A profound shift is underway: the art of deep reading, once a cornerstone of human progress, is fading due to digital overload. What began as an 18th-century reading revolution —democratising knowledge through cheap books and sparking the Enlightenment—now faces reversal, with smartphones and social media stealing attention and fragmenting minds. In the UK and US, pleasure reading has crashed by over 30-40%; children’s literacy hits historic lows, and even university students’ knowledge cuts thin on classics like Dickens. James Marriott has an amazing article on this, if you have a few minutes to spare, jump here and dig deep into the topic.
For animal welfare, this erosion strikes at our core. Books cultivate the sustained empathy needed to truly understand suffering—think Watership Down evoking rabbit societies or Jane Goodall’s memoirs revealing chimpanzee emotions. Without this deep connection, we turn to quick anger from short videos and skip the clear thinking and facts needed for real change. As Neil Postman warned in Amusing Ourselves to Death, entertainment substitutes discourse, leaving societies emotional rather than analytical.
Photo by Eddy Billard on Unsplash
BBC’s The Global Story: The Death of Reading echoes this alarm, highlights how endless scrolling (7-9 hours daily!) shrinks attention spans, reverses IQ gains, and prevents critical thinking—skills vital for being able to read between the lines. Post-literate groupings struggle with inference and logic, risking a world where superficial narratives dominate policy.
Hope lies in deliberate revival: recommending welfare tales like The Cove companion books, hosting reading circles or modelling device-free reflection. At my Tikkun we embrace this call, making reading part of our work to raise generations who truly understand animals, as well as the world with care and determination.
By supporting reading, we protect not just knowledge, but the kind heart and clear sight that help animals big and small, and also keeps human creativity alive.
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