Literary dark ages as attention crisis

Declining habits of sustained reading should be read not only as a lifestyle change but as a structural symptom of an attention economy that privileges short, algorithmically optimized content. That shift hollowed long-form cultural transmission and reduces citizens' capacity for deep deliberation and historical memory. — If sustained reading erodes at scale, democratic deliberation, civic literacy, and cultural continuity could degrade — making the trend a public‑policy as well as cultural concern.