A recent YouGov poll found that 40% of Britons have not read a book in the last year. “The literary era has come to an end,” Philip Roth prophesied in 2000. “The evidence is the culture, the evidence is the society, the evidence is the screen.” Roth believed that the habit of mind that literature required was bound to disappear. People would no longer have the concentration or the isolation needed to read novels.
Several studies seem to support Roth’s conclusion. The average time that a person can focus on one thing has dropped in recent decades from approximately 2.5 minutes to about 45 seconds. I witnessed this when I gave two Ted talks almost 10 years apart. In 2010, we were asked to keep our talks to 20 minutes; in 2017, that was reduced to around 13 minutes. When I asked why, the organisers informed me that the average attention span had shrunk. Still, I kept my talk to 20 minutes. And I would similarly like to push back on the idea that people no longer need novels.
