Leaving the Gutenberg Galaxy

The issue is not that people can no longer read. The issue is that they no longer do — and that both amount to the same result. A civilisation that unlearns reading loses more than a skill. It loses the architecture of thought that this skill produced.

I. What Marshall McLuhan Really Said

In 1962, Marshall McLuhan published "The Gutenberg Galaxy" — a book that is usually misquoted. McLuhan did not say the book is dying. He said something more precise and more radical: the printing press produced a specific kind of thinking. Sequential. Causal. Linear. Abstract. Patient. And this kind of thinking is not natural — it is the product of a technology that has trained the brain for centuries.

Leaving the Gutenberg Galaxy does not mean we read less. It means we think differently. Or more precisely: that we are increasingly less capable of thinking the way reading long texts requires — and enables.

McLuhan formulated this as an observation, not a lament. We formulate it as a finding — with the data that has since become available.

II. The Numbers

The 2022 PISA study recorded the lowest scores since measurements began in 2000. In Germany, reading competence among 15-year-olds fell by 18 points compared to 2018 — the OECD average fell by 11 points. The decline in Germany was more than one and a half times the international average. A quarter of 15-year-olds fail to reach the minimum standard: these students are barely able to grasp the main point of a medium-length text.

The IGLU study — which measures reading competence among fourth-graders — shows the same trend over twenty years: since 2001, reading competence in Germany has fallen by 15 points. Germany is in the group of countries with the strongest declines. In Singapore, reading competence rose by 59 points over the same period.

But the numbers do not capture what is essential. They measure competence — the ability to read. What they do not measure is habit — the will and the practice. And here the situation is even more troubling: people who can read are reading less and less, and shorter and shorter texts. Not from inability, but from disuse.

III. What the Brain Does

The brain is not an organ with fixed capacities. It is plastic — it changes through what it does. Whoever regularly reads long texts trains a specific kind of attention: focused, patient, willing to follow an argument over pages without losing the thread. Whoever stops doing this loses that capacity — not because the brain deteriorates, but because it adjusts to other patterns.

The American cognitive scientist Maryanne Wolf has described this process: the reading brain is a trained brain. It has learned to construct an inner world through letters, to develop empathy for foreign experiences, to think through complex connections. This training takes years. It dissolves in months — when one stops.

What takes its place? Short impulses. Images. Videos. Summaries. Scrolling through content optimised for seconds of attention. The brain quickly learns to prefer this format — because it requires less effort. And it unlearns tolerating the other.

Research now documents this mechanism precisely. An international meta-study published in the journal World Psychiatry shows that internet use fundamentally inclines the mind away from sustained focus — attention drifts from stimulus to stimulus. And the effect carries over: participants who had spent 15 minutes browsing online shopping pages were subsequently less able to concentrate than a comparison group that had read a magazine. The loss of concentration persists even after the device is put down.

There is also the addiction mechanism. A University of Chicago study tracked 205 participants across 7,827 recorded daily impulses: the desire for media consumption was harder to resist than the desire for alcohol or nicotine. And the more often one had resisted a desire during the course of a day, the less successfully one resisted the next. Willpower depletes — social media wins not through strength but through endurance. It waits until resistance is exhausted.

The neurobiological mechanism behind this: the algorithms of social media deliberately stimulate the brain’s dopaminergic reward system. Every like, every new message, every unexpected piece of content triggers a small dopamine release — the same mechanism used by slot machines. The brain learns to seek this stimulus. And it learns to experience everything else — the quiet page, the long text, the slow argument — as withdrawal. The Oxford Dictionary gave this diagnosis a name in 2024: Brain Rot — word of the year.

The point at which one notices that something has been lost is the moment one tries to read a long text — and gives up in frustration after three paragraphs. Not because the text is poor. But because the ability to follow it has faded.

IV. What Does Not Get Lost

It is important to be precise. Not all capacities are lost. The brain that reads less and less is not worse — it is different. It is faster in processing visual stimuli. It is better at filtering information in parallel. It has other strengths.

What is lost is specific: the capacity for deep reading. That is the ability to follow a long, complex argument. To genuinely understand a counter-position, not merely reject it. To unfold a metaphor. To recognise a historical parallel. To sharpen one's own thought through writing.

These capacities are not decorative. They are the foundation of what democracy presupposes: a citizenry capable of evaluating complex arguments, distinguishing demagoguery from analysis, weighing long-term consequences against short-term gains.

V. The Media Problem

The media are not the cause of this problem. But they have adapted to it perfectly — and thereby amplify it.

The format that dominates today is optimised for minutes of attention. The morning briefing. The newsletter. The podcast. The summary. All of this has its place — but it has displaced rather than supplemented long analysis. Whoever reads five newsletters and listens to ten podcasts daily has the feeling of being informed. They usually are not — they are well supplied with positions, but poorly equipped with arguments.

Assertion journalism — the thesis comes first, the evidence is sought afterwards — is the media format of the post-reading society. It serves a readership that no longer has the patience to follow an analysis that begins open-endedly and arrives slowly at a conclusion. It delivers the conclusion first — and then the illustrations.

This is not a reproach to the producers. It is a description of the interaction: the medium shapes the expectation. The expectation shapes the medium. And both shape the brain.

VI. The Bräsig Connection

There is a connection that is rarely made: between the decline of reading competence and what we called in an earlier essay Bräsigkeit — the self-satisfied torpor of thought, the refusal to move even when one knows one should.

Bräsigkeit and the loss of reading are not coincidentally simultaneous. They reinforce each other. Whoever no longer reads loses the capacity for the uncomfortable argument — the argument that compels one to revise a position. Whoever is no longer accustomed to engaging with a foreign perspective over pages becomes more susceptible to confirmation mechanisms: they read what they already think. Hear what they already hear. Click what they already like.

The result is a society that disposes of immense quantities of information and becomes ever worse at processing it. More data, less judgement. More opinions, less analysis. More reaction, less reflection.

VII. What Remains

The printing press did not only produce books. It produced a civilisation — with its strengths and its pathologies. The digital revolution is also producing a civilisation. It is still young. Its strengths and its pathologies are not yet fully visible.

What is visible: something is being lost that does not return of its own accord. The capacity for deep reading must be trained — from childhood, continuously, against the current of impulses pulling in the other direction. It does not return when one stops practising it. And it is not a private matter.

A democracy whose citizens are increasingly less able to follow long arguments is a democracy that becomes increasingly susceptible to short arguments — to the slogan, the simplification, the enemy who explains everything. This is not a prognosis. It is the description of an already visible pattern.

Wilhelm von Humboldt wrote: “Man is only man through language.” He meant this in both directions. Language makes the human. And the loss of language — complex, written, patient language — does something to the human. What exactly, we are in the process of learning.