We’re Reading Less Books: Is This The End of Civilization as We Know It?

Image courtesy of British Library Images

Swayed by the motion of the Circle Line, I grip the overhead rail with one hand, an Oxford Classics paperback in the other. The modernist fragmentations of Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf become increasingly oblique as I read (without a hint of performativity), making me wish I had a hand free to scratch my head.

My attention starts to wane.

Opposite, a fellow commuter smiles warmly into a screen. A message from someone close, perhaps; or an amusing meme? Noticing her joyful expression, I wonder which of us is smarter.

There has been much journalistic dismay in recent times around the possibility that we have “fallen out of love with reading”. But is it such a bad thing for the humble book to have to make way for more immediate forms of entertainment? If reading is essential to intelligence, creativity, and even democracy — ­as has been claimed by journalist James Marriott — then yes; and things are in a bad shape.

A 2025 YouGov poll revealed that 40% of British adults had not read or listened to a single book over a twelve-month period. Across the pond, the number of Americans who read for pleasure has dropped by 40% over the last 20 years. The picture is equally stark for children and young people. The National Literary Trust (NLT) revealed that book ownership in 8–18 year-olds is at its lowest in over a decade (though in 5–8 year-olds the figure has increased). Most revealingly, there has been a 36% fall in numbers of children and young people who report reading for enjoyment compared with 20 years ago.

Marriott tells us that the culprit is, predictably, that all-consuming pocketsize dopamine-machine: The smartphone. 

I raised the issue with Steven Connor, Professor of English at King’s, and Director of Research at KCL’s Digital Futures Institute. “The practice of reading is all the time changing, and also pretty new,” he explains. “Are we reading less? We're definitely reading differently. I think in some ways we’re reading more [...] There are more people reading [globally] than ever.” Literacy has widened exponentially since the beginning of the last century. 

The first appearance of the daily newspaper (The Daily Courant, 1702) and the quaint days of eighteenth-century circulating libraries are far behind us. Yet transitioning from print to digital media may not have produced entirely positive results.

On a recent episode of Radio 4’s Today, Year 8 students were asked about their social media use. One student felt that, on YouTube, if "you go onto a Short, you get shorter attention spans"; and that through “A.I., people are making slop and other content, so that people can, like, get fixated on it and […] not know what's actually real.” Another student enjoyed sharing “funny memes”, though she found TikTok “addictive”. She added that she set “a limit on my phone”, demonstrating the capacity to navigate these issues without a heavy handed social media ban.

However, the consequences of increased smartphone use and lower reading rates are, we are told, dire. For Marriott, "Democracy draws immeasurable strength from print — the old dying world of books, newspapers and magazines — with its tendency to foster deep knowledge, logical argument, critical thought, objectivity and dispassionate engagement. In this environment, ordinary people have the tools to understand their rulers, to criticise them and, perhaps, to change them."

Professor Connor discusses the work of theorist of orality Walter Ong. “He says these very extraordinary things about oral cultures: oral cultures are warm, intimate, spontaneous and violent [...] In oral cultures, the word is an action. In written cultures, violence is deferred, because you're in a space apart from immediate action. The words aren't doing anything.”

“He actually suggests that, psychologically, reading”, Connor continues, “is absolutely essential for the formation of individual subjectivity”. The text allows us to “scoop out” our own discrete intellectual space. “It’s why tyrants and dictators don't want people just reading anything in their own time”.

Marriott links a rise in populism and “Dumb rage” to our less print-oriented, increasingly TikTokified culture, quoting writer Ian Leslie: “Why does [TikTok] benefit populists disproportionately? [...] populism thrives on emotions, not thoughts; on feelings not sentences. Populists specialise in providing that rush of certainty you get when you know you’re right. They don’t want you to think.” Instagram and Facebook, focussed around image sharing and textual posts respectively, have shifted to providing more short-form video content, particularly following the success of TikTok. 

Whether it’s connected or not, there has been a palpable rise in populist political activity in recent years, along with “unevidenced assertions”, as Marriott puts it: More than 110,000 protesters, some of whom became violent, attended the ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally last year, one of the country’s largest ever far right demonstrations; the convicted felon Donald Trump is serving a second presidential term, despite his persistent though unevidenced claim that the 2020 election was stolen by Biden; and as of the 2025 German election, the majority of East German constituencies have been won by right wing populist party AfD. The European Centre for Digital Action attributes the rise of the AfD largely to “the party’s resonating success on social media”; and Tommy Robinson, organiser of the London rally, received a huge boost in online popularity following the spread of misinformation in the wake of the 2024 Southport stabbings.

But are apocalyptic fears of civilizational collapse due to lower reading rates simply reactionary elitism? After all, a lot of people prefer TikTok and Stranger Things to George Eliot; and what’s wrong with that? (Middlemarch is long). It is far from conclusive that short-form video consumption is the main cause of increasing right wing populism. Surely we’re better rather than less informed, too, than in previous technological epochs: the digital age has opened us to more information than ever before. Perhaps we needn’t be concerned.

“We should be concerned at reduced literacy rates”, asserts Jarek, a third-year Liberal Arts student at King’s. However, if we want to engage with “difficult ideas”, he suggests, “there is nothing stopping us from putting down our phones and just picking a book up.”

While history’s tyrants may have feared a literate public, the recent internet blackout in Iran following mass protests suggests the online world is likewise a threat to authoritarianism. Indeed, social media is generally acknowledged as having been essential to the Arab Spring, a series of large-scale pro-democracy demonstrations taking place across North Africa and the Middle East early last decade. The preference for digital over print media arguably benefits various, and varying, political movements.

Returning to Europe and the US, maybe this is simply what democracy looks like: Messy. Full of people we can’t agree with. Light on dictatorship.

There are, of course, the American civilians killed this year by ICE officers. It may be worth dwelling on the possibility that the “word” is once again becoming a little more like the “action” of oral cultures, rather than a mechanism for reasoned engagement; Trump has frequently used threatening language towards protestors.

“I do think we will dream our way out of this in some way or other”, says Professor Connor; we will find “healthier” ways of occupying ourselves. “I’m a utilitarian, so healthier for me just means making you happy”.

If, after my attack of blurry concentration on the tube, I were to be given the power to eradicate these pesky attention-black-holes, would I permit myself to do so? It would mean depriving my fellow passenger with the phone of a moment of happiness. Ultimately, in a democracy, it’s down to individual choice.

For now, though, I thumb across to the next page, and make my own choice — to go on wondering over the luxuriously maddening prose of Mrs Woolf.

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Edited by Dan Ramos Lay, Literature Editor