Do People Even Read Anymore?
A look into how literacy has changed
Audrey notsch
Based on a study done by The Conversation in 2025, about 66% of Gen Z identify themselves as readers. The younger part of this generation reads less, and the older reads more. I find this statistic interesting based on the literacy “scare” that I have been seeing on my side of the internet—this concept that nobody reads anymore. Clearly, people do read; while this statistic could be higher, a little more than half of Gen Z does read. So, why is this rhetoric going around that young people don’t read anymore? I think this issue that Gen Z is seemingly having with literacy is not with a lack of reading itself, but with the level of reading comprehension.
Developments in technology have caused digitized versions of literature to become extremely popular. Podcasts and e-readers have risen in popularity as alternatives to carrying around physical books. While there is debate about whether podcasts actually “count” as reading, I am not very interested in the validity of consuming literature—as long as you’re digesting a story in one way or another, I could care less how it’s done. My point here is that people are reading more than we may realize, because it’s being done digitally, and this may be why it appears that the younger generations “aren’t reading.”
There is, however, a concrete difference between reading physically and reading digitally. As we all know, phones are one of the most distracting things on Earth. I will literally be on my phone for a specific reason, and get distracted by TikTok or something else that’s relatively stupid. Reading on a device breaks your concentration—it’s so easy to just tap on a notification you received, and forget all about what you were meant to be reading. I would argue that digitally reading affects reading comprehension greatly, because the attention span is shortened, and easily broken concentration doesn’t allow the reader to fully digest what it is they’re even reading.
This issue with reading comprehension is larger than just reading on your phone—the Trump administration has greatly affected reading, especially amongst younger Gen Z. For example, the Department of Defense banned 596 books in military schools (schools that are for the children of active-duty military personnel) as of July 2025, stating that the books promoted “woke” ideologies about gender, sexuality, and race. Some of these titles include, “To Kill A Mockingbird” by Harper Lee, “The Climate Book” by Greta Thunberg, and several volumes of “Heartstopper” by Alice Oseman. These books don’t necessarily force woke ideologies, but provide different perspectives.
The reason that this administration is greatly affecting younger readers is because they are actively removing books that build higher reading comprehension from schools. For some kids, the only exposure they get to literature is at school, so taking away the diversity of choices causes a limited depth of reading comprehension. Relating to limiting resources and recent decisions made by this administration, this decline in comprehension can also be connected to the defunding of PBS.
PBS officially dissolved on Jan. 5 of this year. While it still technically “exists,” the broadcasting of the PBS channel solely relies on viewers support, which means that some areas have PBS and others do not. PBS was a fantastic resource for children in low income areas; you didn’t need to pay for cable to watch it, and a large portion of the shows were very educational. Because schools in low-income areas don’t always produce the best levels of education due to underfunding or generally being ignored because they aren’t predominantly white areas, having a resource such as PBS allowed kids to be exposed to higher education levels on a somewhat consistent basis. Without this resource being as readily accessible as it once was, comprehension among the younger part of Gen Z is greatly affected.
Brady Dolan, a 20-year-old political science major here at UMN, shared his perspective on comprehension amongst younger Gen Zers. “Most media channels are completely saturated with shortform content, and the age of exposure becomes younger and younger,” Dolan said. “The period of young kids’ lives where they still have their own imagination is cordoned off because there’s not really any functional or social need to develop your own opinions.”
What Dolan is iterating here holds some real truth—the kids of today are being exposed to things that are both brain-numbing and addicting. In a world where PBS wasn’t dissolved, I’m sure a large population of kids would still rather be playing on their iPads than watching “Word Girl” or “Sesame Street.” Systemically, the rise in technology has discouraged the growth in imagination and comprehension, at the same time as elementary and middle schools base their education more than ever on obtaining certain sets of answers rather than promoting creative thinking.
The older part of Gen Z’s reading comprehension has also been affected in the past few years. While statistics show that we are reading, I think that the internet and AI has greatly affected how we interact with literature. I am an English major, so sometimes I live in my own bubble of sunshine and rainbows where everyone reads and no one uses AI! I am unfortunately hit with a reality check when my peers in class talk about “asking chat” to summarize a reading, and I have to internally face-palm. Dolan shared his perspective (as a non-English major) on college-aged students and their relationship to reading and literary comprehension.
“With students now, I genuinely think most people have a kind of decision paralysis,” Dolan said. “Generative search engines are so normalized and used as a creative safety net when reading or researching that people don’t really seek their own opinion, just the ‘correct’ answer. So college students are probably reading excerpts and pieces of a text rather than whole chapters.”
I mean, whenever you Google anything now, you’re immediately greeted with the extremely summarized AI overview. You don’t really have to dig around and thoroughly read articles anymore to get the information you want, it’s kind of handed to us on a silver platter. Even my beloved research database, JSTOR, now has the option for AI overviews on articles. Dolan’s perspective on the college-aged literacy comprehension makes light of why it seems like no one is reading anymore—it feels like we have come to develop this habit of just reading to read, skimming to find what we need and forgoing the rest, rather than reading to understand or to critically think about what it is we’re consuming and why.
I don’t necessarily think that there is a general lack of literacy, I think that the way in which we have grown to interact with literature has changed. There isn’t one person in particular we should place blame onto—these teachers are just following their guidelines, these kids have no control over how they’re being conditioned, and the emphasis on technology has led to the habit of skimming. I do think, however, that it is important to recognize these problems with comprehension that are happening. Based on what the administration seems to be doing in regards to literacy, it feels more important now than ever to develop and work on our literary comprehension. Clearly there is some importance to it, if there’s direct opposition and efforts to diminish our comprehension from the people in power.