Reading & Attention in a Distracted Age
No, reading hasn't disappeared. In fact, unlike in the past, it's happening every two minutes. Reading has just changed shape. From a few hundred pages on the couch, it's shrunk to a few lines on the go. In the age of obesity, reading is now a pitiable anorexic. To queer The gripe further, the chase for brevity in the time of cancel has snuffed wit out of it. And the soul, you ask? Well, it's a pizza boy, gainfully busy delivering instant pleasure.
The fact is: we still encounter words all day - messages, feeds, documents, captions - but the conditions under which we read have shifted so radically that the act itself has been altered. Internet articles are measured in minutes, not words - "three minutes read". So, what is broken isn't literacy, but attention.