We are seeing more of each other’s lives than ever. But are we paying attention? The way we consume information in the UK is changing rapidly, and so is the way we encounter people’s stories and experiences. It has never been more accessible to write and have people read your opinion. We have also never been so bombarded with differing, polarising content: you open Instagram Reels, and within ten minutes you have seen a recipe for banana bread, the devastating floods in Nepal, an influencer promoting a trivial product, and devastation in Gaza. You often don’t have enough time to understand all that you have just witnessed.
This stream of information is exhausting. This can create a paradox: many people feel anxious about national and global issues while becoming desensitised by repeated exposure to fragments of shocking imagery and suffering. Narrowing algorithms can trap us in an insular bubble of our own worldview, discouraging curiosity about people whose lives differ from our own. This made me think of what Elif Shafak, the British-Turkish novelist, said recently about the impact of reading: “literature is the antidote to apathy…it diminishes this duality between them and us”.
The first reading revolution of 18th-century Britain meant many more people could encounter lives and experiences beyond their immediate social environment. An explosion in literacy rates caused a great transfer of knowledge from elites to ordinary people. By the 19 th century, over 1,000 circulating libraries had been spread across England. Jonathan Rose wrote about how miners and mill workers built their own libraries and formed societies to study Shakespeare and even Plato, many describing reading as a form of inner liberation. Social injustices were now entering public consciousness through the journey of a fictional
story. Authors like Charles Dickens centred the lives of the poor and marginalised in their fiction; Dickens used stories like Oliver Twist to expose readers to the workhouses, child exploitation, and London’s slums. Oliver Twist critiqued the Poor Law system and evoked empathy across class lines.
However, even sympathetic representations of disadvantage have historically been produced by people with the greatest access to publishing, cultural and economic capital. While authors like William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley have had lasting cultural and political impacts, the British literary canon has long been disproportionately composed of the white middle and upper classes. The working class were telling their own stories, yet the same paternalistic institutions that celebrated authors like Dickens for telling stories on their behalf marginalised their voices. Elites had a stronghold on deciding which stories narrated national identity, separating which stories belonged to the story of Britain and who was excluded.
The British literary canon is increasingly giving way to a more open, dynamic landscape with greater diversity of perspectives. Contemporary authors like Bernardine Evaristo, Kazuo Ishiguro and Zadie Smith have shifted the centre of British literature, embedding stories of intersectional identities and modern multiculturalism in the UK. This matters because what we consider part of the canon reflects not only which stories we value, but also whose experiences we see as representative of Britishness. The expanding canon is a beautiful, ongoing conversation between Britain’s past and present, about national identity, power and the human condition, for us to use and carry into the unknowable future. Modern Britain is pluralistic and ever-changing, so these intersectional stories are not “peripheral”; they are part of the mosaic.
We are also witnessing a democratisation of storytelling through online spaces. The barriers to distributing a story have collapsed, as it no longer takes a publisher, a newspaper editor, or high cultural capital to make a story visible. Social media plays a vital role in creating spaces for counter publics to form, where members of marginalised groups can find solidarity and challenge mainstream narratives. In this fertile ground, mobilisation can grow beyond immediate communities and is not barred by geographical boundaries.
Everyone’s Invited is a powerful example of this. In 2020, Soma Sara began sharing her own experiences of rape culture during her school and university years on social media. An outpouring across social media in Britain followed, as other young people shared their own experiences. These individual stories collectively challenged the silence in the public conversation surrounding rape culture in British educational institutions. What began with one woman sharing her story became a space for thousands of others to find solidarity and challenge the institutions around them.
Substack also complicates the idea that social media is purely superficial. It shows how short- and long-form content are not antithetical: a bulletin post can inspire hours of research and long-form writing. Mediums like Substack could help encourage wider reading and writing. The more people, especially young people, are encouraged to share their own stories, the more others can see their experiences reflected in literature and feel inspired to join the literary community.
But what does this extraordinary diversity of stories in the UK mean if we encounter them only in brief fragments, if at all, rather than taking the time to engage with them? In 2026, a story’s potential reach is unprecedented, yet its capacity to leave a lasting impression can feel impossible amid the stream of 24/7 media and constant distraction. This makes the decline in reading particularly concerning. The Reading Agency reported in 2024 that half of UK adults don’t regularly read, and almost one in four young people (aged 16-24) say they’ve never been readers.
Reading slows us down and creates space to reconnect with one another. Unlike the fragmented attention digital media often demands, reading encourages sustained focus and immerses us in a different lived experience. Neuroscience suggests that when we read fiction, our brains engage some of the same neural networks involved in processing real-life experiences. Research also shows that reading fiction can improve social cognition, helping us better understand others’ perspectives. This is why the decline in reading matters beyond literacy itself. We risk losing opportunities to practise sustained attention and engage deeply with experiences different from our own. In Britain, we have never had access to such diversity in stories examining the British experience and identity, yet we risk spending less time truly understanding them.
So, we need a reading renaissance in Britain for 2027. Not out of nostalgia for a literary past, but to embrace the extraordinary ecosystem of written works and digital tools available to us today. To find solidarity in our complex individual experiences. To nurture our curiosity and wonder about the world and one another, as these are vital muscles that need exercising. This is especially important now, when it can be easier to dismiss those we see as different from ourselves than to try to understand them.
As our national identity continues to evolve, the stories we choose to uplift help shape our understanding of who we are. The richness of modern Britain comes from its multiplicity of experiences and identities, and we should not be apathetic towards them, but rather excited to learn. In an increasingly AI-saturated world, where algorithms can reinforce our existing worldviews, reading gives us the chance to keep exercising our critical thinking and, with it, our tolerance for complexity, disagreement, and difference.
Written by Caitlin Cheyne