So Young People Aren't Reading as Many Books, So What?

Photo @christinhumephoto

Over the past few years, I've noticed a lot of posts about how attention spans, literacy rates, and reading comprehension skills are declining among the younger generations.

"Kids are getting dumber," is a popular refrain.

Business Insider ran an article about how learning to read is becoming a privilege amongst the alphas; countless Substacks talk about the lost art of reading; TikToks from frustrated teachers lament attention spans so poor they're actually crippling. And perhaps the most alarming, a 2024 article in The Atlantic that detailed how students at elite colleges can't get through an entire book because they were never required to read one cover-to-cover in high school. 👀

And I know my fellow Canadians might be quick to dismiss this as a uniquely American problem, but our own plummeting provincial literacy data shows we are riding the exact same wave.

The youths just aren't reading books anymore. They prefer their phones, video content, and digesting quick snippets of information. They simply don't have the capacity to sit with a long, difficult text and engage with it, and they never have.

The immediate, horrifying assumption, especially among generations raised to believe that reading = intelligence, is that we are witnessing collective cognitive decline in real time. But there's a paradox here. Globally, literacy rates have actually increased over the last few decades, bringing wide-scale economic and health benefits. However, that increase hides a deeper nuance: while developing nations are successfully lifting millions into basic, functional literacy, highly digitized societies are experiencing the exact opposite trajectory. According to data from international PISA tests, reading comprehension scores across the OECD, including Canada, the US, and Europe, have suffered an unprecedented, systemic decline.

But youth from London to Toronto to Manila are equally tethered to their phones. So, we aren't looking at a uniquely Western problem, nor are we looking at a simple case of "the world is becoming illiterate." Instead, we are seeing a global cognitive split: while the developing world rushes to master the traditional book-and-text model, the digital generation has already abandoned it for a massive cognitive pivot.

So, what if the shift away from books isn't the end of literacy, but an evolution of it?

After all, reading isn't the only path to knowledge. The book era is actually a relatively short anomaly when compared to the oral traditions that dominate the bulk of human history.

Before text, knowledge was inherently social and communal. Information was packaged into narrative structures like myths, legends, and fables because dramatic stories are easier for the human brain to remember than dry, boring facts. Epic poems were memorized and recited aloud.

By shifting to a world of video content, memes (visual symbols), podcasts (oral storytelling), and comment sections (communal dialogue), Gen Z and Gen Alpha are actually, in a way, reverting back to a more networked, tribal, and auditory model of learning that looks a lot more like the vast majority of human history than the book ever did.

Where older generations were trained in linear logic (Statement A leads to Statement B leads to Statement C, and ABC give you a conclusion), young people today are fluent in layered semiotics, whether they're aware of it or not.

Take memes, for instance, the modern hieroglyph.

A single image might contain five layers of irony, a specific musical cue, and a reference to a three-year-old niche event that. To "read" a 15-second video, a user must simultaneously process visual cues, text overlays, audio trends, and the "vibe" of the creator. This high-speed exercise in decoding symbols leaves traditional book readers exhausted, and sometimes, annoyed.

There is also an algorithmic literacy at play. Books are designed to be self-contained units. You might look for context clues, but the text is static. Digital literacy, however, requires reading the delivery mechanism itself. If we stop looking for traditional "book-smarts" in a digital generation, we might see the emergence of a new sort of hyper-literacy in semiotics, pattern recognition, and rapid synthesis.

Modern "readers" are incredibly savvy at looking at the larger context and identifying how an algorithm is trying to manipulate them. (They're still vulnerable, of course, but generally, they understand the architecture better than older generations do). Phrases like "the algorithm is algorithmizing" and "I built this fyp brick by brick" point to a high level of meta-awareness. They understand shadowbanning, SEO-baiting, and engagement farming. Watching rage bait at work, and laughing at people who don't know they're being rage baited, is a whole genre of content in itself. Some creators have built their entire platforms around providing commentary on exactly this type of illiteracy.

This is critical thinking that operates on a structural level rather than a static, textual one. It highlights a fascinating generational shift. Boomers grew up trusting every media source religiously, to the detriment of their ability to productively engage in cultural criticism beyond their own narrow set of experiences. Millennials grew up skeptical of every media source, to the detriment of their ability to disengage from the requisite cultural criticism that has rendered every single aspect of culture problematic. Boomer infallibility and Millennial apathy produced critical blind spots for both generations, with the Xs somewhere in the middle. Gen Alpha has bypassed the debate entirely; they don't care about the source because they are too busy analyzing the algorithmic currents that carry it.

The traditional literary model is inherently a lonely, solitary endeavour: a person and a book. It's also a touch elitist. To be considered "well-read" doesn't just mean you read a lot; it means you read the right things. Romance novels or sci-fi paperbacks don't cut it. Audiobooks would be considered cheating. True intellectual status requires a familiarity with the canon and, preferably, a university degree to prove you can decode it. The "literati" of old held a monopoly on taste; they decided what was profound and counted as "literature" and what was merely trash. The new digital model completely flattens this pyramid. It is inherently networked, collaborative, and decentralized. Less smug and more sly. You're in as long as you can get the joke. While traditional literacy is tied to socioeconomic and institutional privilege, digital literacy is radically democratized. And the "text" of digital content is just the starting point; the comment section is where the real meaning-making happens.

And while you might be tempted to compare commentary to something like cheap secondary literary criticism, digital feedback is iterative. Meaning evolves in real time. A cultural event happens, and within hours, it has been remixed, parodied, stitched, and deconstructed by thousands of users. This creates a highly adaptive, communal intelligence that favours speed and breadth over the depth of a singular "authoritative" perspective. There's no reason to trust the "expert" opinion of an individual tastemaker or cultural gatekeeper anymore, because it's too singular, too rigidly stuck in a moment that's already evolved. To a digital native, the idea of taking only what one person says about a cultural event as the gospel truth probably feels absurd.

This isn't a clean trade-off, of course. We are absolutely sacrificing sustained focus and deep work by moving away from books. In exchange, however, younger generations are gaining the ability to connect disparate ideas across different platforms instantly.

Traditional literacy requires silence, time, and a low-noise environment to excavate meaning. Your imagination to bring it to life. It's individualistic. Digital literacy requires navigating a high-noise environment, jumping between apps, formats, cultures, and 50 open tabs, while synthesizing thousands of voices and perspectives in real time. It's active participation in iterative meaning-making.

You could argue that a teenager who can navigate the psychological triggers of a social media feed, spot corporate "marketing-speak" disguised as an organic trend and identify an AI deepfake is actually better equipped for the future than someone who can analyze an 18th-century ballad but falls for phishing scams.

Younger generations aren't reading as many books, but they are reading. They are training their brains to navigate a high-noise environment, whereas we were trained to excavate a low-noise environment. The assumption is that they're reading fewer books because they've lost the capacity to think, but maybe what they're losing is the ability to think the exact same way that older generations thought.

And given the brave new world they are inheriting, that might just be a good and necessary thing.

I'm not a neuroscientist, so maybe there are parts of this transition that I'm missing, but I am a mom, and I don't think we should give up on our kids just yet.