Imagine this: by chance, your TikTok feed shows you footage of the fascists who recently held highly organised demonstrations in Dover and Portsmouth (and on Wednesday outside the Daily Mail’s London offices, demanding a new house for the mother of their leader, Daniel “Tommo” Thomas). As long as the images hold your attention, you catch flashes of explanation, but then, as usual, you scroll on to someone jumping off a tall building, a fight on the London Underground, or a dog performing tricks.
In theory, TikTok users can skip through 260 videos in under 35 minutes. It’s this distracted, rapid-fire way of receiving information that may explain a worrying statistic from YouGov last week. Its poll on the Dover and Portsmouth events found that 53% of people aged 18-24 had no opinion on whether the masked demonstrations were “a legitimate way of protesting.” Moreover, 43% of people of all ages were either unaware of the story or not following it at all.
These figures probably highlight one of the most worrying aspects of our times: the decline of reading. Millions of us know what that feels like: trying desperately to keep your attention on a book or news article while knowing you’ll be tempted back to the fleeting attractions of your phone. But a background in the pre-digital world helps people not only follow national and global events but also clarify and contextualise them. In this case, at the risk of sounding hopelessly pompous, the fear many of us felt watching what happened in both ports was surely shaped by perspectives gained from years of absorbing books and newspapers – and by the sense that history often either repeats itself or rhymes.
Men dressed in black – let’s be honest: in uniform – who want to “reclaim our borders, restore order and send a clear message: Britain belongs to the British,” while claiming to protect women and girls: the whole spectacle fell somewhere between Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts – and therefore Hitler and the Nazis – and the Ku Klux Klan, with the seemingly ubiquitous balaclavas adding a flavour of the Troubles. But if you get most of your information from a distracting and seemingly endless jumble of random moving images, what would you know about any of that?
All this crossed my mind thanks to an excellent new book marking what may well be a transformative moment for societies around the world. The New Dark Ages is by Times columnist James Marriott, with the subtitle The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society. Presumably to accommodate the changes it describes, it is short: 208 pages. But it is also full of insight and urgency.
In the 20 years since the UK’s National Literacy Trust began examining children’s and young people’s reading, there has been a 36% fall in the number who say they enjoy reading in their spare time, to its lowest level on record. In 2024, the Guardian reported a survey by the Reading Agency charity, which found that 35% of adults said they were now “lapsed readers” – meaning they used to read regularly for pleasure but “rarely or never” did so any more.
View image in fullscreenBlack-clad men in balaclavas outside the offices of the Daily Mail in London, 9 September 2026. Photograph: Denise Laura Baker/Getty Images
The Atlantic magazine recently ran an article bluntly headlined The End of Reading Is Here, whose author, Rose Horowitch, made plenty of sobering claims. “The literate era will prove to be a brief interlude between the oral and digital ages,” she wrote – drawing on no end of evidence and anecdotes. A program director at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, for instance, ran focus groups asking high-school students about recreational reading. The conclusion: “most thougThink of it as an alien practice.” When Marriott first wrote about this, he said, “some professors reported that it was not that the young men and women in their classes were unwilling to read, but that they seemed almost unable to.” In Britain, more than 320 newspapers closed between 2009 and 2019, a statistic the book follows with a stark suggestion: “It is increasingly possible to get through life without any exposure to the news at all.” After the 2016 Brexit referendum, I met people who said they had simply stopped paying attention to current affairs because they were so maddening. Now I wonder if what was really driving this switch-off was technology. The resulting ignorance—a strong word, but it feels justified—is firewalled by phone screens: it feels as if the only things that can break through have to be angry, paranoid, and visually shocking. And because reading has declined, the people who peddle all the nonsense and poison can be increasingly confident that fewer and fewer people will encounter anything even halfway critical or analytical. In that sense, the screen age is exemplified by—oh yes—Donald Trump, who, according to an economic adviser in his first term, “won’t read anything—not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers, nothing.” His style of speechmaking is equally non-literate: as Marriott writes, “he doesn’t supply evidence for his ideas. Rather than organizing his information analytically through clauses and subclauses in the manner of literate communication, he merely piles up assertions.” His proposed election bribe of $5,000 is one surreal example, but there are plenty of others. I recently watched an online video of Sean Duffy, the former Fox Business host who is now Trump’s secretary of transportation. He was celebrating the administration’s push to get rid of start-stop ignition buttons in cars—mainly, I sensed, because of some weird quasi-Freudian attachment to the phallic(ish) shape of traditional keys. Written down as an attempt at a coherent argument, his case would have looked ridiculous. But barked out folksily as Duffy’s “pet peeve,” I could imagine it being warmly received by exactly the people it was aimed at. The same, of course, applies to any number of much more malignant Trumpian positions and passions: climate denial, brazen racism toward Somali-Americans, unapologetic Islamophobia, and the idea that the US is about to be overrun by criminals and the occupants of other countries’ prisons and mental institutions. “Mass literacy is a recent phenomenon,” Marriott writes. “So is mass democracy. We simply don’t know whether one can survive without the other.” Meanwhile, on millions of screens, fascist faux-militias, populists, and other merchants of loathing and absurdity blur into acrobatic skateboarders, arguments on the tube, and dogs that do tricks. That strips them of context and thereby normalizes their rise—and inch by inch, we move toward a future with echoes of the past that too many people will have failed to understand. And this time, there will be no books to burn, because we will have stopped reading them. John Harris is a Guardian columnist. This article was amended on 13 September 2026. An earlier version misspelled Oswald Mosley’s surname.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of FAQs based on John Harriss article about the threat to democracy posed by the decline of reading
Beginner Questions
What is the main point of John Harriss article
The article argues that the decline in reading books and longform texts is a serious threat to democracy It suggests that without the skills developed by deep reading citizens cant properly understand complex issues or make informed decisions
What does the death of reading mean
It refers to the trend of people reading fewer books and long articles Instead we spend more time on short quick content like social media posts videos and headlines
Why is reading important for democracy
Democracy needs citizens who can think critically Reading long texts builds skills like focus patience and the ability to understand complex argumentsall of which are needed to evaluate political ideas and policies
Is this just about reading books for fun
No Its about the type of reading Deep reading of any longform textwhether its a book a detailed news report or a historical documentbuilds the mental muscles we need for civic life
Whats the difference between reading a book and scrolling online
Reading a book is a linear focused activity that requires sustained attention Scrolling online is usually nonlinear fragmented and designed for quick bursts of information which doesnt build the same deepthinking skills
Advanced Questions
What specific cognitive skills does deep reading build that are vital for democracy
Deep reading builds critical thinking empathy and complex comprehension It allows a person to follow a long argument understand different perspectives and grasp nuanceskills that are essential for evaluating political rhetoric and policy
How does the shift to digital media specifically harm democratic discourse
Digital media often prioritizes speed and emotional reaction over accuracy and reflection This creates an environment where misinformation spreads easily and people react to headlines instead of understanding the full context of an issue
What is longform reading and why is it so important
Longform reading means engaging with texts like books indepth articles or essays that require sustained attention Its important because it trains the brain to handle complexity and ambiguity which is crucial for tackling realworld problems that dont have simple answers
