From the Gutenberg press to TikTok, a historian’s take on declining literacy, shrinking attention spans, and what we stand to lose
In the latest Atlantic, Rose Horowitch has called it. She’s just declared that “The Age of Reading Is Over.”
Well, that’s a little fucking depressing.
I wish I could say that it was the first I’ve heard of it. But a few months ago, I had lunch with a friend who also happens to be one of Australia’s publishing world superstars. I asked her how business was.
Her blunt assessment? Books are cooked. People aren’t reading anymore.
Soon after, I asked the same question of another friend who has also been in publishing for decades. She said the same thing, only with more swears.
As a booklover with an unhealthy obsession with all things printed on paper, it’s mystifying.
But as a historian, archaeologist, and student of all things human, it’s utterly terrifying.
What does this mean for us as a species?
Are books the canary in the coal mine?
For Horowitch, we’re entering what she calls our “postliterate era.”
She’s been sounding the alarm for a bit now. She wrote another article in 2024 where she looked at the students arriving at elite colleges in the US who have never read a book, cover-to-cover.
And that’s a big problem. Because unless you’re raised in a household where reading is a thing, it’s not something you’re likely to just stumble upon.
When you think about it, it’s a rather odd thing to do. Settle yourself down, open a bound volume of sheets of flattened wood pulp printed with abstract shapes, and find yourself transported to… well, anywhere.
But it takes focus, and it takes time.
Living as we do in an era where spare time is at a premium and competition for our attention is fiercer than ever, it probably shouldn’t be a surprise that fewer of us are spending our days buried between the pages of a book.
Reading takes us places
But there was a time when books transformed lives.
Take George Smith.
He would have made quite a sight.
November 1872. London. The British Museum. And an unkempt man with wild hair who looks like he’s been dragged backwards through a hedge is running around a second-floor room, tearing off his clothes.
He’s excited. Clearly.
“I am the first man to read that after more than two thousand years of oblivion,” he cries.
Because George has just unearthed one of the most sensational archaeological finds of all time. What he has discovered is a version of the world’s oldest written story.
To read, or not to read? That is the question.
Most people forget that the “Age of Reading” is a short-lived affair.
Writing itself is new tech, relatively speaking. The first marks in clay that can be described as “writing” date back just 9,000 years or so. But those first cuneiform tablets were run-of-the-mill things… the ancient equivalent of Excel spreadsheets… keeping track of taxes, and recording the exchange of sheep and goats.
Real literature in written form didn’t appear until the story George Smith translated that cold, winter’s day in the British Museum.
The Epic of Gilgamesh, as it came to be known, had arrived on the scene four thousand or so years ago in what was Mesopotamia—today’s Iraq and Syria.
But there was another reason Smith was excited as all fuck.
He had discovered the archaeological mother lode. The proof, for those who believed such things, that God’s word as preserved in the Bible was the literal truth.
The passages from the Epic of Gilgamesh Smith discovered got Victorian England all hot under its collective collar, because it included an account of the immortal man, Utnapishtim, who survived a flood that killed all other human beings after building himself a boat from plans handed down to him by the gods. Oh, he loaded the boat with animals as well… and sent birds to check whether the waters had receded, then beached his boat on a mountaintop.
Sound familiar?
For people who believe the Bible is less sky-fairy cautionary tale to keep believers on the straight and narrow than it is a factual account of historical fact, Gilgamesh is Noah.
Gilgamesh got there first, though, because the Genesis bit of the Old Testament was most likely penned around 900 BCE. But it’s all same-same as far as true believers are concerned, and most biblical scholars agree that the story of Noah and his ark was drawn from the Mesopotamian flood story.
It’s not an exact transcription, mind you. My favourite way Gilgamesh differs from the biblical tale is that the Mesopotamian gods, like the Greek and Roman deities, were a petty and vengeful bunch.
They sent an apocalyptic flood because humans were being too rowdy and the gods couldn’t get to sleep. The flood was their version of calling the cops at 2am when someone at the house party next door puts Achy Breaky Heart on repeat.
The eternal story
The account of the great flood is taken by those who believe such things as evidence of Noah’s flood. For those of us who do not, it’s regarded as evidence of the endurance of storytelling and the transmission of tales from one group to another.
Because the flood story didn’t stop there.
