Reading habits for the new literary ‘dark ages’

our Twitter (X) feedView our Youtube channelView our Instagram feedView our Substack feedView our Spotify feed As screens consume greater amounts of our time, we risk losing the habits of mind that helped us build the modern world. History and SocietyPhilosophySocial MediaCognitive SkillsMedia Literacy The 18th-century writer and polymath Samuel Johnson was seldom seen without a book. People say he read in bed and while walking.

He even read at dinner, the pages folded over his lap like a “dog who holds a bone in his paws in reserve while he eats something else,” as his biographer, James Boswell, put it. The fact that today, Johnson is perhaps best known as the face of an internet meme — which, ironically, shows him looking at a text in annoyed befuddlement — tells us pretty much everything we need to know about how reading habits have changed since. As _The Times_ columnist James Marriott suggests in the subtitle of his latest book, _The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society_, what was once part of most people’s daily routines is slowly becoming a lost art, supplanted first by the audiovisual allure of television and now short-form content on social media.

Marriott is far from the first to write about this topic. As he notes in his introductory chapter, essays bemoaning the decline of reading skills and literary culture are so numerous they might as well be considered a literary genre in their own right. Unlike many of these other writers, however, Marriott does not consider post-literacy as a contemporary phenomenon, but as the latest phase in a process that goes back centuries.

Sitting down with Big Think over Zoom, Marriott discusses what TikTok has in common with King Louis XIV’s court paintings, why _Triumph of the Will_ (1935) managed to find a larger, more enduring audience than Hitler’s _Mein Kampf_ (1925), and why reading may become an activity akin to going to the gym or taking fiber supplements. During the Industrial Revolution, when reading started becoming commonplace across society, some people described the trend in terms not unlike how we describe the rise of smartphones and social media now. Strange though it may sound to us, they saw reading as an “epidemic,” an “addiction,” or an “evil force” that, if left unchecked, would tear down the fabric of society.

Looking back, such language calls to mind other baseless moral panics, such as those centered on the fantasy role-playing game _Dungeons & Dragons_ and violent video games in the 1980s and ‘90s, respectively. The only difference, Marriott says, is that in the case of the “reading revolution,” there was legitimate cause for concern. The flourishing of reason and scientific thinking, the abolition of slavery and emancipation of women, and the shift from monarchical to more democratic forms of government all occurred against a backdrop of rising literacy rates and increasingly sophisticated reading habits — which brings us to Marriott’s book.

Although there is some disagreement over how drastic the decline in reading has been, the fact remains that people no longer read as much or as well as they once did. Gone are the days when George Orwell reported that U.K. children were “readily picking up works by Dickens, Defoe, and Shakespeare,” as Marriott writes, or when the _New York Times_ Best Seller list consisted largely of literary novels and esteemed authors like Susan Sontag, James Baldwin, and Truman Capote were the lead guests on major late-night talk shows. Gyula Benczúr’s “Woman Reading in a Forest” (1875). (Credit.jpg): The Hungarian National Gallery / Wikimedia Commons) The first, and most obvious, potential danger in the post-literate world is losing the skills and experiences that historically only reading has provided.