James Marriott
speaker
547 appearances
7 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 31 Aug
James Marriott’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 5.
Appearances
And as you say, this was the thing that gave them the ability to go toe to toe with their social betters, social betters in inverted commas, and argue their economic case, argue the case of their class.
And I think that really only happens in literacy.
If you don't have the information or the kind of critical thinking skills,
That is a huge class advantage to the people at the top of society, which is why literacy has remained an elite thing for most of history and why the spread of literacy has often provoked a lot of unease among social elites because they know that literacy equals power.
that you could hold a book.
Thomas Paine is a great example, and he crops up in the Neil Postman book.
And Neil Postman calculates that, you know, hundreds of thousands of people read this Thomas Paine book.
And I think he has this, he says, you know, relative to the size of the population in colonial America versus the population of America in 1985, this was a media event that was like the equivalent of the Super Bowl.
Like that's how, that's the proportion of the population this book was reaching.
And the really important point is that like a hundred years earlier, Thomas Paine, whose father was a farm laborer,
There is no way anybody from that social background is reaching hundreds of thousands of people with their political ideas at all.
The monopoly on political ideas was entirely possessed by social elites, by the aristocracy, who often were imposing their ideology not through writing an argument, but through parades, palaces, this highly visual culture.
Suddenly, with mass literacy, someone like Thomas Paine, who comes from a social background...
Nobody from that kind of background had had any political influence before mass literacy.
Suddenly, not only can someone from that background write his political ideas down, which, by the way, unsurprisingly happened to be quite anti-monarchical, they can be read by hundreds of thousands of people.
And that is just a huge shift in power.
that just can't be put back in the bottle.
I mean, I think you're totally right that the story begins with TV.
That Robert Putnam book, which I quote in my book, is fascinating how much everything he says about television is an earlier version of everything he says about smartphones.
People aren't reading.
Showing 501–520 of 547 · page 26 of 28
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