IF I SAID the best writers are dead writers, would that sound uncharitable? It was Gore Vidal who once cracked that death had been "a good career move" for some scribe or other, but I see death's literary value as being purgative too. The lives of extant writers have a way of dwarfing the work; even though writers make rather dim celebrities, they, or we, still have a way of popping up in People magazine or at readings, giving interviews and lectures, stirring fantasies of eros or glory among the impressionable and the lonely, and otherwise reminding the public that to buy, if not necessarily read, writers' books is to make some sort of exalted, though one-way, connection with the unusual. That is important in an overpopulated age of hot-wired anomie.

Death is the great forest fire that burns away all this fascinating but extraneous nonsense. When the writer is no longer at hand to answer e-mail or give an interview to some intrepid newspaper reporter armed with a quiver of foolish questions, the only fallback position is the writer's oeuvre. Of course this can be dismaying, since it means one must read the work oneself rather than being spoon-fed it at readings. (Why people want to see in the flesh the writers they admire, incidentally, is a mystery I cannot understand; I have never failed to be mortified at the unseemly sights and inadequate sounds of public appearances by writers whose work I've cherished and even needed.) But there is a clarity that opens between work and reader when the author of the work has departed this messy and perverse life. The words on the page then sound without interference from the writer's own droning voice; the transmission from mind to mind is clear, as in a crackly cell phone call that suddenly becomes crystalline when an obnoxious power line disappears underground or a hill flattens out.

In Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times (Basic, $14.95 paper), editor Kevin Smokler, "one of the country's leading thinkers on the future of contemporary literature, publishing, and the arts at large," according to the modest blurb on the back cover, strikes a number of uniquely American notes in his introduction, beginning with a paraphrase of a failed advertising campaign for Oldsmobiles – "this is not our parents' age of literacy" – and raising an optimistic huzzah that "the sky is not caving in on American letters" but, instead, "opening above us, and in that unknown lie infinite possibilities." I assume Donald Rumsfeld thinks along much the same soaring lines when contemplating all the weapons he means to put into space.

If Smokler, who is 31, indeed speaks for any sizable slice of his birth cohort, then these unreaderly times portend an even more unreaderly future, though one filled with the excitements of gadgetry, performance, and noise. He suggests that "the Internet is fundamentally a reading and writing medium" – a sweet proposition that overlooks the elephant in the living room we fondly know as pornography. He urges writers to collaborate so that literature does not become "an island off the shores of popular culture," as if the point of fiction – indeed of any art – is to be popular, to curry the favor of an audience rather than to challenge and guide and educate that audience, and as if popular culture hasn't become a sinkhole rapidly filling with cultural toxins, amnesia, and ignorance. He further contends that we must accommodate ourselves to living in a culture in which "we expect the life and process of artistry to be laid out for us ... explained without our having to ask," though only the children of an artless industrial society would expect anything of the kind.

Smokler's 11-page introduction to his collection does have the virtue of concisely stating everything that seems to have gone wrong with Generation X, at least in its upper-middle-class division, from an endemic attention deficit disorder propagated by multimedia dazzlements and distracted, self-involved parents to a fatuousness (born of a collapsing educational system) that presents itself as a kind of creative populism. Everyone is above average now, and being a writer or artist is no longer a matter of exploring the self and the world or of coming to some sort of reckoning with giftedness – often in the face of indifference or hostility – but of starting a blog or writing a novel like a chain letter, to name but two au courant forms of expression that confuse exhibitionism and entertainment with art.

Perhaps the greatest untold story of our time is why the wealthiest society the world has ever seen cannot seem to educate its young people. Broad measures of academic performance, from SAT scores to reading aptitude, have been declining for 30 years or more, and the official response is some mix of angst, befuddlement, and vows to do better. Of course we don't do better, because the decline isn't an accidental misfortune but the means to an end: an ADD-riddled, unreaderly population stupefied by bad movies and porn.com is a population that lacks the tools – the skepticism, curiosity, self-discipline, and capacity for reflection – to govern itself and will more readily submit to unaccountable rule.

The evidence, including but not limited to Smoklerian essays on Gen X literacy, suggests we have reached this sad terminus. My question, then: are we dead or alive?