Hello, friends! Welcome to this month’s meeting of the Insecure Writers’ Support Group, a blog hop created by Alex J. Cavanaugh and co-hosted this month by Victoria Marie Lees, Sarah Foster, Natalie Aguirre, and C. Lee McKenzie. Are you a writer? Do you feel insecure? Well, then this is the support group for you! Click here to learn more and to see a list of participating blogs.
People don’t read anymore. People’s attention spans are too short due to social media, YouTube and TikTok, podcasts, A.I. generated slop content, yada yada, et cetera et cetera… I’m sure you’ve heard this before. I’ve been hearing it a lot lately. It’s almost enough to make me worry. I mean, if it’s true that nobody reads anymore, what’s the point of me doing all this writing?
Except I don’t think it’s true. Certainly, social media addiction is a thing. Brainrot is a thing, and some people’s attention spans are being affected by that. These are real problems, but I think self proclaimed experts-on-the-zeitgeist exaggerate how big and how universal these problems really are. When I think about the people I know in real life, do some of them spend too much time online? Sure. But most of them don’t.
And as for the assertion that nobody reads anymore… again, when I think about the people I know in real life, I know a lot of people—people of all ages—who are avid readers. Their taste in literature may be different than mine, but they’re still avid readers. Granted, I also know some people who don’t read much. Turns out some people enjoy reading and some don’t. That’s nothing new. That was true before, too.
It is a fact that some people are struggling with various flavors of Internet addiction. It is also true that some people don’t like to read. Extrapolating from those two data points that nobody reads anymore because everybody’s got brainrot? That doesn’t add up. And the people who keep saying things like that? These same people tend to make a lot of broad generalizations about what’s going on in the zeitgeist these days. I have no idea what their agendas are, but they’re wrong. It’s time to stop listening to them and get back to writing.
i-love-space.com 
Hi,
Nobody reads any more ? In our family, a different literacy poblem has just been diagnosed. Apparently the four year old is hyperlexic and hypernumerate too.
Perhaps, and fairly soon, will enjoy your books ?
LikeLike
From what I’ve read, there’s been a general downward tend in reading for pleasure, but it’s not precipitous, and it’s been going on since the 1950s starting with widespread adoption of TV, and continuing with video games and the internet.
Books do have a lot more competition than they once did, something we have to keep in mind when writing stories. People aren’t going to give us a hundred pages to get to the point like they did with the classics. Books that can show momentum early will likely be more successful, at least from what I can see.
LikeLike
Unfortunately, I’m definitely guilty of not reading like I used to. Swiping through TikToks after a long day of work just seems less daunting than picking up a book. Definitely something I need to try harder on.
LikeLike