Neil Postman Gets It Right Again
lemonde.fr
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2026/06/20/does-the-decline-in-reading-and-the-rise-of-screens-signal-the-end-of-the-democratic-era_6754688_23.html
Filed June 21, 2026 at 11:09 am
I've written about Neil Postman more than once. What keeps pulling me back is one warning of his: a society rarely loses its access to truth because someone censors it. Sometimes it loses that access because it grows too distracted to care.
This essay in Le Monde returns to the comparison Postman made famous, Orwell set against Huxley, and arrives at an unsettling question. If television was enough to worry him in 1985, what would he make of a world built on smartphones, social feeds, and AI?
You don't have to agree with where it lands. But if you still care about attention, about reading, about what those two things do to keep a democracy standing, it's worth your time.