Introduction

Cavafy's (1961) famous poem describes the paralysis induced when waiting for an event that never happens, finding distraction in other things while expecting imminent cataclysm. Libraries have perhaps been guilty of this in recent years, joining the chorus bemoaning the imminent arrival of the digital barbarians and undertaking a whole series of avoidance tactics which make libraries ever more efficient but ever less relevant. Like Cavafy's senators, libraries have prepared themselves, decked themselves in finery but have waited for the future to come to them rather than gone out to engage with it.

The arrival of aliteracy

Recently, a well known national chain of bookshops stocked perhaps the ultimate symbol of what a post-war baby-boomer and wholly literate generation would see as the final, conclusive evidence of dumbing down – a Leonardo Da Vinci action figure. Leonardo Da Vinci, the advertising blurb noted, was the original Renaissance man. He was a master of painting, science, language and (most importantly of all!) the inspiration for Leonardo Di Caprio's name. The website proudly noted that an Einstein action figure would follow. Presumably he would conquer evil with equations. While it is very easy to make the case for this as dumbing down, it is also a marker for the seismic shift which is taking place. There is always inter-generational tension, but we are on the cusp of an era when all the certainties of literacy may well disappear. We are close to a world of aliteracy, where reading and writing as generations have known them become optional, life-style choices rather than the fundamental attributes of a civilized person. Coupled with this is a move from a text-based society to an image-based society. A whole range of shared cultural reference points relied on words:

These vaguely remembered phrases, and dozens like them, carry a raft of meaning and shared values known to everyone, or rather, everyone above a certain age. But consider the shared cultural reference points of recent years. Everyone can conjure the images of the fall of the Berlin Wall, of the lone protester in front of the tanks in Tiananmen Square, or of the little girl running naked and screaming down the road in Vietnam.