There are less and less readers, especially among young people, and general culture also looses its importance as compared to highly marketable objects. Visual communication is often said to take the place of letters. The new man (sometimes called homo informaticus) gains his/her knowledge through the network, manages computers easily, is pragmatic, his/her vocabulary is basic, and has a reduced emotional life. Changes in reading habits among other things lead to the impoverishment of the vocabulary, the deterioration of reading comprehension, and that of expressive skills. Surfing/browsing in networked information requires superficial thinking in contrast to reading requiring concentration. The role of texts is taken over by images, and this is problematic, since images are incapable of carrying abstract ideas, they limit fantasy, and make the detection of visual manipulation more difficult. Globalisation and the internet are considered a dead-end of evolution, suggesting that the solution lies in finding proper proportions, and demystifying the media.