The Ancient Greeks told of Deucalion, who had an inside track with Zeus and was told to build an ark for himself and his wife to escape the flood he was sending because he was pissed off with humankind.
Then there was the Hindu story of Manu, who was told by Lord Vishnu, who visited him in the form of a great fish, to build a boat to survive the great flood.
The world’s oldest story?
Stories have served a function for human beings for many thousands of years.
How do we know this? Well, for a start, the creation stories still told by Australia’s Aboriginal people, who are custodians of the world’s oldest continuing culture, have been around for at least 60,000 years.
They also tell a tale that is thought to be the oldest unwritten human story still circulating. And the way that was discovered is truly mind-blowing.
It starts with the so-called Seven Sisters; a constellation of stars known as the Pleiades. Thing is, if you look up into the night sky today, you’ll see six stars. Not seven.
Geographically remote indigenous cultures across the globe—from Africa to Australia, to Asia and the Americas—all recount a tale of seven sisters who were transformed into stars to escape the amorous attentions of a hunter.
But then the stories diverge. In Ancient Greece, the seventh sister went into hiding because she fell in love with a mortal, which is why only six stars are visible.
Aboriginal Australian stories have several explanations for the missing sister. She died, or is in hiding, or has been abducted.
The same is true for all other versions of the Seven Sisters story. They start the same, but have different explanations for the sister we can’t see.
Here’s where it gets bonkers.
Stars move over time. So, astronomers wound back the cosmic clock, and found that 100,000 years or so ago, the “missing” seventh star, Pleione, would have been visible to the naked eye. Today, it has moved close enough to the star Atlas that the two appear to be one.
Know what else happened 100,000 years ago?
We began our great migration out of Africa.
From there, we spread across the globe in different tribes. We carried with us the foundation story of the Seven Sisters. And when we noticed that Pleione had disappeared, we came up with an explanation.
But those explanations were all different.
The story of the Seven Sisters is proof that, once upon a time, we were all one.
And, once upon a time, we all shared the same stories.
Stories that last
Stories like the Seven Sisters survived and were circulated through the oral tradition. They weren’t recorded in permanent, printed form. They were memorised and recited aloud.
It was the audiobook Mk I, if you like.
And for much of human history, that’s how we’ve done it. Homer’s epic poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey, were preserved through memory and shared as spoken word long before they were written down.
Books as we know them today are a very recent invention.
Even after printing on paper became a thing—the 1400s in Europe, and about 800 AD in China—books were inaccessible to most people. And not just because they were expensive. They were worthless to most people because very few people outside the nobility and clergy could read.
Knowledge was a commodity hoarded by the wealthy and powerful
Human knowledge, as preserved and studied in monasteries and regal libraries, was a commodity stockpiled by the wealthy and powerful.
But things did begin to change as the era of social revolution swept across Europe. In 1686, Sweden’s Reformation brought about a law that required every Swede, regardless of age or sex, to read the Bible. By the early 1700s, eighty per cent of the population was literate.
In England, it took the Elementary Education Act of 1870—just 150 years ago—to push literacy up to 97 per cent. It was the beginning of a state-mandated education system funded by taxpayers and run by elected school boards.
Across Western Europe and America, similar policies were rolled out.
There was, of course, an agenda at play. As the Industrial Revolution picked up pace, increasingly complex technology required educated workers.
Libraries and the Enlightenment
This all happened against the backdrop of social upheaval that saw the ousting of monarchs, and the rise of systems of democratic government across the Western world.
As commoners took the reins of power, they threw open the doors of the vast collections of knowledge their kings and churches had been hoarding.
After the French Revolution, the royal collection became the foundation of the Louvre Museum; its national treasures passed to the French citizens.
The public libraries and museums first established in the 1700s were instruments to educate the population. They were promoted as “people’s universities.” Enlightenment ideals meant knowledge was democratised.
The idea was simple. A democracy is only as healthy as the people casting their votes. An ill-educated and ill-informed population meant poor choices.
Given what’s going on in America at the moment, you’ll get no fucking argument about that from me.
In London, the British Museum was established in 1753 with the mission to advance universal scientific and historical understanding.
Like the first free public libraries, the BM was imagined not as a repository of treasures, but as a tool to combat illiteracy, and offer people the chance to educate themselves, regardless of class or cash.
