there was a time when i would sit down and read reels of pages of books for hours. if i had a day free i would happily lounge on a sofa devouring the page, ignoring the need of refreshment and bodily function. just one more page. just one more page. just to the end of this chapter. and so on.

nowadays it is very much different. i find myself after a long paragraph of text becoming distracted. i will switch to a quick fix of insta or blusky. check the posts on facebook. watch a vid on tiktok. then back to the book. back to the beginning of the paragraph as i have forgotten what it is about. the concentration broken. memory porridge. when did i get so stupid and what caused it?

i guess the growth of social media did not help. clever apps whose algorithms are designed to keep you scrolling and flicking on to the next thing. how many of us have discovered a quick browse on an app has somehow turned into an hour or two? the time somehow swallowed by the inane chatter of nothing. there must be an impact on our concentration spans. school teachers know it. we are consuming text in bites. long form has gone.

and now we have ai. we no longer have to read the article or book or page. we can get ai to summarise it for us in a couple of sentences. what need us to actually read the thing? the days of the victorian novel with sprawling descriptive paragraphs of prose are gone. we are the sound bite nation.

but are we all to blame for this change? in a culture that is forever demanding information to be processed quicker to arrive at conclusions faster because time is poor and precious, is it really our fault we have altered to comply with this demand? particularly when the world of work demands more for the money and many are holding down more than one job. do we have the time to spend on reading great wads of text and do we feel so inclined, after a day of work fixated to a screen of words, to spend an evening doing a low tech version of the same?

personally i’m trying to buck the trend i have found myself in. it seems to me as a writer and bookseller. surely i should recognise the importance of the written page and should not be helping the reliance on short cuts that may lead to a devaluing of my own written work. so i am going to turn off the social media apps in the evenings. embrace the written page. small steps at first but i will do it. i have set myself the target of finishing a monster of a book. to make it even more challenging it doesn’t have chapter breaks. just page after page of text. im starting small. twenty minute reads then a brief break. but the break is not to be on the mobile phone.

i may take this deepening of concentration further. move to long form visual imagery. tv watching reduced. channel hopping stopped. instead embracing the world of the film. long form is now key. fast food a thing of the past. seven course banquets instead. a stop for afternoon tea. when my family tell me to hurry up when we’re out i will instead take my time and stroll. pigeon steps.

expect to see me soon on a corner frozen in step reading war and peace.