I think we might all be slowly losing the ability to read beyond the headline

I think we might all be slowly losing the ability to read beyond the headline.

I noticed myself doing it on LinkedIn yesterday. I was scrolling through posts, taking in the first couple of lines and moving on, and then realised I'd somehow formed an opinion about things I hadn't actually read. I knew the gist. That seemed to be enough.

The more I thought about it, the more I realised I do it everywhere. News articles, emails, reports, presentations, sometimes even messages. I take in enough information to understand what something is broadly about, decide how I feel about it and move on to the next thing.

I'm not sure our attention spans are necessarily getting shorter. I wonder if we're just becoming incredibly good at skimming.

Which is fine until you realise that most of the interesting stuff doesn't live in the headline. It lives in the nuance, the contradictions and the slightly messy bit underneath.

I spend a ridiculous amount of my life arguing that people are more complicated than the neat labels we give them, while apparently consuming the world through increasingly neat little summaries of my own.

There's probably some irony in that.