There Is No Age of Reading

Cracking the Code: Reading Is a Skill, Not an Interface

Dear Reader,

A note before reading:

This article contains only a fraction of my argument against the idea that society has left an “age of reading.” The breadth and length are intentional, bringing together personal storytelling, lived technological history, systems thinking, research, professional experience, and observations gathered across industries and sectors.

We are repeatedly told that people no longer read, yet even a broad overview of the written material surrounding modern life can be difficult to finish. We now face more interfaces, decisions, messages, documents, and cognitive demands than most people can fully process.

If this article feels extensive, that response is part of the point. The difficulty does not indicate a shortage of reading. It reflects information overload.

In early January 2026, I released a video on my YouTube channel exploring a truth repeatedly overlooked in leadership discussions and mainstream commentary: reading has not died; it has evolved.

The video examined how the learning environment has fundamentally changed. This article expands that discussion and explores why reading cannot be confined to one format, object, or historical age.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMOV1b2ADq0

Over the past two decades, our systems, workplaces, classrooms, and methods of communication have undergone an enormous digital transformation.

Think about how quickly the technology changed. Twenty years ago, a USB drive with 512 megabytes of storage felt new and innovative. Today, you can hold a tiny drive containing more than 100 gigabytes of data in the palm of your hand.

Look around.

Billboards now show videos. Smartwatches wrap around our wrists, prompting us to read emails and notifications while we walk. We can even take calls or listen to music through them. Cellphones, tablets, computers, and laptops are everywhere. Even when we travel, we cannot escape screens.

Airplanes have digital entertainment systems built into the backs of seats. Modern cars and commercial vehicles have large dashboard screens for maps, alerts, and system settings. Crews aboard massive ships rely on digital displays to interpret weather, routes, navigation data, and changing conditions at sea.

The way we create, access, and process language has also changed through voice-to-text technology, online lectures, digital audiobooks, and other assistive tools.

THE WORLD DID NOT STOP READING. THE INTERFACE CHANGED.

This digital shift has even changed what students are required to carry.

Heavy backpacks have long placed considerable strain on students’ shoulders and backs throughout the school day. Digital learning has reduced the number of textbooks and binders many students need to carry, but it has not eliminated the physical burden. Students may still transport laptops, tablets, chargers, notebooks, water bottles, and other supplies between home and school.

Workers face a similar problem, carrying laptops, charging equipment, documents, and personal items through commutes, airports, offices, and shared workspaces. The interface became lighter and more compact, but the equipment supporting modern learning and work can still be physically demanding.

This is evidence that the container changed, not that reading disappeared.

When I first began learning computer skills at thirteen years old, I was a little girl seeing the early capabilities of a future world I did not yet know would exist. At that time, I understood that computers were powerful, but I could not have predicted how completely digital systems would eventually reshape learning, working, communicating, and socializing.

Years later, as an adult studying at college and university, both in person and online, I watched that future arrive.

The classroom was no longer a single room, and information no longer came from a single textbook. Learning moved through websites, portals, discussion boards, presentations, digital libraries, recorded lectures, PDFs, emails, and many different file formats.

The scale of education was changing too. The largest class I took had 500 students in a massive auditorium. That crowded physical space stood in sharp contrast to the silent digital infrastructure that was quietly beginning to run everything behind the scenes.

A few years earlier, while I was studying travel and tourism, the industry was moving toward e-tickets. The transition affected travel agencies, which sold directly to customers, as well as tour operators, which assembled and coordinated the travel products those agencies sold. Organizations across the industry had to adapt to new booking systems, evolving customer expectations, and the movement of information from paper-based processes into digital ones.

I remember a teacher giving us blank paper tickets to keep as souvenirs for the future. She told us plainly that the industry would not have them anymore, so we should keep them. I kept mine. Years later, I saw that she had been entirely right.

As part of my studies, I was also working for a tour operator and watching that transition happen from inside the industry. Much of the sales and marketing work was still handled over the phone, while booking requests and important details also arrived through email. It was a highly manual process, and information could easily become scattered between phone conversations, email chains, and individual follow-ups.

In early 2007, I designed a digital intake form that brought the required information into one place, reduced the risk of missed details, made bookings easier to track, and created a more consistent process for handling customer requests.

The form was well received across the organization because it made the booking process clearer, faster, and easier to manage. The people using it understood its value. The resistance came from within my own team. My manager and some of my colleagues were upset that I had taken the initiative to change the process at all, even though the form reduced missed information and helped the work move more effectively.

Looking back, it was one of the earliest examples of a pattern I would encounter repeatedly across industries and sectors throughout my career. I found myself leading cross-functional collaboration, improving the way information moved, redesigning workflows, reducing errors, solving systemic problems, and organizing complex information. That pattern later developed into formal expertise in information management, including serving as an Information Management Subject Matter Expert within government, and continued through complex digital transformation work in financial operations.

Again and again, the wider organization welcomed the results, while resistance came from the managers and teammates closest to the existing process. These were the people who stood to benefit from those improvements the most. At times, the insecurity was so intense that I had to look a manager in the eye and say plainly, "I am not here to take your job. I am here to help you and strengthen the work of the team."

