The digital world isn’t just reshaping how we tell stories, it’s changing the very nature of the stories we tell - and not in a good way, our Writer at Large Neil Mackay argues

YOU may have missed a startling comment from one of Britain’s greatest living novelists, Jeanette Winterson. In the age of chaos, mere culture is easily swept aside in our news cycles, after all.

Winterson, who is also a literature professor, was responding to concerns that we’re entering ‘the post-literate age’.

She suggested the era of “mass literacy” in which we live may be just a “blip in time”. It’s only over the last two centuries that reading and writing spread to the masses. In the screen era, that may fade into history.

Story-telling, Winterson hopes, will survive, but “whether reading continues, I doubt it”. She added: “What I care about most is the transmission of culture. It’s going to break my heart when reading goes. But as long as we still have a lively culture we might get through. If we just become screen-fed zombies, we won’t.”

The facts appear to support Winterson’s dystopian vision of the future. Only one third of young people aged eight-to-18 like to read. Around a third of British adults say they once read but no longer do. And reading for pleasure has fallen by roughly 40% in the last two decades.

Only one third of young people aged eight-to-18 like to read (Image: PA)

I fear, however, that Winterson is only scratching the surface of the problem. The cultural shift that’s upon us won’t just potentially kill reading, it will fundamentally change the nature of the story and how we tell stories.

Winterson says there’s a growing trend of writers who no longer read. How can the story survive this change?

With the loss of the story would come the loss of so much of what it means to be human: empathy, contemplation, learning.

We need to take a very long view of history to understand........

© Herald Scotland