugly content that pervades the social media” on tech companies and on algorithms. As he puts it, “Social media churns out information that’s been highly processed to stimulate not just engagement but also dependency.” By encouraging excessive and unchecked self-exposure to a mass audience, it shatters all boundaries. The result is discord, not harmony.

An earlier book also warned of a world of fractured attention. In The Lonely Century, economist Noreena Hertz had a different focus, but she also addressed the harmful effects of communication technology and social media. She assigned a central role to social media and smartphones in making people “more angry and tribal”. Drawing on research, she argued that technology and social media were also fuelling a global loneliness crisis, both personal and political. Smartphones “fragment our attention”, estrange us from people and “create a splintered self”. Hertz saw social media trapping people into isolated digital bubbles and creating a meaner, more aggressive world. This is evident in trolling and other forms of online abuse. As a result, she urged the acknowledgement of the dangers of “tech addiction” and making social media platforms accountable.

Communication technology has brought immense benefits to society. At the same time, it has involved serious unintended consequences. Where there is promise there is also peril. Managing the negative effects of new technologies remains a difficult challenge without easy solutions. With artificial intelligence the risk is even greater as it is growing much faster than our ability to control it.

The writer is a former ambassador to the US, UK and UN.

Published in Dawn, September 7th, 2026