This article investigates the tendency of those who explore the topic of ‘electronic literacies’ to downplay the fundamental nature and importance of the perceptual habits associated with print literacy, and highlights the opposite tendency of reading and writing specialists to decontextualize the acquisition of these fundamental skills from the character of the culture at large. Making the case for a perspective located somewhere between these two positions, which attends to cognitive and neurological distinctions between our media interfaces, the author surveys a number of purported social trends in the United States. Among these are the increased rates of television viewing; the inadequacy of writing practice and instruction in American educational institutions; and the migration of writing, typing, and reading to the computer screen. In relation to these trends, he considers our prospects for the cultivation of a type of ‘secondary literacy’, in order that we might attain a kind of equilibrium within the cultural conditions that Walter Ong describes as ‘secondary orality’ – a phenomenon inherent in our general reliance on the most common electronic communication forms, which, in the communication contexts that they create, predominantly employ the spoken word and moving imagery.