Bilingual

They Stole Your Attention
13 hours ago
- The average human attention span on a screen has dropped from ~150 seconds in 2004 to 47 seconds by 2016, and remained at 47 seconds as of 2025.
- After a screen switch or interruption, it takes an average of 25 minutes and 26 seconds to fully re-immerse in the original task.
- Microsoft 365 telemetry from 2025 shows that the most interrupted workers face an interruption every 2 minutes during core hours, totaling 275 interruptions per day.
- Meta's ad revenue per user in the US and Canada reached $57.03 worldwide in 2025, an all-time high, highlighting the monetization of attention.
- The article recommends keeping your phone in another room, removing feeds from work machines, and maintaining blocks of hours that no notifications can interrupt.
Text is king
2 days ago
- Book sales in 2025 were higher than in 2019, and independent bookstores are thriving, with 422 new shops opening last year.
- Reading time declines are modest, with the largest dip occurring between 2003 and 2011, likely due to broadband internet rather than smartphones.
- Digital distraction may be plateauing, as social media usage has started to decline and people seek to reduce screen time.
- Text remains irreplaceable for serious intellectual work, as writing preserves and refines thoughts better than other media.
- Books are central to long-lived movements and ideas, as seen in historical examples like 'Common Sense' and 'Silent Spring'.
- Modern culture is more recorded than ever, with billions of photos and videos created daily, but text retains unique cognitive benefits.
- Despite digital distractions, many people still choose to read books, suggesting a persistent human desire for deep, reflective pleasure.
- The author is optimistic about text's future, noting the resilience of reading across historical technological shifts.
The Age of Reading Is Over
22 days ago
- Universal literacy was once believed inevitable, but reading is declining rapidly, suggesting the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history.
- Americans read much less than before, with fewer than half reading any book in 2022, and reading for pleasure dropping significantly; gambling has become more common.
- Reading materials have become simpler, with shorter sentences in bestsellers, and popular books now include young-adult fiction, while classic literature declines.
- News consumption has shifted from reading to watching or listening online, with less than 10% of 20-somethings reading newspapers daily, exacerbating a literacy crisis.
- Despite reading more words through digital fragments like emails and social media, sustained attention to longer works is waning, leading to postliteracy and declining comprehension skills.
- Cognitive abilities are affected, with studies showing reduced reading stamina, lower test scores, and declining IQ trends, though some spatial reasoning may improve.
- The rise of video content, social media, and AI threatens deep thinking, with politicians like Donald Trump exemplifying postliterate communication styles that exploit distracted audiences.
- Reading is becoming a niche hobby, with economic and cultural power shifting to influencers and video creators, marginalizing traditional readers and literary figures.
- Efforts to resist decline include school bans on cellphones and a return to print books, but the broader trend suggests a shift toward a postliterate society with horizontal cultural transmission.
- The legacy of written knowledge is preserved digitally, but apathy and declining inclination to read pose risks to the ability to engage with rich, complex texts and think independently.

digital distraction

They Stole Your Attention

Text is king

The Age of Reading Is Over