Take the 2-minute tour ×
Science Fiction & Fantasy Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for science fiction and fantasy enthusiasts. It's 100% free, no registration required.

I just read an article titled Most Citizens of the Star Wars Galaxy are Probably Totally Illiterate (by Ryan Britt) in which the author states that because of holocrons, comm-links, and holographic communication that literacy (and subsequently journalism and fact preservation) are essentially nonexistant in the Star Wars universe.

From the article:

If you simply stick to the Star Wars films, there is no news media of any kind. Despite the fact that we see cameras circling around Queen/Senator Amidala in the Senate, they don’t seem to be actually feeding this information anywhere. Are they security cameras, like the ones that recorded Anakin killing little tiny Jedi kiddies? This theory achieves a little more weight when you consider that the conversation in The Phantom Menace Senate scene is all about how Queen Amidala can’t verify the existence of a coming invasion. She’s got no pictures, and stranger still, no reputable news source has even written about the blockade of Naboo. Even if we put forth that cameras in Star Wars are only for security and not for news, that still leaves the question of why there are no journalists. A possible answer: it’s because most people don’t read, which means that over time most people in this universe don’t ever learn to read.

Are there examples of reading and prevalent literacy in the expanded universe?

share|improve this question
7  
Two instances of reading I can recall are 1) Obi-wan reading the label on the Death Star Tractor Beam's power control, and 2) Luke reading R2's translated communication in his X-Wing. Neither of which shows prevalent literacy though. –  Keen Oct 4 '12 at 22:11
5  
@Keen The article points out that pilots may have a rudamentary literacy in order to know which buttons "make ship go fly." R2D2's communication could have been "Dagobah = bad." –  Jack B Nimble Oct 4 '12 at 22:19
    
There are examples of reading ancient scrolls and pieces of "flimsiplast", but I don't have a source off the top of my head. Also, these are isolated incidents And not evidence of widespread literacy. –  SSumner Oct 5 '12 at 0:02
3  
Star Wars Episode 7: The Exciting 2 hours of watching people read! –  DVK Oct 5 '12 at 1:27
    
@DVK yeah but they retconned out all the pron. –  Chad Oct 5 '12 at 17:10

2 Answers 2

up vote 9 down vote accepted

First of all, fact preservation is most certainly something that IS seen in TGFFA.

  • Jedi Archives in G-canon

  • Information archives (e.g. Zahn books have planet sized ones).

Second of all, Holonet was indeed partially a news service, among other things.

Third, this whole article is written from the point of view of self-overimportance of blathering chattering classes (e.g. people who make a living from producing words). In reality, TGFFA is probably no different from our modern day world:

  • In poorer segments of society (Kessel), people barely have energy to survive, never mind read.

  • In less "elite" segments of society, people mostly care to read Sunday's funnies and sports pages. And prefer movies and TV (or holographic equivalent thereof) to reading.

  • Wonks and elites follow the news and stuff... and watching them diligently read TGFFA's equivalent of Druge Report or Puffington Host or some dead tree "news" paper does not, in any way, shape or or form, constitute something that an average movie viewer would find even remotely entertaining.


As far as Queen Amidala not being able to verify the invasion, that's because there is a blockade. How many news reports have you seen coming out of a fully blockaded planet (or island) that no newsman can land on?

share|improve this answer
    
Regarding the blockade - Amidala was literally running for her life - she wouldn't have had time to grab any of the documentary evidence they likely DID have, and sensor records from her ship would only show a blockade (unless they actually captured the landing of a ship on sensors) –  Jeff Oct 5 '12 at 19:11
    
+1. I also have to think that not every being everywhere can speak Galactic Basic. It might be the prevalent language, but most grunt Geonosians probably have no idea how it's spoken, much less read. They have protocol droids for a reason. Sure, senators would probably read, but 99% of people in Star Wars could probably care less. –  Gabe Willard Oct 5 '12 at 20:20
2  
@GabeWillard I think you mean they couldn't care less. –  Jack B Nimble Oct 10 '12 at 16:45
1  
... Grammar Wars! –  DVK Oct 10 '12 at 17:05
1  
I admit I wondered what TGFFA stood for...thanks for the clarification... –  Bart Silverstrim Oct 10 '12 at 21:09

Reading is not important for communication, the technology exists that would make it possible for the majority of the population to communicate with out ever having to read or write. Reading and writing are important for business and bureaucracy. There is plenty of both of those in Star Wars.

Hoever, there are journalists throughout the galaxy. During the Empire period they were severely curtailed but they existed even then, though — with the exception of those sanctioned by the Emperor — they were underground journalists. The journalists produce for shows on the Holonet as well as written news reports also distributed on the Holonet. Several novels feature journalists as catalysts or side characters that are part of the plotline.

share|improve this answer
1  
"First of all reading is not important for communication." Not sure what you mean by this - in the Star Wars universe, or in general? :) –  gef05 Oct 5 '12 at 23:56
    
@gef05 in general but in the SWU even more since their technology is more universal than we have her on earth. –  Chad Oct 8 '12 at 12:54
    
Some form of text communication would still probably have a place in society. I remember thinking how it would be so great to have Star Trek computers/communicators where you just speak what you want, then thinking how much you'd want to kill the guy in the next cube with speech-to-text telling the computer how to perform tasks. Even today we have "communicators" that use txtspeek on phones that used to be using voice to communicate... (cell phones can make phone calls too?!) –  Bart Silverstrim Oct 10 '12 at 21:12
    
@BartSilverstrim - perhaps but the text to speech and translators are much more sophisticated in the SWU. You could communicate with out reading. But yes text is important to business and bureaucracy... –  Chad Oct 11 '12 at 14:23

Your Answer

 
discard

By posting your answer, you agree to the privacy policy and terms of service.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.
http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/24302/are-most-star-wars-characters-illiterate
scifi.stackexchange.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-41
88358
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:J5EPROK36NRL3RW6UUDOUQ4EJG6NECXT
<urn:uuid:e0c27a92-3f67-4d8b-a77a-60ae2f064e7a>
2014-09-24T00:24:18Z
198.252.206.16
sha1:CTXF2LC7ERIQEFBSASZUTK3PVTSDOBZ3
<urn:uuid:0ec70602-d20a-41ef-811b-28afad02a604>
http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/24302/are-most-star-wars-characters-illiterate
response
<urn:uuid:0d90d86d-6198-4fb2-a8f5-cbc94045421d>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-234-18-248.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-41
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for September 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf