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

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. lnkd.in/gpXB4RuA

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

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.

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. Other recent public discussion has focused on whether social media breaks, even short ones, can improve attention, memory, focus, and well-being. WaPo.

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?

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.

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

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.