00:00Well, from James Marriott's perspective, he'd say it's like directly linked to democracy and that, you know, reading has accompanied
00:08some of the biggest kind of political movements and upswells and revolutions and that, you know, he's actually worried that
00:15this could, you know, affect democracy because they've always gone hand in hand.
00:20He also makes the point that reading is actually fundamentally unnatural and difficult. And actually, through human history, we've always
00:28struggled with reading. It's not a terribly natural way of absorbing information to look at tiny little black specks on
00:33a page. We've been much better at hearing things. But that doesn't mean it's not really, really important. And actually,
00:40if you want democracy to function, you can't sort of rely on soundbites.
00:44And, you know, he talks about political speeches made in Parliament that they've shortened so much, you know, down to
00:50tiny little, you know, clippy, clippy bits, basically, for our attention spans. You can't really run a democracy like that.
00:58So that's quite worrying.
