A recent study by the Danish School of Media and Journalism offers a finding that should unsettle both the technology industry and cultural policymakers: the problem would no longer be that young people fail to perceive the negative effects of certain digital platforms, but that they perceive those effects well and still cannot break free from them. Based on 600 personal interviews and several surveys among 18- to 35-year-olds, the research describes a particularly explicit sense of confinement, one that coincides with some of the small-scale qualitative studies (focus groups) we have been conducting at Fundación GSR. Participants speak of spending «four or five hours on autopilot», «stuck in a hole», engaging in what they themselves call «doomscrolling»: endlessly moving through algorithmically governed content on platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, and 73% believe they spend too much time on their mobile phones. Above all, many of them express the feeling that they would actually prefer to be doing something else.

The report’s wording is revealing. Young people say they would like to spend more time «in real life», with other people, engaging in creative activities, reading books, exercising, or simply being out in nature. Yet they feel that platforms «absorb» their time and attention in ways that some even describe as «shameful» or «frightening». For years, the expansion of these platforms has been interpreted as a natural consequence of the cultural preferences of younger generations. This study suggests something rather different: we are not necessarily dealing with spontaneous demand, but with an ecosystem designed to maximise behavioural capture and retention. This distinction matters. If users themselves express cultural ideals that are incompatible with their actual digital habits, then perhaps we should stop thinking about the problem solely in terms of «individual choice». The usual discourse around self-discipline, willpower or «healthy time management» becomes insufficient when confronted with systems deliberately engineered to exploit automatic psychological mechanisms. 

This has direct consequences for the world of books and reading. The decline in time devoted to reading is often framed as a simple competition between different forms of leisure, but platforms such as TikTok and Instagram are not merely competing for time; they are competing for cognitive structures themselves and helping to shape new neural pathways. The central question is not only how much time remains available for reading, but what kind of attention remains available after hours of fragmented, accelerated and algorithmically optimised stimulation. For a long time, I have belonged to a group of people insisting on the importance of «higher level reading”, or, as I prefer to put it, «ambitious reading». The Danish study offers something valuable because it shows that many young people have not necessarily abandoned that ideal. At the very least, they still retain a sense of how life ought to be, an imagination that associates reading, creativity and face-to-face conversation with desirable forms of existence. What is striking is the widening gap between their cultural aspirations and their everyday practices.

Is it not possible to identify here a major opportunity for those of us who work in reading promotion?  This fracture should force us to reconsider some overly simplistic assumptions about contemporary cultural behaviour. It is becoming increasingly clear that the claim that younger generations «simply no longer want to read» is inaccurate. An important part of the problem may instead be that the dominant digital ecosystem makes it progressively harder to sustain the mental and temporal conditions necessary for reading. The attention economy does not merely redistribute time; it also reshapes perceptual habits, cognitive rhythms and emotional expectations. In this context, reading policies may require a significant shift in focus. Promoting literacy is no longer enough if, at the same time, there is no critical discussion about the technological infrastructure competing for every available second of concentration. Encouraging reading begins to look less like a cultural promotion campaign and more like a matter of attentional ecology.

For years, the dominance of platforms appeared to rest upon a form of implicit cultural consent. That report suggests a more ambiguous reality: many young people are not celebrating this model of digital consumption; they are expressing exhaustion, frustration and even a desire to escape from it. Perhaps that is why the most hopeful aspect of the study is precisely this unease, and possibly therein lies an opportunity, because meaningful cultural transformations often begin when a society stops confusing adaptation with genuine desire.