THE Macintosh has a lot to answer for. The first time your correspondent clapped eyes on its graphical user interface (GUI), he realised the game was up. The use of icons instead of written words seemed the final admission that we had given up trying to read and write, and had entered a post-literate age.

The Apple Macintosh wasn't the first computer to have a GUI based on windows, icons, menus and pointing devices (known collectively as “wimp”). Back in the early 1970s, Xerox pioneered most of the wimp features with its legendary Alto personal computer for researchers, and later its Star computer for office use.

But Apple brought the dumbed-down pictorial interface to the rest of the world. And once Microsoft followed suit, by grafting a friendly Windows face on its crusty old MS-DOS operating system, it became the norm.

Why Johnny can't read

No question, without a wimpy GUI, computers would never have become as popular as they are today. The command-line interface—with its forbidding prompt and blinking cursor—required mastering a whole catechism of arcane instructions that only a priesthood of computerdom could cherish.

When “root@computername:~# shutdown -h now” could be replaced by a simple click of a mouse to switch off a computer, novices of all ages and backgrounds could climb aboard the digital bandwagon.

The flight from literacy to digiracy didn't stop there. The printed word has fought a rear-guard action against not only computers and television, but also a whole horde of digital upstarts from DVDs and video games to mobile phones, iPods, YouTube and now the mobile internet. Meanwhile, newspapers, magazines and books have faded to shadows of their former selves, as a post-literate generation finds its facts and fun elsewhere.

According to Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University and author of “The Dumbest Generation”, leisure reading among American 15-to-17-year-olds fell from 18 minutes a day in 1981 to seven in 2003. Electronic media, of one sort or another, now occupy every spare moment.

Mr Bauerlein fears that, far from opening new vistas for learning and awareness, digital technology has fostered a level of public ignorance that now threatens not just our competitive wellbeing but our democracy as well.

To some extent, government statistics bear him out. Proficiency scores in reading, writing, science and mathematics for American teenagers in their last year of high school all fell between 1992 and 2005. Only one in three children left high school able to read proficiently. Only one in four could write a coherent paragraph.

Cultural observers bemoan the way electronic media—with their demand for spectacle and brevity—have shortened our attention spans. But as a blogger on Eastgate.com noted recently, that equates brevity with debased taste, and sees patience for long stories as a mark of high culture. But if brevity is to be deplored, what should we make of haiku, sonnets, and ink-brush calligraphy?

On the other side of the coin, lengthy sagas are not the sole prerogative of the literary elite. Pop culture has its share of huge tales—witness the Harry Potter canon. Indeed, for every pared-down presentation pumped out by the electronic media, an engaging narrative can be found.

None more so than Michael Straczynski's television masterpiece, “Babylon 5”—a single narrative, conceived, written and produced essentially by one person, spanning 80 hours of performance spread over five years. That's the equivalent of 40 full-length feature films, or a handful of books by Dickens.

Literacy may be under attack from electronic media, but that's actually nothing new. In fact, the assault on the written word began not with the Macintosh computer in 1984, but with Samuel Morse's demonstration of the telegraph in 1844—an innovation a colleague on The Economist insists, quite correctly, on calling the “Victorian internet”.

In an essay on why Johnny and Janey can't read (and why Mr and Ms Smith can't teach), Mark Federman of the McLuhan Programme in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto, argued that the telegraph was the first to “undo” the effects of the written word.

Where the phonetic alphabet separated the sound of a word from its meaning; and encoded that sound in symbols we call letters; and combined those symbols into hierarchical groupings called words, sentences, paragraphs and, ultimately, books; the telegraph recombined those symbols with sound—enabling the instantaneous transmission of information from person to person across vast distances.

If the telegraph was the starting point, Mr Federman reckons we are probably half way through a 300-year transition out of the world of mass literacy. That world began when Johannes Gutenberg introduced the printing press in 1455, and gave birth along the way to the Reformation, the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment, the Scientific Method, and finally the Industrial Revolution—not to mention the modern era of newspapers, universal education and, yes, mass literacy.

Why 300 years? Because that's how long it takes to reform social institutions. It's the period needed for a generation to cease hearing about the way things used to be done from great-grandparents, who had heard about such things from their own great-grandparents.

So, where in this brave new world of post-literacy are we heading? Er, not sure...

What little we know is that our sources of trusted wisdom are eroding fast. When academics pay to have their findings published, invent results or ignore conflicting data to keep a sponsor's money flowing, it's hard to view our learned institutions as sources of reliable information.

Nowadays, we seem to put greater faith in the wisdom of crowds. Hence our trust of Google, which ranks a web page by how many other pages are linked to it, and how many other searchers view the page in question. In doing so, we prize the confidence of our peers above that of experts.

In Mr Federman's view, the quest for truth has given way to the quest for making sense of the world as experienced. For anyone under the age of 20, the world being experienced is one where the internet has always existed, and where everyone who matters is only a click, speed dial or text message away. “Tomorrow's adults,” says Mr Federman, “live in a world of ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive proximity.” Their direct experience of the world is wholly different from yours or mine.

So, no surprise that when we incarcerate teenagers of today in traditional classroom settings, they react with predictable disinterest and flunk their literacy tests. They are skilled in making sense not of a body of known content, but of contexts that are continually changing.

Teachers must recognise that our pedagogical tools are inconsistent with the skills needed to survive in a world where people are always connected to everyone and everything. In such a world, learning to think for oneself could well be more important than simply learning to read and write.