Vox Meditantis

The evidence is damning, and it should make every writer’s blood run cold. According to research from Penn State University examining over 35 million Facebook posts, 75% of shared content is spread without users even clicking to read it first. That means three-quarters of the people hitting “share” on your carefully crafted piece have done nothing more than glance at your headline. They haven’t engaged with your arguments, absorbed your insights, or grasped the nuance you’ve spent hours perfecting. They’ve simply seen something that aligns with their existing beliefs and sent it careering through the digital ether.

This isn’t merely disappointing—it’s a fundamental breakdown of what writing is supposed to achieve. We’re witnessing the triumph of metrics over meaning, of engagement over enlightenment, of speed over substance.

The Architecture of Shallow Engagement

Social media platforms have engineered themselves around one principle: keeping users scrolling. Their algorithms reward quick interactions—likes, shares, reactions—because these generate the rapid-fire engagement that keeps advertising revenue flowing. A “like” takes milliseconds. A share requires barely more thought. But reading? Reading demands something infinitely more precious in our fractured attention economy: time.

The statistics paint a stark picture of our diminished capacity for sustained focus. Research shows our attention spans have plummeted from 12 seconds in 2000 to just 8 seconds in 2020. Meanwhile, we spend over two hours daily on social media platforms, but we’re not actually engaging with content—we’re skimming, scrolling, and reacting on autopilot.

Consider the cruel mathematics of modern engagement. Facebook pages see an average engagement rate of just 0.07%. Even Instagram, supposedly the pinnacle of visual engagement, manages only 3.0-4.2% on average. These numbers reveal a profound disconnect: whilst platforms celebrate billions of users and interactions, the reality is one of mass superficiality.

The Psychology of Instant Gratification

The “like” has become our digital crack cocaine. Research published in Nature demonstrates that social media behaviour follows the principles of reward learning, with users spacing their posts to maximise social rewards whilst minimising effort. Each notification triggers a dopamine hit, creating what researchers call “computational reward learning” cycles that keep us trapped in shallow engagement patterns.

But here’s the insidious part: this system doesn’t just create addiction—it creates the illusion of knowledge. Users who share content without reading it develop what psychologists call “inflated confidence”. They believe they understand complex issues based on headlines alone, contributing to the spread of misinformation and the degradation of public discourse.

Students acknowledge this erosion of their own cognitive abilities. Research shows that 31% admit to losing focus in class due to phone checking, whilst 49% find off-task technology use distracting. Yet they continue to check their devices up to 80 times daily—whilst believing they only check 25 times. We’ve become strangers to our own behaviour, addicted to systems we don’t fully comprehend.

When Exposure Becomes Engagement

The platforms have weaponised our psychological vulnerabilities. Features like endless scroll, algorithmic personalisation, and intermittent variable reinforcement schedules are deliberately designed to hack our attention. Social media companies employ teams of neuroscientists and behavioural economists to make their platforms more compelling, more addictive, more impossible to put down.

Content creators and writers find themselves trapped in this system. They watch their carefully researched articles receive fewer “reads” than “likes,” their thoughtful essays shared by people who never made it past the first paragraph. The platforms reward clickbait headlines and inflammatory content whilst penalising nuanced, complex thinking that requires sustained attention.

This isn’t an accident—it’s the business model. Attention is the commodity being harvested and sold. The deeper the engagement, the less efficiently the platform can extract and monetise that attention. Quick, shallow interactions are more profitable than meaningful reading.

The Human Cost of Algorithmic Priorities

Writers invest vulnerability, craftsmanship, and countless hours in their work. They research, draft, revise, and refine—all in service of creating something that might resonate, inform, or move another human being. But the current social media ecosystem treats their output as mere content to be processed by algorithms designed for engagement optimisation, not human connection.

The psychological impact is profound. Writers report feeling invalidated when their work receives likes without reads, suspicious of metrics that don’t reflect genuine interest, and increasingly cynical about their ability to create meaningful change through their words. They’re forced to choose between algorithmic success and authentic expression—a choice that previous generations of writers never faced.

Readers, meanwhile, are losing the capacity for deep engagement. The constant stimulation of social feeds has rewired our brains for distraction. We’ve become uncomfortable with silence, with sustained attention, with the kind of reflective engagement that great writing demands. Books feel too slow, articles too long, complex arguments too demanding.

The Misinformation Multiplier Effect

The sharing-without-reading phenomenon has devastating consequences for information quality. Political content is particularly susceptible, with extreme partisan material shared more frequently without verification than neutral content. False information spreads faster than truth because it’s engineered to trigger immediate emotional responses rather than thoughtful consideration.

