The Internet Has Not Killed Reading—or Attention Spans

British author and technology pioneer Kevin Ashton has been puzzling over the nature of storytelling for the past 25 years. That’s how long it took him to research and write his latest book, The Story of Stories: The Million-Year History of a Uniquely Human Art.

The first seed of the book for Ashton lay in two seemingly contradictory questions posed by American philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky. The first, known as Plato’s problem, asks how we can know so much with so little information. Babies, for instance, learn to speak based on what might seem like a poverty of inputs. The second question is known as Orwell’s problem, and it asks the opposite: How could we know so little, given that so much information is available to us?

Ashton—best known for coining the term “The Internet of Things” in 1999, to describe the rise of a whole economy of sensors and other objects connected to the World Wide Web—also began asking himself how the rise of the smartphone might transform the human relationship to storytelling and to the world. “By the mid 2010s, I could be pretty confident that by 2026, some 9 out of 10 people in the world would have a smartphone, and I wanted to know what that might mean,” he recently told me.