From the Editor’s Desk: Tech Addiction (Premium)

Last November, I re-read Stephen King’s first collection of short stories, Night Shift, for probably the 10th or 12th time. Thanks in part to the timing—I was getting ready to publish my year-end recaps of ebook and audiobook reading—I decided to write it up. And in that article, I provided a mile-high view of my history of reading. Long story short, I was a voracious reader when I was younger. And while I still am, in some ways, my habits have changed in recent years. Maybe in recent decades.

And that, too, is a topic I’ve addressed elsewhere, perhaps in an earlier edition of this newsletter, the notion that our attention spans have declined dramatically, thanks largely to the impact of personal technology. Some key milestones include CNN Headline News, the subsequent generification of local news, the Web with its unprofessionally written blogs, the fall of newspapers and periodicals, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok. Whatever. All I know is that I have a hard time reading anything long-form these days. And it bothers me.

And that was part of the reason that re-reading Night Shift made me so happy. It was an easy read, still as good as I remembered it, and easy to get through. These successes are rare, and I’ve been testing my ability to plow through with long-form fiction for years, in part by re-reading very long books like The Lord of the Rings and The Stand, both successfully, and, IT, much less successfully. That one was a struggle.

And maybe this is obvious, but re-reading something you know you like is a bit of a cheat because you can zone out and not get lost. I was reminded of this after re-reading Night Shift because I decided to go back and re-read King’s other short story collections in turn. And this has been much less successful.

Perhaps this should have been obvious, but Night Shift consists of the very best short stories that King wrote before he became a best-selling writer. And his second collection, Skeleton Crew, is not as good. Yes, there are some standout stories in there, The Mist (which is really a novella), The Raft, Word Processor of the Gods, and a few others rise to the level I had expected. But much of the rest of that book was uninteresting to me. It’s like the sophomore slump we see so often with recording artists: Boston’s second album, for example, has a few classic songs, of course, but the full work doesn’t in any way measure up to that band’s debut.

But I kept trying. The third King short story collection is called Nightmares & Dreamscapes. And … yikes. Again, there are a few classics I remember fondly. (Night Flyer and … actually, that might be it.) But much of the rest of it is dreck. And in going through this again, I realized that I had at some point bought this collection in audiobook format because I had never finished the book. And then I never finished that. And now, every time I open the Kindle app and stare at the page, trying to figure out where I am in whatever story—and, seriously, are these stories much longer than his older stories?—and I just don’t want to keep going. It’s become work.

And I look down at this device in my hands, this iPad, with its many reading apps, its infinite supply of content, and I wonder. Is this part of the problem? Actually, there’s no doubt about it. Of course it is.

And this is the thing with personal technology and our attention span. These devices, these magical, connected devices, give us so much that we rarely pause to consider what they’re stripping away: our brains and our ability to focus. We have been training for this moment for decades, this moment where we all lack critical thinking capabilities, will believe any nutjob conspiracy theory, and return again and again to the Matrix-like suckling that is our social media feeds. Which are now all ads, from what I can tell. And this is all happening just in time for ChatGPT and its Skynet-like successors to come along and steal away the one thing we can still sort of do from the comfort of our own homes—create content ourselves—leaving humanity with … what? An even more poorly created collection of content that will no doubt further destroy our brains. The wheels on the bus go ‘round and ‘round, ‘round and ‘round, the wheels …

In contrast to what I wrote last week, the good news here is that I know how to fix this problem. It’s just a matter of making it happen. But it’s clear to me now that rebuilding my reading skills should involve reading new long-form content and that I need to start small and work up from there. The broader issue here, of course, is that I am part of the problem: as a content creator who has been writing about personal technology for almost 30 years now, I’ve played my own small role in this disaster. And I’m not totally comfortable with that.

So I do what I can. And communicating the problem, as I’m doing there, is just a small part of a broader responsibility to set things right. Surely there is a middle ground between our entrenched technology addictions and a Luddite fantasy of living off-grid in the woods. I’ll get there.

But first I need to finish Nightmares & Dreamscapes.