Or, as Nicholas Carr put it ten years earlier, Google is making us stupid. (Though beware the sweeping generalisation: if the hummingbird brain produced by 21st-century digitisation is killing our ability to concentrate, then the best readers in the world would have been the single-task process-working masses of the 20th.)

During the past year, the new federal government has responded to a persuasive appeal from writers and readers to support literature. But, as the wise Miles Franklin-winning author Amanda Lohrey has pointed out, more good writing means little if there are no readers. Imagine the future of music if listeners were hit by an epidemic of deafness (hang on, I think that’s happening too). The pressing challenge, Lohrey argues, is to restore reading, starting in schools and emanating into communities. A strong national culture is a strong reading culture.

Taken in by the latest apocalypse, I sometimes wonder if we have come to a book-reading precipice, if it can fall out of use as suddenly as the fall of the Soviet Union – an empire that evaporated in the space of a few weeks. As a writer, this is a nightmare of course, but the reckoning comes more painfully as a reader.

I guess I read something like 80 books a year, and have done so for at least 45 years, so let’s say that amounts conservatively to 3000-odd books, or roughly 30,000 hours. According to the 10,000-hour rule, in the time I have given to reading books I could have become a genius in three different disciplines. I could have been a surgeon, while also a professional golfer, and a concert pianist to boot. Instead, I gave that life to poring over ancient manuscripts like a medieval monk.

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The sadness would not be for poor old me, but for everyone else and the pleasures they will have missed out on. Forget about one wasted life; what about the many lives they missed out on living? Whatever is happening to our brains, it remains a human need to imagine different lives, to travel to a world beyond our own. Imagination drives all that time we spend on those infernal devices. But you don’t get to fully inhabit that other world for a few seconds on Instagram. You’re just window-shopping. Only the time spent inside a book, the expansion of your dreaming, can gift you the miracle of travel that you are seeking.

Here’s some hope. Johann Hari was clearly answering a question that many were asking. What is really happening to my concentration? His book sold more than 50,000 copies in Australia. When people wanted to know why they couldn’t concentrate on reading, they looked for the answers in a book.

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