THE THINKER 32 PAN-AFRICAN A nxiety about technology is nothing new among traditional intellectuals. The Greek philosopher Plato worried that writing would produce forgetfulness – if you can write things down there is no need to remember them – while the English poet Alexander Pope described the invention of printing as a ‘scourge for the sins of the learned.’ Narratives about literature being shunted aside by other media go back to the advent of visual media such as movies or television, long before the rise of the internet. Then as now, the view of a present where deep thinking and reading are relegated to the margins of cultural life by new technologies is overstated. Firstly because reading, and especially the reading of high literary forms, has always been an activity for a minority with a particular set of literacy skills, surplus money and the leisure time to pursue it. As US media scholar Kathleen Fitzpatrick notes, narratives of cultural decay have more or less overt ideological motivations. The subtext of recent statements about the decline of a reading culture in the age of digital and social media is usually something like: ‘No one reads [anything (I think is) good] anymore’ (Fitzpatrick, 2012, p. 42). It is not that people, including Africans, who are active online do not read, and write, anymore. The digitally connected tend to read and write a lot. It is just that they often read and write short, small size chunks of text: WhatsApp messages, tweets, and Facebook and Instagram posts. The key shift here is that digital media users bypass the divisions between the written, the visual, the oral and the aural. We read and write texts, look at images, play videos and listen to music or speech on the same device, often at the same time. We have created new ways of communicating in literacies and African literature Digital media, In this article, we explore the impact of digital media on African literacy practices and literature. As our starting point, we want to problematise the notion that digital media spell doom for reading generally and for African literature in particular. Versions of this argument include perturbations that ‘African readerships are under siege’ by ‘the cost of books, varying degrees of general literacy, inadequate library services and the seductions of the web and social media’ (Ojwang and Titlestad, 2014). The latter are held responsible for the decline in modes of attention attuned to ‘older forms of “deep” and refned literature,’ in favour of ‘visual salience, speed, brevity and the predominance of surface over depth.’ In this view, the information fow of new media has rendered the pastime of reading fction, with its affects and ‘stylistic or literary pretensions to beauteous form, […] seem evermore superfuous’ (De Kock, 2015). Pier Paolo Frassinelli and Lisa Trefry-Goatley ©Shutterstock.com