Print is not just another medium

Sericus’ reply to my article on socialism and post-literacy (Solidarity 767) seems to have missed the point of my original.

I do not “underestimate” non-textual forms of communication. I am a fairly avid podcast listener and a regular cinemagoer. I believe strongly in the emancipatory potential of art, including literature but also music, dance, and visual arts. Nor am I a neo-Luddite; unlike James Marriott, I am a smartphone user, and likely to be one for the rest of my life.

Non-textual forms of communication and expression are valuable. “A picture paints a thousand words” is a hoary cliche, but, to give one example, a purely-textual explanation of the class function of the police is undoubtedly positively reinforced if accompanied by photos of the cops trying to break the picket at Grunwick, or the iconic image of a mounted policeman swinging his baton at Lesley Boulton’s head at the Battle of Orgreave.

I remember a talk given by my comrade Jill Mountford about the role of women during the miners’ strike, which she began by displaying Picasso’s “Two Women Running on the Beach”. She used the painting as a metaphor for the growth and transformation many women in mining communities underwent as a result of their experiences of struggle. I daresay the talk would have been less powerful, for me at least, had Jill just given us all a textual handout to read.

The role there, though, is reinforcement, not replacement. Ideological claims, analytical arguments, and historical reflections cannot be communicated through purely visual formats. They require text.

Consider this exchange. How could Sericus and I carry it out, except by text? We could record our contributions and have an exchange of podcasts, or short videos. But that would make it more difficult for anyone who wanted to engage in anything more than a passive way to do so. Anyone listening who wanted to reflect on or review a particular sentence would need to rewind to find it... or, follow along using a transcript. Back to text.

Conclusive

I am not opposed to reading from screens. How could I be? I live in 2026. There is no return to a pre-digital age. But numerous studies, some of which I referred to in my original article, show fairly conclusively that information retention from screen-reading is lower than retention from reading printed texts. That seems at least noteworthy. Screen-reading technology can help that and perhaps, as it improves, the retention gap between texts read in printed form and texts read on a tablet screen will disappear. Fine. But left groups will still require a means of communicating our ideas that continues after an initial verbal exchange. Of course, we can send links to articles, or PDFs of whole newspapers, pamphlets, or books, via WhatsApp. I do plenty of that. But printed literature distributed or sold after a conversation is surely more likely to be read, and more of it retained, than a single URL, which for many will simply be one more snowflake in the digital blizzard.

Sericus says “it is time the political left moves beyond traditional media methods and engages”. What do they mean by this, in practise? That left groups should cease production of printed materials, and rely solely on digital output? For all the reasons I set out in my original article, that approach would dramatically hinder, not help, our fundamental project: encouraging fellow workers to become “democratic philosophers” and “permanent persuaders”.

As I wrote, this “requires the ability to think, reason, argue, debate and persuade, and to produce and refine ideas.” How can these skills be taught except through a discursive and educational culture primarily — not exclusively, but primarily — organised around text, and text in the formats most conducive to maximum retention, i.e., print?

Daniel Randall, London