End of storytelling?
So does the end of books mean the end of storytelling?
In a word, no. Because human beings have been telling stories for as long as we’ve been stringing abstract thoughts together.
Even more than that, a story’s superpower is its ability to transport us to imaginary places and transcend the preoccupations and dangers of daily life.
Storytelling offers us companionship and comfort. It’s why parents read aloud to their children at bedtime. And our ancient ancestors did the same, as they huddled, wide-eyed, around the fire and listened as elders recalled tales of gods, ancestors, and great deeds.
We will continue to tell stories. And we will continue to consume them.
Ways we consume stories are changing
What’s changing is the way we’re consuming them.
In 2015, there were two billion users across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Today, with the addition of TikTok and Twitter, we have 8.5 billion on social media. It’s the equivalent of the entire human population. Yes, that figure includes those of us who have profiles on multiple platforms. But still.
Next time you’re on public transport… or anywhere, come to think of it… look around and see how many people have their noses buried in their phones, where once it would have been a book.
And then there’s the time we spend watching TV. Just using Netflix as an example, in 2015, it had seventy million subscribers. In 2025, it reached 325 million.
But does it really matter? Does it make a difference whether we’re consuming our stories in thirty-second grabs on TikTok, binging series on Amazon Prime, or finding them between the covers of a book?
The short answer is yes. Absofuckinglutely.
Reading leads to deep thinking and sparks corners of our imagination that watching a fully resolved story on a screen does not.
Watching something is a passive activity.
Reading something—whether that’s on a screen or narrated in an audiobook—is the neurological equivalent of running a marathon.
When you read, your brain is translating shapes on a page in an instant and transforming them into an imagined world. As the story progresses, you manage to hold onto complex narrative threads and tap into emotions that belong to fictional characters.
A study at Emory University tracked what happens to the brain after someone reads a novel before bed each night.
For a start, the areas linked to language and cognition spark up. No surprises there.
What researchers weren’t expecting was the discovery that the changes persisted the next day. They described it as “muscle memory”; even hours after the readers put their books on the bedside table, their brains were still chewing over the narrative. They were still echoing the characters’ experiences, long after they closed the covers.
MRI scans have shown that reading sparks increased neurodevelopment in early teens that compares with well-established patterns influenced by parental income and education.
Everything is served up ready-made for your brain.
It’s consuming, not creating.
And this holds true whether you’re reading a story or listening to it. Neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have shown that the same parts of our brain are activated whether we’re reading a story or listening to it.
In short?
Most screen-based stories are the equivalent of pulling up in the drive-through for a burger on the road when you’re feeling peckish.
Books are buying a packet of tomato seeds, then planting, growing and harvesting them to make yourself a pot of soup.
The way you build—and learn—things in the neurologically DIY world of books is a uniquely human experience.
Movies: Ruining Books Since 1895
It’s why screen adaptations of books are so often a bitter disappointment.
Like me, I’m sure you’ve got a film version of a favourite book that is an assault on your senses and an affront to decency.
Once upon a time, I had a t-shirt printed up for my husband that read: “Movies: Ruining books since 1895.”
It’s why the prospect of The Odyssey by Christopher Nolan, a director whose work I admire enormously, is terrifying to me. Homer’s epic poem, as translated by the great Richmond Lattimore in 1967, is one of my favourite pieces of writing.
The thought of Matt Damon as the Greek king, with Anne Hathaway as his long-suffering queen, makes my hair stand on end.
I have a theory on that. Two people will read the same book, and picture the people, places, and events on the page completely differently. My “tall, dark, and handsome” will not be your “tall, dark, and handsome.”
But on screen, all the work is done for you through the alchemical art that is film or TV-making. The “tall, dark, and handsome” of a favourite character in a book becomes Timothée Chalamet. Or Javier Bardem… Or Matt Damon.
What is produced on screen can never resemble the world you created in your mind. That doesn’t mean it’s always shit. It’s just not what you pictured. So, you’re almost invariably going to be disappointed.
I mean, it’s true, isn’t it? You’ve got at least one of those films, right?
An intimate affair
But it’s more than that.
Books, for me, are an intimate affair. We holiday together. Share a bed. Stay up together until the wee small hours. Chat over a glass or two of exceptionally nice wine, or a well-brewed cup of tea.
