A recent Nature article asks a useful question: are attention spans really shrinking?

The answer, as usual, is more interesting than the slogan. The article suggests that our underlying capacity for attention may not have disappeared. What has changed is the environment in which attention now has to operate. Digital distractions are constantly competing for focus, even if the human capacity for focus remains largely intact. nature.com/articles/d

That distinction matters because the real problem may not be cognitive decline in the crude sense. The problem may be environmental degradation.

We have built a communication system that is hostile to sustained thought and then asked writers, scholars, journalists, and intellectuals to live inside it.

This is especially strange for writers. Writing is not simply the production of sentences. It is the sustained organization of attention. A writer has to hold a problem in mind long enough for it to change shape. He has to resist premature formulation. He has to tolerate uncertainty, boredom, contradiction, false starts, and the slow emergence of structure.

Social media rewards almost none of this.

It rewards speed, reaction, compression, novelty, provocation, moral positioning, and the quick conversion of experience into public performance. It turns thinking into a display behavior. A sentence is rewarded before it becomes an argument. A joke is rewarded before it becomes a scene. A posture is rewarded before it becomes a thought.

There is research pointing in this direction. A San Diego State University study found that just five minutes of TikTok scrolling before reading long-form news made college students less focused while reading. (San Diego State University) Other recent public discussion has focused on whether social media breaks, even short ones, can improve attention, memory, focus, and well-being. (The Washington Post)

The details matter, and the science should not be exaggerated. It would be too simple to say that social media “destroys the brain.” The more precise claim is that certain digital environments train habits of attention that are poorly matched to serious intellectual work.

That is the part that interests me.

I have been deeply ambivalent about social media, not because I think it has no use, but because I do not see how it makes me a better writer. It may increase visibility. It may help distribute work. It may produce readers, subscribers, arguments, invitations, and occasionally even genuine intellectual exchange.

But does it make the work better?

That is the question.

My suspicion is that for many writers, the answer is no. Social media does not move us toward our best work. It moves us toward our most immediately legible selves. It rewards the fragment, the take, the line, the provocation, the joke, the little flash of cleverness that can survive in a feed.

Books require almost the opposite discipline.

A book asks you to stay with a problem after the applause would have stopped. It asks you to think when no one is watching. It asks you to follow an idea beyond its social usefulness. It asks for depth, patience, and form.

Social media asks: can you make this interesting right now?

That is not a trivial difference. It is a different cognitive economy.

And this is why I find the whole situation increasingly absurd. Writers are now expected to participate in systems that may actively undermine the habits required for writing. We are told to build platforms, cultivate audiences, maintain visibility, generate engagement, and become publicly legible as personalities. But the work itself still requires privacy, concentration, difficulty, and time.

I do not want to become important on the internet.

I want to write books.

That may sound old-fashioned, but I do not think it is nostalgia. It is a question about intellectual ecology. What kinds of environments produce serious thought? What kinds of environments deform it? And why have we so casually accepted the idea that writers should spend so much of their energy inside systems optimized for distraction, performance, and social reward?

The issue is not merely that social media wastes time but that it trains the wrong habits.