High school graduates are turning up at Ivy League colleges having never read a book from cover to cover. A YouGov poll last week found two-fifths of Britons had not read a single book, even in the form of an audiobook, over the past year. Literacy is declining fast among both adults and teenagers across the globe, according to an OECD study last year.

Podcasts, meanwhile, are more popular than ever. Almost half of Americans above the age of 12 had listened to a podcast in the past month, according to a report by Edison last year. In the UK, those who listen to podcasts on a weekly basis — about 30 per cent of adults — do so for an average of five hours and 27 minutes.

All this is leading to the concern that we are becoming a “post-literate society”, in which the written word is no longer central to the way in which our thinking, politics and culture are shaped. The argument tends to be laid out as follows: we are becoming less intelligent; clichés and stereotypes are in the ascendant; communication is now more about one-upmanship and “being loud”; and “vibes” are replacing rigorous analysis and making us less able to deal with complexity.

...these discussions are missing some of the positives, such as the space for nuance, uncertainty and open-mindedness that the spoken word can allow for.