Shakespeare’s first performed plays occurred in the late 16th century, the colour television was first demonstrated in 1928, the first YouTube video (‘Me at the zoo’, uploaded by co-founder Jawed Karim) was released approximately 23 years ago, and the modern social media titan, TikTok, was created approximately 10 years ago. The final marked an important, dangerous and disquieting epoch in entertainment. Though the claim that human attention span has dropped under that of a goldfish remains an incontrovertibly proven fallacy, in the past 20 years alone, the average amount of time a person can spend focused on a task digitally has plummeted from two and a half minutes to just 47 seconds. 47 seconds before we check the time, fiddle with our phones and lose our train of thought. Addiction to short-form content as such has greatly contributed to this collapse. To put it plainly, attention is a digital drug. It harnesses mass amounts of political, economic and social sway. For...
Below is the opening prologue to the first book in Rian’s book series. The series includes so far: 1. The Red Emerald: The Beginning 2. The Red Emerald: The Discovery 3. The Red Emerald: The Hidden Threat 4. The Red Emerald: The Flames of War 5. The Red Emerald: The Palace of Darkness (with 3 more books on the way) Special recognition should be given to Rian’s initiative and creativity in developing his own book series at such a young age. For a short summary of the series, Rian describes it as 'a fantasy series that involves a sacred, powerful object called the Red Emerald. When this artefact is found in medieval England, a dark force wants it. The Emerald bearer battles his way through tough obstacles in the hope of freeing the treasure within the Emerald.' Prologue: Once, long ago, there was darkness. Not the sort of darkness that lingers in corners that are not yet dominated by light. This darkness was much, much more. When the earth was first created, darkness surrounded ...