Hey there, have you ever read Nicholas Carr’s 2010 book ‘The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing To Our Brains’?

No, of course you haven’t. Because if you were born after 1990 you’ve spent the majority of your life being bombarded by digital media. Your brain is shaped by the information it receives and back when people used to read books receiving information meant sitting quietly for hours, slowly reading and meditating over a linear and uninterrupted text. Your brain learned to carefully consider ideas in a quiet, private and imaginative space.

Nowadays you can’t read anything that hasn’t been truncated for clarity and saturated with hyperlinks, graphics and pop-ups that constantly break your line of thought and retrain your mind to rat-chase information from one place to the other. You read half of an online article before cutting to the end to get to the conclusion, along the way infographics, YouTube videos open on other tabs and Messenger notifications jump around in front of your perception and break the link between your mind and the information you’re trying to learn.

When was the last time you actually read a book from start to finish? For me it was at least a year ago and that’s fucked because A: I grew up reading voraciously, sometimes 2 or 3 books at the same time and B: I have a degree in literature. And I’m just as bad as the rest of you – Over the past ten years it’s become more and more of a struggle for me to read anything without my mind wandering away from the page and craving the instant satisfaction of digital titillation.

Someone once said that books are the foundation stones that civilisation is built on. I wonder what happens to something when you rip its foundations out from under it.