Quotes
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​“When was the last time you opened a book and you were able to really concentrate on it, with no interruptions, for more than five or ten minutes? No scrolling on your phone between paragraphs. For many of us, that kind of deep, immersive reading is being lost.”

— Tristan Redmond, London, The Global Story, BBC

"Who has time to read long books, anyway? Only people with lots of free time. I'm too busy trying to make ends meet and spend time with my family."

​- Sarah, Tacoma, Washington

"The last long book I read? I don't think I've every read one."

- Don, Queens, NY

The Slow Death of Long-Form
​Immersive Reading

and its Implications for
​Philosophy and Theology

​"Are we living through the slow death of reading - replaced by an addictive screen culture that fragments our attention and floods us with trivial or unreliable information? Writer and voracious reader James Marriott believes we are entering a post-literate age with profoundly negative consequences for education, culture and democracy itself. In today's episode, James traces how an 18th century ‘reading revolution’ shaped the modern-world - and what might follow its sudden decline."
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Producers: Aron Keller and Sam Chantarasak; Editor: James Shield; Mix: Travis Evans; Senior news editor: China Collins

The Library Years

As a college student, I often read long books. Novels, because I was an English major; philosophical texts, because I was a philosophy minor. I would go to the library, sit down for an hour or two, and read without interruption. Later, as a graduate student in philosophy of religion and theology, I did the same. I can still remember the thrill of deep reading.

I assumed I was not alone—that many people read this way. It felt normal. Serious thought required sustained attention; sustained attention required time; and time was something you deliberately set aside. You entered a long book not to extract information but to dwell within it—to follow an argument across hundreds of pages, to let confusion slowly turn into clarity, or to savor a beautiful story. Reading was not consumption; it was formation. Through books, you traveled whole worlds.

A Privileged and Fragile Practice

Only later did I realize that this way of reading was historically contingent—and, to some extent, a privilege. It depended on silence, on the acceptance of slowness, and on the expectation that one might devote months to a single work. Many people never had that luxury.

It also depended on a nervous system not yet shaped by constant alerts and digital interruption. I assumed this style of reading was widespread and secure. I was wrong.

What Educators Already Know

The decline of long-form, immersive reading is not news to college professors. Many no longer assign whole books—or, if they do, they no longer assume students will read them in full. The same concerns are voiced in primary and secondary schools, and by parents who watch teenagers move quickly between homework, messages, streaming, and social media.

Researchers have been studying this shift for years. The issue is not simply distraction, but habituation to constant novelty. The brain becomes used to frequent shifts in stimulus, making sustained concentration feel difficult.

It’s Not About Intelligence

Students today are often intelligent, creative, and articulate. The issue is not whether they can think, but under what conditions thinking deepens. Long-form reading develops particular habits of mind: patience with complexity, tolerance for ambiguity, memory across extended arguments, and the ability to integrate ideas over time. When those habits weaken, certain forms of reflection become less common.

What Is Fading

Reading itself is not disappearing. We still scan, skim, excerpt, and scroll. Text is everywhere. What is fading is sustained engagement with extended works that require continuity of attention across chapters and weeks.

Immersive reading takes time to enter—ten or fifteen minutes just to settle in—and then longer stretches of uninterrupted attention. It requires returning to a text over days or weeks, letting earlier passages shape later ones. What is fading is not literacy, but the habit of dwelling within a developing structure of meaning.

The Rise of Visual and Aural Media

At the same time, visual and aural media are becoming dominant. Video essays, podcasts, audiobooks, and short-form videos shape much of our intellectual life. These media can communicate insight powerfully. But they cultivate different habits.

They favor immediacy over sequence and impact over slow accumulation. They are often consumed while multitasking. Instead of entering the internal order of a text, we move across segments, extracting insights as needed. Knowledge becomes something we consult rather than inhabit.

Philosophy and Theology in a New Environment

As these media become central, philosophy and theology increasingly operate through voice, image, and personality. A compelling speaker or a well-produced video can influence audiences more quickly than a carefully argued book. This can widen access and energize discussion.

But it also shifts authority toward presentation and away from sustained reasoning. Depth may still be present, but it must now compete with performance. The question is not whether serious thought can survive—but whether the habits that once supported it can be renewed in a different cultural ecology.

Three things are needed.

