Not long ago, if a curious student in Dhaka wanted to read about the philosophy of Ibn Rushd, an Andalusian polymath and jurist, or if a farmer in Rajshahi wanted to understand soil pH levels, or if a young woman in Sylhet dreamt of learning French, they were largely on their own. Knowledge, for most people, was a matter of geography and privilege. The internet changed all of that. Today, that same student can access the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, covering an enormous range of philosophical topics through in-depth entries, for free. The farmer can watch a tutorial from an agronomist in the Netherlands. And the young woman in Sylhet can learn French from a native speaker via an app. In a single generation, the internet has democratised knowledge in ways no library or school system could have achieved alone. For a country like Bangladesh—young, aspirational, and increasingly connected—this has been nothing short of transformational.
And yet, all gifts carry a price. Something has shifted in the way we read and in the way we think. Sustaining attention on a long article, let alone a book, has grown harder. The urge to check a phone, to skim rather than absorb—these are not personal failings but symptoms of something systemic. The culprit is not the internet itself, but the particular form it has taken: an endless scroll of short videos, bite-sized news, algorithmic reels, and dopamine-engineered notifications. Some platforms have industrialised distraction. The average reel lasts under 30 seconds. News headlines are designed to be consumed, not contemplated. We have built a media environment optimised for speed and sensation.
This is not merely an observation about leisure habits. Academics and researchers, people whose professional identity is built around sustained intellectual labour, report increasing reluctance to sit with a long paper. Students confess to relying on abstracts and summaries rather than full texts.
What elevates this beyond a cultural complaint can be explained by neuroscience. For most of history, the brain was thought to be essentially fixed after childhood. That assumption has been overturned. The brain is neuroplastic, meaning it continuously reshapes itself in response to experience and habit. Neural pathways used frequently are reinforced, and those neglected are pruned away. This is what allows stroke patients to relearn speech. It is also the mechanism by which our digital habits are quietly restructuring our brains.
In his landmark 2010 book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, American journalist and author Nicholas Carr argued precisely this. Drawing on neuroscience research and his own experience of finding his capacity for deep reading diminished by years of heavy internet use, Carr made the case that the internet is not a neutral tool. Every medium we use—the clock, the map, the printed book—shapes the mind that uses it. The internet, with its hyperlinks, interruptions, and fragmented information streams, trains the brain towards rapid, superficial processing. And over time, it makes the neural circuits required for sustained, contemplative reading weaker from disuse. Other research has also shown that heavy use of fragmented media is associated with diminished capacity for sustained attention and deep processing.
Deep reading is not merely a pleasurable pastime—it is the foundation of original thinking. When we read deeply, we make connections, question assumptions, inhabit other perspectives, and generate ideas that are genuinely our own. It is in the slow, resistant encounter with a complex text that the mind is truly exercised. If we lose that capacity, the consequences will be far-reaching. Innovation requires holding complex problems in mind over time. Democratic participation requires reasoning carefully about evidence. A population of skimmers is, ultimately, a population more susceptible to manipulation and less equipped for the intricate challenges ahead.
Bangladesh is not a passive observer of these trends. With internet penetration expanding rapidly and smartphone ownership rising steadily among the young, the country is experiencing digital immersion at an extraordinary speed. Social media remains deeply embedded in everyday life, with millions of users, many of them teenagers. And the culture of reading, already fragile due to historical underinvestment in literacy infrastructure, faces a new and more seductive competitor for attention.
The solution here is not to retreat from the internet, but other countries have begun to think seriously about how to manage their effects, and Bangladesh would do well to study their example.
For instance, France has banned smartphones in schools for students up to 15 years of age. Sweden, after enthusiastically embracing digital classrooms, has begun a partial reversal, reintroducing printed textbooks and handwriting instruction based on emerging evidence that screens impair reading comprehension and retention compared to print. Finland continues to prioritise reading for pleasure as a core part of its curriculum, with dedicated uninterrupted reading time built into school days. In China, regulators have imposed strict daily time limits on short video platforms for minors—a blunt measure, perhaps, but one that reflects official recognition that algorithmic content poses a developmental risk to young people.
Bangladesh can adapt these lessons. Schools could designate daily periods of sustained, uninterrupted reading—with physical books, not screens. Curricula could reward depth over speed: longer essays rather than multiple-choice quizzes, discussion over summarisation. Public libraries, chronically underfunded, deserve serious investment, and media literacy programmes could help young people understand how algorithms are designed to capture, not enrich, their attention. At home, parents can choose reading together over scrolling separately and model the sustained attention they wish to see in their children.
Bangladesh is at an inflection point. The habits being formed today in classrooms and on smartphones will shape the cognitive landscape of a generation. If we invest now in the conditions that make deep thinking possible—in reading, in stillness, in the patient encounter with difficulty—we will be building the most important infrastructure of all: minds capable of imagining a better future. If we don’t, the cost will not appear on any balance sheet, but it will be felt, quietly and irreversibly, in the quality of everything we think, everything we make, and everything we become.
Hussain A Samad is a consultant at the World Bank in Washington, DC, and an independent researcher. He can be reached at [email protected].
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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