By Mica Dunleavy, Staff Writer
A few weeks ago, I saw Born With Teeth on the West End. Given the play’s middling reviews and single-room setting, I was unexpectedly riveted for its full 90-minute runtime. A few lines, just into the first part, struck me strongly enough that I paid for a copy of the script on the way out of the theatre, and then for a ticket to its closing show on the train home. In the winter of 1591, a mostly imagined Shakespeare complains to a fictitiously raunchy Marlowe that he ‘just wants to write’. Marlowe, entrenched in sixteenth-century political intrigue and spying, snaps his response: ‘no one gets to just write […] We give ourselves away in every line.’
As a current screenwriting student, whose most repressed feelings have been accidentally dredged up and aired in too many 10am workshops to count, I know this to be true. But I can’t help remembering the ridicule this concept was met with in English lessons throughout school; the harassment Dr Ally Louks faced for writing about olfactory implications in literature (of which there are evidently enough for a PhD); the endlessly recirculated iFunny screenshots about how the curtains are actually just blue. The internet, and seemingly the world at large, has lost any interest it may once have had in understanding the deeper implications behind the media it consumes. And maybe that’s fine – if the author didn’t intend for the curtains’ colour to mean anything, what’s the use in analysing it? Not everyone was a reserved nerd with a complex relationship with their English teacher – but looking at the state of the world, it seems we’re dismissing the curtains too quickly.
A July 2025 report from the Parliament’s Communications and Digital Committee states that a ‘failure to prioritise media literacy in the UK presents a risk to social cohesion and democracy’. This statement might seem outlandish, merely intended to cause panic, were we not watching it happen in real time. Anyone who has spent more than five minutes reading news reports from the US since November of last year has watched the consequences of declining media literacy and rising anti-intellectualism play out before their eyes: ‘common-sense politics’ that hinges on the idea that immigrants are ‘eating the cats’ doesn’t win elections because of a subtext-conscious population. As Parliament’s committee highlighted, the UK isn’t safe from the dangers of a lack of media literacy either; Reform UK’s clear intentions to follow in America’s footsteps have all the same hallmarks of anti-intellectualism, with their (19-year-old) Warwickshire Council leader calling universities ‘communist conveyor belt[s]’. Any historian can tell you where politics based on dismissal of intellectual pursuit gets you, but it’s harder to define exactly what that means for us here and now.
TikTok is undeniably frying the average attention span to under a minute (down from two and a half in 2004 according to Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at UC Irvine) and artificial intelligence is on the rise – AI images and videos, AI articles, AI posts flooded with AI comments – how do we come back from this? If none of us can pay attention to anything for long enough to fact check if something is real, let alone if it’s true, must we resign ourselves to a future of an eternally misinformed public, with all the political carnage that entails? The Parliamentary committee’s recommendations included ‘embed[ding] media literacy across the national curriculum’, but it seems unlikely that changing school curricula could be capable of saving us when any new and improved English assignments will be completed by ChatGPT anyway.
I don’t mean to make the situation sound utterly unsalvageable, though.
The situation isn’t utterly unsalvageable, though. The tools of our salvation are in our hands – all we have to do is use them. Dua Lipa runs a book club (Service95), one frequently credited as being ‘one of the few [celebrity book clubs] … who [people] feel genuinely reads her recommendations’, according to one Reddit user. In 2025, the number of people listening to podcasts hit 584.1 million worldwide. Over half of UK adults use social media to access the news. People have – arguably innately – a desire to learn and to understand. But the people providing them with that ability regularly abuse their power: millions of those podcast listeners are being fed dangerous rhetoric by Andrew Tate or listening to fearmongering and far-right ideology under the guise of “wellness”. The social media feeds where people source their news are often filled with fake stories and sensationalised headlines, built to appease an algorithm driven indiscriminately by strong emotions, only seeking further scrolls rather than education or thought.
Very few of us can claim to be a paragon of digital and media literacy. I, too, have a potentially problematic relationship with TikTok; I trawl through comments to find explanations for things I don’t understand rather than leaving the app to use an actual browser more than I’d like to admit. The constant presence of Google’s AI summary has unfortunately made me lazy, a fact I mostly only realise when it’s blatantly wrong. I’m not suggesting we bury our phones and have preteen newsboys deliver papers by hand each morning, but a collective and critical assessment of the state of our media consumption wouldn’t go amiss. Culture is always changing; the Overton window will shift, political terms will end, and elections will be won and lost. But there is a point of no return – and we, the people of these statistics and voting numbers and sweeping statements – are the ones responsible for ensuring that final line isn’t crossed.
It isn’t my aim to leave you with the lingering sense of existential dread most of us now associate with The News at large, but with a reminder of the meaning of individual action. Which is to say – read a book today. Read the news. Consider that maybe, whether the author intended it or not, it might actually mean something that the curtains are blue.