A report warns that deep reading is becoming a minority practice
The Fondation Jean-Jaurès finds that even as text surrounds us more than ever, sustained, concentrated reading is losing ground to the attention economy — and proposes ways to protect it.
A report published this Monday by the Fondation Jean-Jaurès, covered by Télérama, argues that although written text has never been more present in daily life — on screens, in messages, in feeds — the kind of reading that requires sustained attention is becoming harder to sustain and risks becoming the preserve of a minority.
According to Télérama's account of the report, the attention economy is reshaping our relationship to the written word: we are surrounded by text, but much of it is skimmed, fragmented or consumed in short bursts, which is a different activity from the slow, concentrated reading long associated with books.
The report reportedly does not stop at diagnosis. Télérama says it also outlines avenues for creating conditions favorable to long, focused reading, though the source material available here does not detail what those proposals are.
For readers who keep a home library, the finding lands close to home: it suggests that the practice at the center of their habit — settling into a book and staying with it — is precisely the kind of attention that is becoming scarcer, even as the volume of text in circulation keeps growing.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.
