Over the past few years, an alarming correlation between the England Men’s Test Cricket Team and global reading habits has emerged. In almost every single phrase written or uttered about the two, you can detect the drumbeat of a funeral march playing in the background. Bazball—the current regime spearheaded by coach Brendon McCullum and captain Ben Stokes—fluctuates between being a saving grace singlehandedly responsible for keeping interest in Test cricket alive, and a grim reaper escorting the sport to an undignified end.
Reading likewise seems to be trapped in limbo. On the one hand, literacy rates worldwide are the highest that they have ever been, with more than 80% of individuals being able to read globally and levels at 99% in most developed nations. Moreover, the increase in people completing both secondary education and university degrees indicates a higher baseline reading comprehension in the modern age.
On the other hand, myriad statistics and surveys indicate reading’s moribund state at a local, national, and international level. In the UK, the number of children who reported reading for pleasure has dropped by more than a third over the course of two decades. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Adult Skills Report, one in five UK citizens between the ages of 16 and 65 read at a level below or equivalent to that expected of a ten-year-old.
Even the presence of classics like Moby Dick, Gravity’s Rainbow or Wuthering Heights in the tote bags and palms of readers on the Tube or in cafés has not assuaged fears that people still enjoy reading. On the contrary, these individuals are branded ‘performative readers’, an admonition that reveals something deeply unsettling about the perception of literature in the modern age. Books are flaunted as rarefied, retro commodities—the more obscure, the better—designed for the express purpose of being judged by their cover and lending credence to their owner’s status.
All of this is well-established. Media outlets across the world have published numerous treatises related to our lost love of reading. As works of literature are increasingly viewed as esoteric and enigmatic items, influencers and celebrities have scrambled to jump on the bandwagon by launching book clubs, filming themselves reading or even hiring soi-disant ‘book stylists’, to mixed reception. Mounting illiteracy, then, can hardly be described as an invisible magnetic pull dragging humanity back to the primordial soup via the Dark Ages. Beyond facile correlations with the rise of social media, the more interesting, and less examined, aspect of the crisis is why. What actually resides behind the catastrophe?
Of course, the usual suspects of phones and the internet shortening attention spans tend to crop up in pieces that set out to resolve the issue. But an article by Kit Wilson in the New Statesman proposes an alternative explanation: the problem is not that we’re spending too little time reading, it’s that we’re reading too much.
Between the lines
This observation regarding our overexposure to language marks a step in the right direction, away from the cold objectivity of numbers and incessant enumeration of symptoms, and towards a more nuanced diagnosis of this phenomenon. When we spend time online, we are assaulted with a phantasmagoria of words, accompanied by head-splitting sounds, garish arrays of colours and flashing lights. Our minds are pulled in so many directions that language starts to sputter, becoming disconnected from that which it once described. Words cease to gesture towards any sort of reality we may be familiar with, stripped of context and abstractified within their immediate and broader contexts.
The nature of the content which contains the written word, from the never-ending stream of homogenous news articles to the subtitles of hallucinatory TikToks and Instagram Reels, only exacerbates the problem. Even though we seem to be reading individual words and phrases, we are not utilising our capacity to comprehend complicated texts, assume new perspectives or forge mental connections between works. In this way, we are not “deep reading”. This term, coined by Maryanne Wolf, designates a more profound engagement with a text beyond merely grasping the significance of words on paper, and it is fundamental to our ability to understand and interpret the world around us.
The literacy catastrophe is not simply one of overfeeding and -stimulation, therefore, but also one of malnutrition. Time spent on devices—an average of 306 minutes, or 28% of the day for UK citizens in 2024—is time spent at the borders of reality. The way in which we interact with language in these long periods, therefore, is even more harmful, not only distancing us from the world but also blunting the cognitive tools we employ to make sense of it. We are both alienated from reality and exposed to its digital simulacrum. Disturbingly, a growing number of people are becoming more attached to this false image, whether they’re turning to chatbots for therapy or sinking into intense solitude, only finding comfort in ubiquitous and increasingly extreme pornographic content.
Frictionless existences
In this ephemeral digital ecosystem, we exist as livestock, pulled hither and thither towards content that aligns with our tastes by algorithms fattened by personal data. As a result, we only see what we want to see, only hear what we want to hear: an experience completely devoid of challenges or friction. The internet is regarded as an El Dorado constructed out of opportunity, a tapestry of connections between individuals. But a closer examination of its systems and algorithms reveal it to be a pre-determined pipeline, a tunnel whose path continually wraps back around to the same destination—the self.
The combination of linguistic decay and frictionlessness is devastating for our approach to literature and goes a long way in explaining why our reading habits have shifted in recent times. Nowadays, the alternative to listlessly scrolling through social media is spending time in the real world, where there is antagonism, conflict and strife. In comparison to this sheer difficulty, having vapid content tailored exactly to your specifications on an unending conveyor belt is an attractive alternative.
