Why Short Videos Are Winning

People started reading less because they started reading more.

In 2009, researchers estimated that the average American consumed ~34 GB (≈100,500 words) of information per day. It's hard to argue that the amount of information surrounding us, the amount of text we read across all our screens, has done anything but increase since then.

So yes, people stopped reading for pleasure because the amount of text they read every day exploded.

Reading a book, especially fiction, requires attention and deep context switching. You’re not just reading words - you’re switching into an entirely different mental environment and staying there. Finding time to read isn’t enough. You need to disconnect from everything else and remain inside that context. That’s difficult when the same device you’re reading on is constantly trying to pull you into another one.

This is also my theory for the rise of algorithmic social media - and its latest invention, short videos. These formats don’t require deep attention or context switching. And that’s why the videos are short - the longer the video, the more attention it requires.

You can open them instantly and get a quick dopamine hit delivered straight to the palm of your hand. It’s fast, effortless, and asks nothing from you. And when your breaks are short, you have a few minutes to kill, or you're just tired - it's easier to fire them up than to open a book.

It feels like our modern lives - patchy, quick, fragmented - are designed for exactly this kind of time spending. It’s almost as if we once lived at normal speed, and now technology has pressed Fast Forward.

And if you want to break that cycle, you have to hit Pause first.