Quite by chance, your TikTok feed presents you with footage of the fascists who recently took part in highly organised shows of strength in Dover and Portsmouth (and, on Wednesday, outside the London offices of the Daily Mail, demanding a new house for the mother of their leader, Daniel “Tommo” Thomas). For as long as the images hold your attention, you see and hear flashes of explanation, but then, as usual, you scroll away to someone leaping off a tall building, a fight on the London Underground, or a trick-performing dog. Hypothetically, TikTok users are able to skip through 260 videos in under 35 minutes.
And it’s this distracted, quick-fire way that so many people receive information that may be responsible for a worrying statistic from YouGov last week. Its poll on the Dover and Portsmouth events showed that 53% of people aged 18-24 years old simply didn’t have a point of view on whether the masked demonstrations were “a legitimate way of protesting”. Further, 43% of those of all ages were either unaware of the story, or not following it at all.
Those figures probably highlight one of the most worrying aspects of the times we live in: the decline of reading. Millions of us know what that phenomenon feels like: trying desperately to keep your attention glued to a book or news article with the nagging certainty that you will be tempted back to the more ephemeral attractions offered by your phone. But a background in the pre-digital world helps people not just follow national and global events, but clarify and contextualise them.
In this case, at the risk of sounding hopelessly pompous, the fear many of us felt as we watched what happened in both ports was surely full of the perspectives gleaned from years of soaking up books and newspapers – and the sense that history often either repeats itself, or rhymes. Black-clad – let’s be honest: uniformed – men who want to “reclaim our borders, restore order and send a clear message: Britain belongs to the British”, while claiming to be protecting women and girls: the whole spectacle was pitched halfway between Oswald Moseley’s blackshirts – and, therefore, Hitler and the Nazis – and the Ku Klux Klan, with the seemingly ubiquitous balaclavas lacing everything with a flavour of the Troubles. But if you receive most of your information in the form of a distracting and seemingly infinite jumble of random moving images, what would you know about most of that?
All this crossed my mind thanks to an excellent new book marking what may well be a transformative moment for societies all over the world. The New Dark Ages is the work of the Times columnist James Marriott, and subtitled The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society. Presumably to accommodate itself to 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 looking at 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 that they used to regularly read for pleasure, but “rarely or never” did any more.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
