Platform infrastructures of reading: Postliterary Attention Theory and summary-first interfaces

Contemporary discourse frequently diagnoses an “attention crisis,” framing distraction and overload as individual or psychological failures. This article argues that the crisis is better understood as a transformation in the media-technological conditions of reading. It develops Postliterary Attention Theory (PLAT) to explain how platform infrastructures organise textual encounter through three mechanisms: pre-legibility, in which ranking and summary layers shape salience before reading; labour shift, in which platforms compress and pre-frame texts while readers inherit burdens of verification and contextual reconstruction; and temporal governance, in which refresh rhythms, notifications, and metric feedback normalise fragmented engagement. The outcome is stratified durational literacy: unequal capacity for sustained reading, interpretive depth, and visibility across different infrastructural and socioeconomic conditions. The article advances three propositions—attention as embodied media labour, algorithmic co-reading as hybrid literacy, and fragmentation as structural affect—and offers a conceptual demonstration of how PLAT may be operationalised through threshold analysis, with summary-first interfaces and AI-generated overviews treated as exemplary reading thresholds in discovery environments. It concludes by reframing media power as the organisation of literacy and by outlining a comparative agenda for studying reading under convergent media conditions.