Manuel Estrada
Books, Ado and Nothing
The twentieth century saw the second great wave of literacy, comparable only with the one which arose following the invention of movable type printing in the middle of the fifteenth century. As Moholy-Nagy predicted in the mid-twenties, “the illiterate of the future will be those who do not know the language of photography”. In the field of publication there is an inevitable before and after in this revolution of the image. However, today, seventy years on, that prophecy having been fulfilled, other illiterates are appearing, those who know the world of the image, who use photography, but whose understanding is wafer-thin. They are functional illiterates, they see but they don’t know. Reading habits are on the decline. We live at speed, and reading takes time. According to the statistics, the young spend 30 hours a week at the computer, television and other electronic apparatus, and just four hours a week reading. Composed of many fragments, ours is a culture of zapping. Fragments sometimes mutually incoherent, from a variety of sources and of unequal reach. A Sunday supplement in a major daily could be considered a clear exponent of this new culture: an attractive article on the Antarctic, a fleeting interview with a successful neurosurgeon, another with a best-seller writer, recommendations about cooking, shopping, travel, reading, etc. Range and superficiality. Quantity threatens to overcome quality. Lies and creative carnage We live in a so-called Market society. The objective is to sell, the first idea which occurs to many publishers, and to many industrialists is “let’s ask those who understand
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