Behold the Faustian bargain of the modern age. People all over the world have done their deal with the devil. This phenomenon has even bled out of digital spaces and manifested in disturbing, real-world ramifications. Namely, individuals and institutions find themselves having to cater to this unwillingness to be pushed and challenged.
The most marked instance of this occurrence in the UK can be seen with recent changes to secondary and tertiary humanities education. In schools, curricula have been pared down in response to pupil’s aversion, or perhaps inability, to get through longer novels. Sir Jonathan Bate, professor of English Literature at Oxford University, refers to this as the “John Steinbeck: Of Mice and Men effect — they would never prescribe the Grapes of Wrath any more but Of Mice and Men is nice and short”. According to Bate, even at university level, students struggle to finish one book in three weeks.
This phenomenon is not exclusive to the Western world, either. In China, for instance, around half the population reads online fiction, though these pieces are laden with clichés and banalities, and are “designed to be scrolled through quickly”. Moreover, readers are picky and prudish when it comes to subject matter and plot, often eschewing works with sexual content warnings. In a recent article for The Baffler, Zhang Yueran noted that the process of criticising authors who write about topics outside of the audience’s puritanical ideal is known as “beating up the chef”, an indication of how commodified the current book market is. In the world of business, retail and now literature, the customer is always king. This attitude has seeped out of the internet and has been absorbed into the ideologies of publishing houses which pump out threadbare novels that don’t require any great expenditure of grey matter to understand.
Epistemic change in the air
As previously mentioned, our capacity for deep literacy is crucial to our comprehension of reality. We are the water, and language is the meander; the more we read literature, the faster the current becomes. As our bond with words grows more intimate, we shape it and it shapes us, leading to increased curiosity, a heightened awareness of ourselves and more empathy for others, skills that are sorely lacking nowadays. The power of literature to change reality and the way we perceive it has been warped and distorted by contemporary habits. Instead of making the world a richer place, it has fallen into a negative feedback cycle where any intrigue, excitement or personality is stripped away layer by layer. As our linguistic skills and descriptive powers wane, the borders of our selves and reality shrink. Just like in Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, where television and rock ‘n’ roll are portrayed as tools to “[give] us too much to process, fill up every minute, keep us distracted”, total freedom has ironically revealed itself to be a mechanism for public control that is ripe for exploitation.
Our perspectives have narrowed and become sclerotic as a result of this distortion, and the tapering of deep literacy rates likewise renders us susceptible to manipulation and coercion. There is little about the rise of populism over the past couple of decades that has been subtle, but the fashion in which its political figureheads—Trump, Orban, Modi—communicate is one of the most striking aspects of the movement. For all the praise that speakers like Mark Carney receive, the days of eloquence are over. In order to succeed in the attention economy, one must resort to one-upmanship and always endeavour to be the loudest in the room: the adage about all publicity being good publicity has never rung truer.
All this points towards the most significant revelation tied to the literacy crisis: the shift in modern epistemologies away from humanities. We have been told by policymakers and businessmen that, in a technocratic society, English, history and modern languages are not as useful, and therefore not as valuable, as STEM degrees. To me, this indicates a shift away from previous theories of knowledge; where once having a comprehensive view of an issue or a topic was desirable, now intelligence is equated with our capacity to store factual information. This may be good if you want to think like a robot, always think logically, or win University Challenge, but it won’t be much good when you’re settling a debate, socialising at the pub or helping a loved one grieve. Which of these activities seem more human to you?
Literature in the age of AI
Modern tech and business bros’ perspectives on literature is especially telling in this regard. Take, for instance, the application ‘deepstash’ – an artificial intelligence tool that gamefies reading, scanning a book and distilling it into its ‘key concepts’ that the user can be quizzed on. In doing so, it removes the challenge from the act of reading, siphoning off any complexities or difficulties the reader may encounter and producing only a handful of data points. Instead of looking at Monet’s Impression, sunrise, where all the dots coalesce to form a multifaceted, but clear work of art, AI tools and summary bots create the equivalent of dots on a blank piece of paper, isolated information points that lie disconnected from each other and have no impact on the spectator.
Currently, I believe that artificial intelligence, no matter how advanced, will never be able to reproduce a work of fiction that is comparable to that of a modern human. Yes, they may resemble each other superficially, but probe a little deeper and everything that makes literature great—the subtext, the substance, the soul—is absent from text written by a machine.
However, the literacy crisis highlights that LLMs and similar technologies pose a grave danger to us, in that they threaten to erode everything that differentiates humans from machines. The real risk, then, relates not to the advanced output of ChatGPT, Gemini and the like, but rather our disconnection from reality and one another leading to soulless literary returns. We shouldn’t be asking, “Why is nobody reading?” anymore. We must avoid existing solely in comfortable online echo chambers or programming ourselves into subpar information processors, half-baked versions of our own creations. Much like with Bazball, the answer to the problem tends to revolve around prioritising substance over style, and resilience over ease. Instead, we need to appreciate complexity once again.
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