How the Reading Landscape is Changing
Our Creative Director, Debbie Hicks MBE, talks about how reading is being redefined in 2024.
Recent research from BookTrust and the National Literacy Trust shows a significant drop in children’s reading engagement and enjoyment as they progress through school. Children may be reading less but are they also reading differently? Is it that conventional definitions of reading are misaligned with current practice? As new technologies and digital media reshape how we consume and interact with narrative and information, is the definition of “reading” being redefined for younger generations?
We hear a lot about the dangers of screen time but in a fast moving, digital world, reading can come in many forms. Screens can be a barrier but they also provide a valuable access point to content as demonstrated by last year’s Summer Reading Challenge, which saw 650,000 children’s e-books and audiobooks borrowed from libraries over the summer holidays.
Way back in 2009, The Reading Agency worked with Channel 4 to explore this shifting landscape. Research outcomes from the collaboration indicated that “the 21st Century reading landscape is no longer confined to books and written text but features new communities of readers and writers whose relationship with narrative is defined by different rules of engagement.”1
Fifteen years on, this shift has accelerated as reading realigns itself with new technologies such as artificial intelligence and augmented and virtual reality. The result is a new generation of readers for whom narrative is non-linear and where the lines between creator and consumer are blurred.
Nowhere is this truer than in the realm of video games. Gaming is an important part of contemporary cultural life providing a key source of entertainment and learning, escapism and community. Story and narrative sit at the heart of this highly creative form of visual storytelling; co-created by gamers as they make decisions affecting character, plot and place development. Finding ways to channel this creative power as part of the reading agenda could be a significant opportunity for all of us committed to building a nation of young readers.
And it’s not just children and young people who can benefit. Video games can also be an effective tool for motivating and supporting adults who struggle with reading, engaging them through real-life contexts, building confidence in understanding instruction, dialogue, and in-game text, and delivering the benefits of creating, sharing and consuming narrative.
Reading is no longer a solitary, linear activity confined to print. Readers have always been creative co-creators, shaping their own version of plot and character influenced by personal experience and imagination. That’s why film adaptations of books so often disappoint because they represent someone else’s vision, they are not the world as the reader imagined it. New technologies have taken interactive, collaborative, and dynamic approaches to narrative creation and consumption to a new level, opening up access for those who find print daunting and even further blurring the boundaries between producer and consumer.
Accessibility, relevance, choice and collaboration are all influencers of meaningful engagement in content regardless of medium. Video games have all these characteristics in spades. Leveraging this new immersive form of story making and story sharing could be a key tool in building reading engagement and skill for less confident, lapsed and reluctant readers.
At the Reading Agency we believe in the proven power of reading to change lives. We also believe that books are vital to the reading experience and here to stay. But we also think that technology provides the opportunity to rethink and complement how we cultivate and support reading in 2024.
By embracing digital development, and evolving reading habits, we can unlock new creative possibilities and inspire more people to read, write, and engage with stories and information. We’re in exciting times as the future of reading unfolds before us. Ask a child if they enjoy reading for pleasure and they may say no. Ask them if they enjoy gaming and they are likely to say yes. Bridging the two can offer new possibilities.
- The Reading Agency (2010) ,Gaming for reading: A feasibility study on the use of video games to engage adults with low literacy in reading for pleasure ↩︎
