We often hear today that people seemed to be more literate in the past than the present but others dispute it. If people of the past were so smart, why didn't they have television, digital music and cell phones? There are more books, more magazines, more reading material today than at any time in the past. Of course we are much more literate today.

But they are wrong. Before the advent of television, we WERE a much more literate society. The reason is simple: before television, our mode of communication was primarily word-based. Once television became ingrained in our culture, our mode of communication became primarily image-based.

As an example, take Charles Dickens when he toured America reading A Christmas Carol. Dickens was enormously popular in the United States. Everywhere he went, he was mobbed by fans that escorted him to and from his hotel to the auditoriums where he performed his readings. Traffic would be snarled as thousands thronged his carriage. Strangely, most of them had no idea what Dickens looked like, had never seen even a drawing of him, but loved him because they had read his books. Dickens's words mattered to them not his image.

The auditoriums where Dickens read to the American masses were packed to capacity. Entire families attended, wares were hawked outside by entrepreneurs, reporters and journalists reviewed the crowds and the object of their adoration for newspaper columns that would be avidly read by fascinated subscribers who had been unable to attend. As Dickens unwound his tale, the audience laughed at the humorous parts, booed miserly Scrooge, wept in grief over Tiny Tim and were overcome with joy at Scrooge's change of heart and applauded long and wild at the end as the famous author took his bows. Dickens kept a diary of his travels. A typical entry reads: "They took to it tremendously last night that I was stopped every five minutes. One poor girl burst into a passion of grief about Tiny Tim and had to be taken out."

So successful was Dickens's tour, that America as a whole began celebrating Christmas annually. Prior to that time, few Americans observed Christmas. To Americans, Dickens had made Christmas seem like a fine, old, English tradition and anything that was celebrated in England had to be celebrated in America. The trouble was that Christmas was no more celebrated in England than America but Americans didn't know that. No one thought it odd, for example, that the butcher's shop in the story was open on Christmas Day if Christmas was so celebrated in England. But this demonstrates the power that words and print once held over the world.