This creates a feedback loop of ignorance. Misinformation spreads rapidly through networks of people who haven’t engaged with the actual content. Each share lends false legitimacy to dubious claims, creating the appearance of widespread support for ideas that haven’t been subjected to scrutiny. The result is a public discourse increasingly untethered from facts, evidence, or reasoned argument.

Writers of serious journalism, analysis, and commentary find their work competing not just with entertainment, but with deliberately crafted misinformation designed to exploit the very weaknesses that social media has created in our collective attention.

Beyond the Vanity Metrics

The time has come to distinguish between vanity metrics and meaningful engagement. Likes, shares, and follower counts may look impressive on dashboards, but they’re increasingly meaningless as measures of actual impact. A post that receives thousands of likes but changes no minds has failed in its fundamental purpose.

Real engagement looks different. It’s measured in time spent reading, in comments that demonstrate comprehension, in shares accompanied by thoughtful commentary. It’s reflected in changed behaviour, in policy discussions informed by evidence, in public debates elevated by nuanced understanding rather than tribal positioning.

Writers and publishers need new metrics that capture depth rather than breadth. Time on page, scroll depth, return visits, and genuine interaction are far better indicators of success than raw engagement numbers. But this requires courage—the willingness to pursue smaller audiences of genuinely engaged readers rather than vast numbers of passive consumers.

Reclaiming the Reader-Writer Relationship

The solution isn’t to abandon social media—it’s to use it more strategically. Writers can signal their expectations for meaningful engagement through careful calls to action. Instead of “like if you agree,” try “share your thoughts after reading.” Rather than optimising for immediate shares, optimise for sustained attention.

This means accepting smaller numbers in exchange for greater depth. It means writing introductions that reward patience rather than promising instant gratification. It means creating content that can’t be fully appreciated without complete consumption—work that earns its audience rather than trapping it.

Writers must also model the behaviour they want to see. Read before sharing. Comment thoughtfully. Engage with complexity rather than retreating into simplification. Build audiences who value depth over speed, quality over quantity, understanding over agreement.

The Responsibility of Platforms and Publishers

Social media platforms have a moral obligation to design for human flourishing rather than addiction. This could include prompts asking users to confirm they’ve read content before sharing, algorithms that reward time spent reading over immediate reactions, or features that surface content based on thoughtful engagement rather than viral spread.

Publishers, meanwhile, must resist the temptation to optimise purely for metrics that don’t reflect their editorial values. If the goal is informed public discourse, then success should be measured by the quality of that discourse, not by the volume of traffic generated.

This requires new business models—ones that value subscriber loyalty over advertising clicks, depth over reach, expertise over popularity. It means accepting that not all content can or should be “engaging” in the shallow sense that algorithms reward.

A Call for Digital Citizenship

Ultimately, changing this system requires collective action. Readers must take responsibility for their own attention, consciously choosing depth over distraction. This means reading articles before sharing them, engaging thoughtfully with complex arguments, and supporting writers and publications that prioritise quality over quick engagement.

We need digital citizenship education that teaches people to recognise manipulation techniques, to value sustained attention, and to distinguish between information and entertainment. Schools should teach critical reading skills alongside digital literacy, helping students understand how their attention is being harvested and sold.

Most importantly, we need to remember what we’re losing. Every piece of writing that goes unread because it demands too much attention is a small tragedy. Every complex argument reduced to a shareable soundbite represents a diminishment of our collective intelligence. Every writer who abandons nuance for virality is another voice lost to the cacophony of algorithmic optimisation.

The Fight for Depth

The battle for deep engagement is ultimately a battle for human dignity. It’s about preserving the capacity for sustained thought, for complex reasoning, for the kind of careful consideration that democracy requires and that wisdom demands.

Writers who insist on being read rather than merely shared are fighting for something bigger than their own visibility. They’re defending the possibility of meaningful communication in an age of manufactured distraction. They’re insisting that human attention deserves respect, that complex problems require complex thinking, and that the rush to share should never supersede the responsibility to understand.

The choice before us is clear: we can accept a world of shallow engagement, viral misinformation, and degraded discourse, or we can fight for depth, accuracy, and genuine human connection. We can optimise for the algorithm or for understanding. We can prioritise metrics or meaning.

The outcome of this choice will determine not just the future of writing, but the future of informed public discourse itself. In a world where three-quarters of shared content goes unread, every person who chooses to read before sharing becomes an act of resistance. Every writer who demands deep engagement rather than quick clicks strikes a blow for human dignity.

The question isn’t whether we can afford to slow down and read deeply. The question is whether we can afford not to.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.