I think reading does force more long term focus, even if it's marginal for certain books. Certainly moreso than scrolling TikTok.
My personal process of grappling with this led to a focus on agency and intentionality when defining the difference.
Scrolling TikTok, much as scrolling Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or YouTube's recommendations would be, is an entirely passive activity. You sit back and you allow the Content to be fed to you.
Reading a book requires at least a bare minimum of selecting a book to read, choosing to finish that book, and intentionally choosing at any given time to spend your time reading that particular book. Similar things can be said for selecting movies. The important part in my mind is that you chose it, rather than letting someone or something else pick what they think you'll like.
The process of picking things yourself allows you to develop taste and understand what you like and dislike, mentally offloading that to someone or something else removes the opportunity to develop that capability.
I think there's arguments to be made against this view: how can you decide what to read or watch without getting recommendations or opinions? If you only engage with popular media isn't it just a slower process of the same issue?
But I do believe there is a fundamental difference between passivity and active evaluation of engagement as mental processes, and it's the exact reason why it is harder to do than scrolling is.
Where does HN comment lurking lie in the range between passivity and active evaluation, I wonder?
Eh, old people always complain about the media of the younger generation.
Compare https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesesucht (use Google Translate).
I think this is a pretty lazy dismissal as far as things go. Yes people "always complain" about many things, but that's the correct response to things that are always getting worse.
The gist of your linked article is that they were opposed to reading because they believed that reading distracted people from labor, which they considered undisciplined and immoral. Of course there also seems to be a healthy dose of misogyny associated with it:
> Poeckel's statement that women should acquire a certain amount of knowledge, but not too much, because then they could become a "burden on human society," is representative of many other texts in which reading regulations played a central role.
Then once you get to the progression of books > comics > movies > Youtube > TikTok (did I miss any?), you can observe a steady decrease in the amount of cognitive effort required to engage with the medium and a reduction in attention spans. Reduced attention span is a legitimate concern and it's only getting worse as time goes on (ask teachers).
I actually enjoy TikTok in moderation these days but I worry about people who struggle to engage with anything but TikTok, it's like a generational ratchet that only seems to go one way, towards shorter and shorter attention spans.
Maybe someone can make the argument that this won't actually matter, but it's incorrect to say that things haven't changed in observable and measurable ways, and that people are just complaining about nothing.
Am I that old already? I just turned 29 a few months ago.
While I believe that long form content such as YouTube essays can actually be intellectually stimulating depending on how you engage with the video itself (e.g. do you actively watch it, or do you just have it on in the background?), I truly believe that 95% of TikTok is just mindless slop.
My S.O. probably spends 3 hours a day on TikTok/Reels and I seriously doubt they could remember even 10% of what they saw in that time. It's like a part of their brain turns off while scrolling.