Madison Vale

What would it take to capture your attention? A jarring fact? A whole synopsis of the article? A cute story? If that were to draw you in, what would it take for you to stick around until the end? It seems not much will keep you here for the whole post, which says a lot about our attention span. We may be glued to our phones but are never stuck in one place for a long time. You might read the beginning of this, and then feel compelled to open Instagram purely out of habit of rotating through apps and activities to keep yourself entertained.  

Even Johann Hari found himself in this position. While he filled his time with meaningful activities such as reading mountains of books during his technology detox, by the time he returned to reality, his unpleasant habits were returning. Maybe not at the level they were before, but enough to show that even the most aware people can fall into these habits. 

With the rise of our screentime comes “the collapse of sustained reading” as Hari would put it. Reading a whole book without distraction was once a simple task, one that didn’t require a jarring fact or an abstract at the beginning to keep your drawn in. “Some 57 percent of Americans now do not read a single book in a typical year. This has escalated to the point that by 2017, the average American spent seventeen minutes a day reading books and 5.4 hours on their phone.” (Hari) 

When it seems like the constant flow of information on our devices is calling our name, how we can keep ourselves from losing the focus battle to our phones over the written media in front of us is becoming newest question and challenge for the average American. What would it take for us to pick up a book again?