The changes I proposed made our own work clearer, faster, and more reliable. They reduced the time spent chasing missing information, investigating avoidable mistakes, and figuring out who would have to fix them. That meant we could complete our work with less stress, go home, and enjoy our personal lives without carrying unresolved problems with us. In turn, this improved employee morale and the team’s overall performance. At the same time, those improvements helped the organization adapt to changing market conditions, strengthen its overall performance and competitiveness, and protect its reputation.

That broader pattern was already visible in the travel industry. The form was not simply an administrative improvement; it was an early example of how better information systems could help a team work more effectively and help an organization remain responsive when external conditions changed.

Yet that improvement became even more important when the 2008 financial crisis began disrupting the travel industry. As bookings declined, companies closed or merged, and uncertainty spread across the market, improving the way information moved through the business was no longer simply a matter of convenience. The digital structure I had built ahead of time helped manage a labour-intensive process when the industry could no longer afford to lose opportunities through avoidable gaps.

That experience stayed with me because it was never really about travel. It was about information: how it is collected, organized, governed, communicated, interpreted, retrieved, and acted upon. Over the next two decades, I would see the same pattern repeat across industries and sectors.

The technology changed. The systems changed. The industries changed. But the underlying challenge remained remarkably consistent: helping people understand information, collaborate across functions, make decisions, and move work effectively through increasingly complex environments.

This is why I reject the idea that we once lived in an “age of reading” and are now leaving it behind. What would an age of reading even mean? Reading is not a historical phase attached to paper, books, or a particular interface. Human beings have always needed to receive information, interpret it, understand what it means, recognize patterns, and decide what to do next. A hundred years from now, or a thousand years from now, that need will still exist. The vessel may change, but the cognitive act does not disappear.

The form I created was itself an example of this. It did not ask people to read more. It arranged the information so they could understand it faster, notice what mattered, reduce mistakes, communicate more clearly, and act with greater confidence.

That is part of the cognitive work surrounding reading. Reading involves more than decoding isolated words on a page; it also requires people to locate meaning, recognize relationships, and understand how information functions within a system.

WE ARE SURROUNDED BY INFORMATION

Look around any room, bus, classroom, or office. People are staring at screens and reading.

They are processing text messages, emails, PDFs, work updates, digital dashboards, news alerts, captions, instructions, comments, forms, product information, and notifications. Words now move across more surfaces, arrive at greater speed, and compete for attention throughout the entire day.

Much of the public discussion about declining reading habits remains centred on physical books, particularly novels. Yet physical books represent only one part of the modern information environment. People now encounter an enormous volume of written material through work, education, communication, shopping, entertainment, transportation, healthcare, and ordinary decision-making.

Consider something as simple as choosing where to eat. A person may read restaurant reviews, scan a digital menu, compare prices, check opening hours, examine photographs, search for dietary information, and read comments from previous customers before leaving home.

Buying a basic household item can involve even more reading. People move through product descriptions, specifications, customer ratings, return policies, comparison charts, warranties, and dozens of reviews before making a decision.

Written language also surrounds people beyond their screens. Words appear on clothing, bags, hats, shoes, mugs, posters, packaging, and merchandise. A slogan on a T-shirt, a brand name on a jacket, a warning label on a product, or a phrase printed across a tote bag becomes part of the information people absorb while moving through the world.

Walk through any city for ten minutes and notice how much language surrounds you. Street names, business signs, restaurant menus, advertisements, traffic signs, building directories, public transit maps, safety notices, product packaging, and storefront displays all communicate through words. We navigate these environments so automatically that we rarely recognize how much reading takes place every moment we are awake.

Each of these activities requires people to locate information, interpret language, compare competing claims, identify patterns, judge credibility, and decide what to do next.

Work adds another enormous stream of reading. Every industry depends on people interpreting information. Recruiters read résumés and cover letters. Managers read reports, proposals, policies, performance updates, and project plans. Healthcare workers read patient records and test results. Lawyers read contracts and case files. Tradespeople read measurements, safety instructions, building plans, and equipment manuals. People working in transportation, finance, education, retail, manufacturing, government, technology, hospitality, and construction all rely on written information to make decisions and complete their work.

Even applying for a job can involve hours of reading. Applicants move through job descriptions, company websites, application questions, benefit information, employment agreements, interview instructions, and follow-up emails. On the other side, employers read résumés, portfolios, references, assessments, and interview notes before deciding whom to hire.

At the same time, more people are working while carrying the full administrative load of their personal lives. They move between workplace messages, bills, banking information, school communications, medical appointments, government forms, insurance documents, housing matters, transportation updates, family responsibilities, and household decisions. Much of this arrives through text and requires attention after the formal workday has already ended.

The boundary between reading for work and reading for life has almost disappeared.

Information follows people from the office to the commute, into the grocery store, through their homes, and onto the screens beside their beds.

