Why are we not reading anymore?

We live in a highly developed era dominated by short videos now ; the enjoyment of the written word seemingly has long since passed, leaving behind only a faint, lingering glow. 

The decline of the era of the written word, including encompassing books, newspapers, and magazines, began as early as 1925, when the British engineer John Logie Baird invented the world's first television. Young people today, specifically those under the age of 25 to 28 do not necessarily dislike reading; rather, having grown up in an image-centric age, they have not cultivated the capacity for meticulous and comprehensive reading that allows them for deep engagement.  

The scarcity of reading is constrained by three conditions:

 1. The time was used. 

The pace of life and information density have become extremely fast and high, leaving less time to process information, making it impossible for young people to actually concentrate on deep reading and thinking. 

 2. Deep thinking was deprived 

Highly developed spectacle society, driven by capital, is trying every means to keep people at the surface of cognition, only able to process the most superficial information, losing the opportunity to process information in depth. 

3. Performance nature of the modern society

The performative nature of society creates pressure to perform, while reading is solitary and introspective; all the flavors and gains you feel from the books  are very personal  and difficult to express. When humanity is massively domesticated by the values ​​of a performative society, it will unconsciously agree that "only what is expressed is valuable," and humans subconsciously feel the pressure to perform when they socialize with other people. Under that context, reading (excluding reading for conversation topics) becomes a high-cost, low-return activity. 

People start to resort to short videos as a quicker way to gather information.

Why could those videos influence us so much?

It could be explained from the below two reasons. First of all, suppressing intelligence through extremely high speed and rhythm. By using a high frequency of video, intelligence is suppressed, temporarily causing the audience to lose their sense of time and space. A prime example is TikTok. The videos that attract the most traffic are very short, and there's no pause or jump between videos. This makes the switching speed between videos extremely fast. With such rapid transitions in both length and duration, people become immersed in a pure, mindless flow of willpower, because intelligence requires a certain amount of time to function. The specific content that appears is unimportant, whether it's beautiful women, comedy, pets, movies…it doesn't matter. What matters is that this extremely fast speed and rhythm can continuously suppress intelligence, leaving willpower directionless and eliminating your sense of time. This allows this special kind of willpower to be invested without limit, and usually, as soon as intelligence recovers, this process quickly ends. 

Secondly, suppressing intelligence by stimulating primal desires: This is achieved by creating a game of pursuit. A typical example is the videos of beautiful women dancing on Youtube, which often garner 200,000 to 300,000, or even millions of views. Most of the girls in these videos are not professional dancers. Why do they get so many views? Fundamentally, they create a "symbol" through their clothing, posture, and makeup. This symbol functions as a "desired object," drawing you into a game—a game of chasing that desire object. These videos break the limitations of time; they can even be long-form videos, as long as the "desired object" continues to exert its influence. While watching these videos, the viewer gets infinitely closer to their own desired object, but can never truly reach it. When a person is enveloped in such an environment for a long time, they will be captured by an inexplicable force. This force specifically attacks the most vulnerable parts of them (instincts, desires, irrationality, etc.), doing everything possible to keep them on the surface of cognition. This is exactly what the capital wants to see: everyone just keeps staying on the surface of cognition. Because the information on the surface is the most homogeneous, and it is easiest to unify positions and values ​​.The more superficial the information, the higher the ability to copy and mass-produce information, the more homogeneous the information, and the greater the space for capital to make profits.