First: Creative Adaptation

Philosophers and theologians must adjust creatively to the new attentional environment. If immersive reading is no longer the cultural default, disciplines that once depended on it cannot simply assume its presence. This does not mean abandoning rigor. It means redistributing depth—through serial essays, sustained conversations, structured podcasts, modular teaching, and dialogical formats that unfold over time. Intellectual integrity can remain intact, but the modes of transmission must evolve.

Second: Reclaiming Immersive Reading as Counter-Cultural Practice

​Immersive reading itself can be reclaimed as a counter-cultural discipline. If broader culture no longer sustains the habits required for sustained engagement, intentional communities can. Book clubs, slow-reading circles, seminar groups, and study communities can cultivate shared continuity of attention. In such settings, long-form reading becomes less a solitary achievement and more a collective practice. What was once culturally assumed becomes deliberately nurtured.

Third: Expanding the Forms and Understanding of Depth

Philosophers and theologians must also recognize that profound ideas can be communicated through images and sounds as well as through print. An exclusive reliance on textual argument can itself become limiting. Visual art, film, music, oral storytelling, liturgy, and embodied practices can carry conceptual and spiritual depth in ways that prose alone cannot.

Here the insights of Alfred North Whitehead are instructive. For Whitehead, a proposition is not merely a sentence or logical claim; it is a “lure for feeling.” Propositions invite ways of seeing, sensing, and responding to the world. They can be conveyed through language, but also through image, rhythm, gesture, and narrative. A powerful story, a carefully composed image, or a piece of music can function propositionally—offering a possibility for experience and inviting it into realization.

If this is so, the future of philosophy and theology need not depend exclusively on long treatises or printed texts. Depth can be mediated through multiple forms. The danger lies not in adapting to visual and aural modes, but in confusing them with shallowness. An image can compress insight. A story can carry metaphysics. A melody can embody theology.

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​Factors Contributing to the
​Death of Immersive Reading
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Screen Culture and Fragmented Attention.

The migration of intellectual life onto screens has subtly reshaped how attention operates. Screens encourage scrolling, skimming, hyperlinking, and rapid movement between stimuli. Even when one reads a long text digitally, it exists within an architecture of tabs, alerts, and adjacent media. The environment itself invites interruption. Immersive reading depends upon linear progression and sustained focus; screen culture trains the mind toward fragmentation rather than continuity.
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Smartphone-Driven Interruption.

The smartphone intensifies this dynamic by making interruption constant and portable. Notifications, messages, social feeds, and background updates generate a perpetual readiness to respond. Attention becomes provisional—never fully given, always slightly alert to competing claims. Even when the device is set aside, its rhythms linger psychologically. Immersive reading requires a kind of attentional exclusivity that smartphone culture steadily erodes.

Summary Culture: "Just give me the Gist."

The widespread availability of summaries—through online explainers, study guides, and increasingly AI-generated syntheses—has reshaped expectations about how knowledge is acquired. It is now easy to grasp the “main ideas” of a book without inhabiting its development. This fosters an extractive posture toward texts: conclusions matter more than the process by which they are reached. AI intensifies this tendency by making condensation instantaneous and comprehensive. The discipline of following extended argument becomes less necessary and, therefore, less practiced.

The Rising Dominance of Visual and Aural Media.

Contemporary communication is increasingly mediated through image and sound—video platforms, streaming services, podcasts, audiobooks, and short-form visual content. These modes are powerful and often deeply meaningful. Yet they cultivate different cognitive rhythms. They are frequently consumed while multitasking and unfold episodically rather than sequentially. As visual and aural media become dominant, silent, sustained textual engagement recedes from cultural centrality.

A Culture of Busyness

Modern life is marked by acceleration and blurred boundaries between work and leisure. Many people experience their time as compressed and overcommitted, even when discretionary hours technically exist. Immersive reading requires more than available minutes; it requires interior spaciousness and freedom from anticipatory urgency. In a culture that valorizes productivity and constant responsiveness, slow reading can feel impractical or indulgent, and thus gradually diminishes.

Depleted Mental Energy

For many people, daily life is marked by financial uncertainty, emotional strain, and chronic cognitive load. Economic instability, debt, caregiving pressures, health concerns, and job insecurity absorb mental energy long before one sits down with a book.

Sustained reading requires cognitive surplus—the capacity to enter a reflective mode not dominated by immediate demands. When individuals live under conditions of stress or precarity, attention narrows toward survival and problem-solving. The decline of immersive reading may therefore reflect not only technological shifts but also the broader erosion of interior stability in contemporary life.

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