The same applies to hobbies and personal interests. People now have access to an extraordinary range of activities, communities, and learning resources. Someone can learn gardening, photography, dance, coding, cooking, woodworking, languages, fitness, drawing, music, or home repair without entering a formal classroom.

Every interest creates another stream of information to navigate. People read instructions, study techniques, follow demonstrations with captions, compare equipment, join online communities, troubleshoot problems, and evaluate advice from people with different levels of knowledge and experience.

This abundance has expanded what people can learn and do. It has also expanded the amount of information attached to every activity.

Even caring for one’s health can begin to resemble a full-time job.

People are expected to understand food labels, appointment instructions, laboratory results, medication information, insurance forms, exercise guidance, symptoms, sleep data, treatment options, and conflicting health recommendations. They may spend hours searching, reading, comparing, tracking, and deciding which information applies to their own bodies.

A person trying to improve their health may be reading nutrition labels in a grocery store, comparing exercise programs, researching a symptom, interpreting data from a wearable device, reviewing a medical report, and trying to understand whether several pieces of advice can be followed safely at the same time.

The amount of reading involved in simply managing daily life has grown substantially.

There is also a physical reality that traditional commentary often overlooks. People are tired of sitting still.

Many people sit while working, sit while eating, sit while commuting, and sit while waiting. By the end of the day, remaining in one position for another two hours may feel physically unappealing, regardless of how interesting a book might be.

Mobile technology loosened that physical constraint. People can read on a train, access a written work through an audiobook while walking, enlarge text when their eyes are tired, follow captions while watching a video, or move between audio and written formats depending on where they are and what their bodies can manage.

Written language became more portable and adjustable, while people gained greater freedom to move between reading and audio.

The scale of this transformation is global. Public discussions in Western media often focus on a familiar group of English-language platforms, while enormous digital ecosystems operate across other languages, writing systems, cultures, and regions.

People navigate text-driven interfaces through messaging platforms, search engines, payment systems, social networks, online marketplaces, transportation apps, government portals, and digital workplaces. WeChat and Douyin in China, ShareChat in India, and VK in Russia form part of vast digital ecosystems used by hundreds of millions of people. Yet these platforms rarely appear in discussions that use Western book sales as a measure of whether people still read.

Billions of people are moving through these digital systems every day.

Modern information is also processed across several senses and formats at once. People watch videos with subtitles, follow synchronized lyrics while listening to music, read comments while a livestream continues, interpret maps while driving, and move between sound, symbols, images, numbers, and written instructions within the same interface.

These interfaces also behave differently from printed books.

A printed book generally presents a stable body of information. The words remain in place while the reader determines the pace.

A digital interface updates, responds, redirects, interrupts, and frequently requires an immediate decision. A message must be answered. A warning must be understood. A form must be completed. A route must be changed. A link must be judged before it is opened. A workplace notification may affect what someone does next.

The screen responds to us, and we respond to the screen.

Artificial intelligence has added another layer to this environment.

Working with AI still requires substantial reading. Voice instructions and spoken responses are available, but written outputs often contain greater density, detail, and structure. Text allows users to examine an answer closely, compare sections, return to earlier points, identify contradictions, and decide what should be kept, corrected, expanded, or discarded.

A person using AI has to read what the system produces, assess whether the request was understood, recognize errors or missing context, refine the instructions, compare alternatives, and decide whether the response is useful or trustworthy.

The quality of the interaction depends partly on the user’s ability to communicate clearly, read critically, recognize patterns, and evaluate whether the output actually makes sense.

AI therefore increases the importance of interpretation. It can produce language quickly, but the human being still has to determine what that language means, whether it is accurate, and how it should be used.

People now move through a high-velocity cognitive environment filled with written language, spoken information, visual cues, data, symbols, alerts, and competing demands.

The central challenge has become one of volume.

People are expected to read, interpret, filter, compare, and respond to an extraordinary volume of information throughout an ordinary day, with that information often arriving faster and through more channels than earlier generations experienced.

Every opportunity brings another body of information to understand, another decision to make, and another demand on attention.

We are surrounded by information.

We are reading constantly.

The deeper question is whether the human mind has been given enough time, space, and support to process everything it is now expected to carry.

Without effective ways to manage that flow, information can quickly become overwhelming.

Anyone who has experienced corporate “mailbox hell” understands what I mean: hundreds of unread messages, repeated email chains, urgent attachments, meeting invitations, and several people responding to the same issue at once.

We are not living through a shortage of words.

We are living through an excess of information.

The relationship between information, attention, cognition, and modern life deserves a deeper discussion, and I will explore those questions in a future article.

We do not live in a post-literate society. We live in a society saturated with written information.

If we ever do become a truly post-literate society, there will be no books, emails, text messages, signs, maps, contracts, forms, labels, instructions, alerts, safety warnings, written laws, medical records, public notices, or digital text. Schools will no longer teach reading, and governments, hospitals, workplaces, transportation systems, emergency services, and businesses will somehow have to function without written information.

That is not the world we live in.

Enjoy reading,

Alice