ABSTRACT
The West has already entered the fi rst phase of the post-literate era prophesied by Wells in 1895. Television has replaced print as the primary source of information about national and international events. For the pocketcalculator generation of schoolchildren, ‘mental arithmetic’ is a skill of the past. British university libraries now throw out two million books a year, to make room for ‘much-needed PC and laptop facilities’ (Times Higher Education Supplement 16.11.07, p.1). Many pages have been devoted during the past quarter of a century to lauding the advantages that literacy brought to the Western world. The time is ripe to attempt a review of the fallout.
