Is short-form content killing our attention span for books?📕 vs📱
Yes but for endurance, not for sales:
- Attention: 150s → 43s in 20 years. We are training our brain for swipes, not chapters. Eye-tracking shows TikTok right before reading results to more scattered eye movements, less focus.
- Reading habit: Deep reading down 39%, we now see 5,000 pieces of content a day vs 1,400 in 2012.
- The brain cost: Heavy short-form viewers show reduced frontal cortex activity, lower self-control (r=-.41) and more anxiety in studies of 71 papers / 98k people.
- The paradox: #BookTok made books trend again. 2021 was a record print sales year because of TikTok. So short-form kills how_we read (can't finish 400 pages) but boosts what we buy.
It's not illiteracy, it's bi-literacy crisis. We can skim 5,000 posts but struggle to sit with one book.
Do you think this is accurate??
Do you still enjoy reading or lost patience for long reads?
Physical books or e-books??
Drop your comments below 👇
@thebookpolitics Well i think there’s some truth to this. After scrolling for a while, most people find it harder to settle into reading anything at all. Not because we enjoy reading less, but because we are now used to constant stimulation daily.
I don’t think short form content is killing reading, though. If anything, BookTok has actually helped people discover books. Maybe i will say we’re just getting better at consuming quickly and worse at slowing down.
And I’ll always prefer physical books. 📕
@thebookpolitics Yup exactly. It makes you slow down and really be present with whatever you’re reading.