Is Short-form Content Killing our Love for Books? 📚 vs 📱
I keep thinking about this because of a book called SONDER - Lives Beyond The Silence.
Sonder means realizing every stranger has a life as vivid as yours.
But how do you notice a stranger's life when you're scrolling past 100 faces per minute?
Team YES says: TikTok trained our brain to hate silence. We can't sit with one story for 200 pages anymore.
Team NO says: Short-form is not the enemy.
My take: Short-form didn't kill attention. It killed tolerance for boring books.
If a story feels REAL, we will stay. If it doesn't, we scroll.
What do you think 🤔. Has Reels/TikTok ruined your reading or made you discover MORE books?
Let's debate in comments 👇
As the author of SONDER: Lives Beyond The Silence, I think it’s a bit more complicated than saying short-form content has ruined our attention spans.
For me, the bigger question is what constant scrolling has done to our capacity to be present. We are exposed to hundreds of faces, stories and lives every day, but we rarely have enough time to sit with any of them. We see someone’s heartbreak for 15 seconds, feel something, scroll, and five seconds later we’re watching someone bake a cake.
That actually connects quite deeply to what SONDER is about. The idea behind the book is that every stranger you pass is living a life as complex, painful, beautiful and real as your own. But sonder requires you to pause long enough to imagine someone else as a person rather than just background noise.
So I don’t think TikTok or Reels necessarily killed our ability to care. I think they’ve made it incredibly easy to move on before we’ve had the chance to care deeply.
And I don’t think the answer is simply “read more books” either. We’ve become so accustomed to consuming stories, people and even emotions in fragments that sitting with something deeply can feel uncomfortable.
But when a story feels real, something changes. You recognise yourself in it, or you recognise someone else, and suddenly you stop scrolling. You stay.
So maybe short-form content hasn’t killed our love for books. Maybe it has simply made our attention more contested. And the stories that keep us are the ones that give us a reason to stay.