And with so many competing demands on my time, my relationship with whatever book I’m reading is usually an extended one, played out in fifteen or twenty-minute grabs over several weeks. It gives the characters time to settle down into my head… and heart.
There’s something about the fast-food-style rapid consumption of culture that leaves me feeling empty, even after “binge eating” an entire TV series.
Books, and reading, have the opposite effect.
They leave me sated.
Accidental learning
But books are much more than entertainment.
I always think back to my time at university in the dark ages when “online” would have meant something to do with a train or a telephone that plugged into a wall. Yes, kids. Such things did once exist.
Reading lists for classes involved trekking down into the bowels of the university library to hunt down dusty tomes that, more often than not, were missing from the shelf, either because some diligent student had made it there first, or because a dyslexic librarian had got his Dewey system scrambled.
Many curses and swears later, I’d be searching along the stacks of books for the missing volume. But as I did, I stumbled across countless gems I wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.
What was supposed to be destination reading became an exploration. An adventure.
Then, when I became a university lecturer, I was expected to collate a “reader” of articles copied, printed and bound together for my students.
Today, students are given lists of links to online articles.
Everything is prescribed. Nothing is random.
And, yet, accident is the mother of human innovation.
Accident, repetition, curiosity, and persistence.
That’s what concerns me the most about the long-term impact of AI use on the human brain. We’re outsourcing all those things in the name of efficiency.
But what does it do to us when we stop digesting and processing knowledge ourselves?
Pattern recognition—one of the key markers of human intelligence—only becomes possible when you’ve had the opportunity to observe enough things to notice patterns.
Innovation occurs when we draw connections between otherwise disconnected events and parallels between things that, superficially, don’t appear to be the same.
Sure, AI knocks innovation out of the park. It speeds things up like nobody’s business.
And all it needs are banks of processors stored in blank-faced buildings with plenty of water and power to keep going.
AI has no need for, or real connection to, our world.
It lives in bundles of wires and chips. Its only experience of what it means to be human and exist in the mad, chaotic splendour of the planet we are blessed to call home is the glimpse it has through the words and images it scrapes from the internet.
We are at risk of delegating the human narrative to a mechanical system that has no need of stories or real understanding of why they are so important to us.
We outsource that at our peril.
Because what we will lose is our sense of wonder.
That sense of wonder and the spirit of exploration and innovation it inspires are amongst the most important things that define us as a species.
Until very recently, books have played a key role in that, because they have been the great equaliser.
If you can read, the world is your oyster.
Need further proof?
Let’s take it back to George Smith and his remarkable discovery in the BM.
He is the Enlightenment era pin-up boy.
Because George Smith was not born to wealth or privilege.
He had a hard-bitten and impoverished upbringing in Victorian England.
Despite the fact he displayed a precocious intellect, once he turned fourteen, George was expected to leave school and earn his keep.
He was apprenticed to a publishing house to learn how to engrave banknotes. But George was obsessed with the ancient Assyrian culture. So, every lunch break, he trotted off to the BM to hit the public library and learn all there was to know about the cuneiform tablets unearthed by archaeological expeditions near Mosul in the mid-1800s.
(And, yes. I know. Don’t get me started on the horrific strip-mining of culture from colonial possessions during the 18th and 19th centuries to build the vast public museum collections of Europe and America. I created and wrote an entire TV series about exactly that a few years ago. That’s a story for another day.)
Smith’s interest caught the attention of the staff at the museum, and by the age of nineteen, he was spending his evenings after work sorting and cleaning mountains of cuneiform cylinders and tablets in the BM’s storage rooms.
By the time he was thirty, renowned Assyriologist, Sir Henry Rawlinson, appointed George Senior Assistant in the Assyriology Department.
It was there that the boy born in poverty who left school at fourteen discovered the eleventh tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
George Smith died at the age of 36 on his third expedition to what is now Syria, where he travelled searching for more remnants of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
He had found his life’s work. His quest. And he was inspired to go way beyond his comfort zone to fulfill it.
George Smith got there, because of books.
I fear that the end of the Age of Reading will mean the things that make us so remarkable as human beings will wither and die.
Not with a roar.
With a whimper.
Still reading? Cool. Me too.
So, read on.
Let’s make it our act of rebellion.
Are you with me?
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