What does it mean to live in a post-literate world? In The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society, James Marriott argues that digital distractions are eroding our capacity to read long, complex texts and think independently.
Without deep reading, we risk losing access to the accumulated wisdom of past generations. A public less able to weigh evidence is easier to manipulate — a dangerous prospect for democracy, which depends on citizens who can scrutinise those in power.
“Without reading, the world is going to become less rational and more disordered,” Marriott warns. He fears a “post-literate future that resembles the pre-literate past” — one that’s “mystical, tribal and autocratic”.
How we receive information also affects how we think. In Understanding Media (1964), Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan argued that communication technologies do not simply deliver information — they shape how people live and relate to others. “The medium is the message,” he declared.
Two decades later, Neil Postman argued in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) that television had turned public debate into entertainment, with audiences judging politicians on performance, not the strength of their arguments. “To engage the written word,” he wrote, “means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning.”
People once worried we were reading too much. In 18th-century Europe, critics called the habit a “fever” or an “epidemic” and warned it would corrupt public morals. “Respectable ladies neglected their household duties because they were transfixed by ‘poems and periodicals’,” Marriott writes.
Worse still, the servants were reading too. “A gentleman might visit his kitchen to make the astounding discovery that his cleaning maid was engrossed in a newspaper.
“Books and newspapers spread access to new ideas and new information down through society, transforming what ordinary citizens could know about their history and their governments.” He links this “reading revolution” to the Enlightenment and the rise of modern democracy.
Marriott describes students, even at elite universities, who struggle to read complete books and are bewildered by the thought of getting through several in one semester.
An English professor tells Marriott she has stopped teaching Middlemarch and Ulysses. She still teaches Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, but says: “I can guarantee not one of my students will have finished it.”
Some students arrive at university having studied excerpts instead of complete works, with little practice of reading a demanding text from beginning to end.
Students are not just struggling with novels. In the US, psychology and chemistry lecturers say their students are not completing their assigned reading. Engineering students solve problems using lecture slides rather than reading the course material. In the UK, law and social sciences students struggle to understand unfamiliar words and to stay focused long enough to finish a prescribed text.
Are students reading less because they find it harder or finding it harder because they read less?
“The transmission of knowledge — the most ancient function of the university — is breaking down in front of our eyes,” Marriott writes.
The decline extends beyond university reading lists. A 2025 study found that the proportion of Americans aged 15 and over who read for pleasure on a typical day fell from 28% in 2004 to 16% in 2023. The study does not establish why.
Marriott blames the smartphone for the decline in reading. Tech companies make money by keeping us glued to our phones. They design notifications and personalised feeds to keep us coming back, then track what we do so advertisers can target us more precisely. The longer they keep us scrolling, the more they earn.
Reading on a screen can still demand just as much concentration as reading on paper. But checking a message or opening another tab breaks that focus.
As former Google employee Tristan Harris puts it: “You can try having self-control, but there are a thousand engineers on the other side of the screen working against you.”
We check our phones while we watch television, too. Scriptwriters increasingly assume we will not give them our full attention. Characters explain events we have already seen, so we can miss a scene and still follow the plot. Film and television scholars call this “narrative redundancy”.
Marriott sees this as part of what he calls “the great simplification”. He argues that doomscrolling reduces our appetite for anything that demands sustained attention, prompting writers and filmmakers to simplify what they produce.
“Political discourse which was once conducted in print — with its remarkable capacity for sustaining logical thought and extended argument — now takes place amid the moronic inferno of social media,” Marriott writes.
What happens when those in power will not read? No example is more chilling than President Donald Trump. In 2018, former secretary of state Rex Tillerson said the president “doesn’t like to read, doesn’t read briefing reports”.
In 2019, Time reported intelligence officials’ “futile attempts to keep his attention”, cutting some briefing points to two or three sentences. One official called it “wilful ignorance”. He refuses to listen when the evidence proves him wrong, then makes decisions that affect millions of lives.
Brazil’s former president, Jair Bolsonaro, said much the same about his reading habits. Asked in 2025 about the last book he had read, he said he no longer had time for books and got information from a WhatsApp network.
I found The New Dark Ages an excellent read, particularly convincing in its account of how reading habits affect our political and cultural life. It is a stark reminder that we take our intellectual freedoms for granted, even as our capacity for independent thought weakens.
That warning comes from a journalist who relies on digital technology every day. He writes, “I believe much of the disorder and unreason of the 21st century is a direct consequence of the fading of the written word and the colonisation of our culture by addictive screens. I am by no means automatically opposed to technology. But I have seen both sides and it seems to me that the print world — in all its richness and complexity — is not one that we want to lose.”
Business Day
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