THE INFORMATION AGE
MINDLESS SCROLLING MUST END
Fazmina Imamudeen assesses the impact of constant connectivity on youth
A book asks for time but a feed doesn’t. One requires the reader to remain with an idea while the other is built around ‘the next thing.’ For young people growing up between books, screens, notifications and increasingly capable AI systems, this difference is becoming part of everyday intellectual life.
Information arrives constantly – often, in fragments – and the mind learns to move with it. So the question is what happens when moving quickly through information becomes easier than staying with it?
The modern information environment rewards speed, as every few seconds readers are invited to decide whether something is interesting enough to continue. Scroll, scan, click, move on…
Repeated often enough, this changes the relationship between attention and information. Reading becomes less about entering a textual content and more about rapidly deciding whether to remain in it.
This matters because difficult ideas rarely reveal their value immediately. A novel may take 50 pages to establish its meaning; a serious essay may require rereading and a scientific argument may only make sense once several pieces of evidence have been connected. The effort involved is not incidental to understanding – it’s part of it.
Research complicates the simplistic claim that screens themselves are responsible. A 2026 Meta analysis found that differences between digital and paper reading were particularly apparent when digital reading involved scrolling.
And when the latter was removed, many differences largely disappeared. Therefore, the issue may be less about screen versus paper than the unstable environment in which information is consumed.
Short-form video introduces another factor of constant context switching. A teenager can move from comedy and politics, to sport and advertising, within minutes. Each new piece of content requires a new context and the algorithm removes the need to decide what comes next.
A recent review of research on short-form video and young people found growing concerns around attention and cognitive outcomes. But it also noted that the evidenceis too complex to support sweeping claims about permanent cognitive damage.
Perhaps the more significant change is that algorithms increasingly determine what deserves attention. Traditionally, curiosity involved seeking something but now information comes to us, selected according to what’s likely to keep us engaged.
This can make information consumption remarkably efficient while narrowing the range of things we encounter.
Social media also makes credibility harder to judge. The internet has solved the problem of access to information far more successfully than the problem of evaluating it. OECD data from PISA 2022 found that 64 percent of students could easily find relevant information online but only 51 percent could actually assess its quality.
Artificial intelligence takes knowledge outsourcing further as it can summarise a chapter, explain a theory, compare arguments or produce an essay within seconds. Used intelligently, this can strengthen learning – but there’s a difference between removing an obstacle and removing the thinking that occurs while overcoming it.
The danger is that AI may make intellectual dependence extremely convenient. If a machine can retrieve information, select what matters, explain it and formulate the conclusion, students need to learn which parts of that process they should still perform themselves.
Young people don’t need to be protected from technology; instead, they must become sophisticated users of it. They should know when to skim and when to concentrate; when a summary is useful and when the original matters; when an answer should be accepted and when it should be questioned.
The real challenge isn’t about preserving an imaginary world where everyone read books attentively and thinks deeply; rather, it’s about preserving the capacity for depth in a world that’s designed for speed.
