Dictionary

postliteracy en · NOUN

Etymology

post- + literacy

Meanings

1. (countable, uncountable) The decline of literacy.
   • Postliteracy won’t replace reason with madness, but it might give us madness of a new and different type. 2026 March 19, Sam Kriss, “Politics After Literacy”, in Jacobin:
   • Pundits—responding to the rise of streaming, AI, climate change, and Trump himself—have announced the dawn of post-literacy, post-humanism, and post-neoliberalism. 2025 February 12, Spencer Kornhaber, “The Game That Shows We’re Thinking About History All Wrong”, in The Atlantic, retrieved 12 Apr 2026:
   • There are studies showing that our video consumption has ushered in this age of post-literacy. Gen Z now overwhelmingly prefers to consume visual content on YouTube as opposed to traditional media, and that has tracked with a drop in reading levels, attention spans. 2026 March 28, Lulu Garcia-Navarro, “What Is YouTube’s Dominance Doing to Us? We Asked Its C.E.O.”, in The New York Times, →ISSN:
   • The conventional wisdom is that the American public has lost faith in the humanities—and lost both competence and interest in reading and writing, possibly heralding a post-literacy age. 2024 October 23, Tyler Austin Harper, “ChatGPT Doesn’t Have to Ruin College”, in The Atlantic:

Forms

Relateds

postliterate