Of course, like many countries, especially in this region, there are so very many things and people to love, marvel at, admire and enjoy. Lao people are kind, forgiving and generous. A single smile – one that shows the teeth and crinkles the eyes, from a stranger, a friend or my own mouth – can transform the day from bad to good. The food here is mind-blowingly delicious, and the local attitude to eating and religion is both enlightened and bare-bones traditional. The weather is languid. Life slows down and stress fades away.

But one thing I could never get used to – and still can't 11 years later – is the overwhelming inaction. Not just political inaction, although in a country that has been in the grip of a communist dictatorship since the mid-1970s, there's plenty of that. I mean an actual lack of physical action; there's just so much ... sitting around. Stroll through any market and you're met with rows and rows of people staring off into space. Not talking, not reading. Maybe eating. And more staring. Completely inert.

That was back in 2006. In 2007, Facebook was unleashed upon an unsuspecting world. Two years later, pretty much everyone had a smartphone. And now, eight years on, those same rows of faces in markets and on roadsides are lit up by their screens, as their owners sit and scroll endlessly. Is this preferable to staring into space? Probably, although I know for a fact that most of what everyone is clicking through and "liking" indiscriminately is the usual dross. Facebook, YouTube, funny videos, memes, selfies.

Is Facebook really the gateway to the rest of the world we think it is? Over lunch recently, an acquaintance who works in communications told me about a recent interaction she had with a government department. She was working on a communications strategy for one of its large projects, and an official she was liaising with took her aside. It's all going really well, he told her, but there is something else we'd like you to do with us. Could you ... teach us the internet?

Teach us the internet. Of course! So many of these endless scrollers, even the young ones, have no idea about the vast reservoirs of information that lie beneath the surface of social media. They didn't grow up with internet. They never had to listen to those painful early dial-up beeps, or knew anything before Google. Hell, many don't even know what Google is for, even though there is an official Google Laos. As with so many things in a society that is developing so fast, there is a sense that people have just been dropped, like aliens, into a ready-made ecosystem with no road map or set of instructions.

It's an apt analogy, actually – well done me. Driving on Vientiane's roads is a lesson in alien-from-outer-space cluelessness. It's fair to say that 99.99 per cent of Lao drivers have not had the benefit of driving lessons. They just plop down at the wheel and give it a go, driving in much the same way they ride motorbikes. Road rules are not so much ignored as non-existent, and roundabouts exist only for ... actually, what are they for? I have been stranded on a roundabout for minutes at a time because no one will let me through, but there is no rudeness or aggression here, just a complete lack of skill or etiquette. And lots of accidents.

But back to Facebook. No judgement here: I'm as likely as the next person to be found staring at my smartphone screen during just about any still moment of the day. I'm a late adopter, having shunned social media for various reasons over the years. But here, where I sometimes feel more disconnected than I've ever felt in my life, my online reading habits are still those of the inveterate snob that I am. I scroll through my feed, skipping past personal posts from friends and acquaintances, avoiding clickbait on principle, rarely stopping to watch a video. I zero in, instead, on news and articles from established sites. I gobble up long-form journalism like junk food. I don't know how I would survive without my daily, hourly, news-and-good-writing fix – at my fingertips, all the time. I don't know, in other words, what I would do without social media.

Phone-wise, I'm not alone, here in urban Laos. All around me, people are scrolling and tapping. In the markets, at roadside grills, in restaurants and shopping malls. But, my friend's government experience notwithstanding, the reservoir of the internet is unlikely to be tapped any time soon in Laos, a culture where reading for pleasure is an almost entirely foreign concept. I'm not being sarcastic: Lao people don't read, and that's a fact.

And it's not just a lack of personal preference, the way it is in, say, Australia, where many, many people don't read books. It's an actual, ingrained, educational trait; almost no one has been educated with the notion of reading for anything other than rote-learning or deciphering forms.

My main job during this one-year stint has been editing a magazine, with a small team of other English speakers. It's the new, improved edition of the official airline magazine, and our brief has been relatively simple: produce interesting content for the discerning traveller. Many Lao Airlines customers are from Asia. A good proportion are Lao. Almost all have money, or they'd travel overland. We are told to consider locals as a large proportion of the readership.

The magazine is all in English, and I'd like to point out we began with the best of intentions, commissioning high-quality translations, more or less verbatim, for each story. It seemed like the right thing to do. Two editions in, and we received some feedback from our Lao readers. The magazine was declared unequivocally boring.

"Too many words – no one will read them," M said. She's the sparky young editorial assistant we hired early on, and who has quickly become an office mainstay. Smart, educated, ambitious – she's the future of Laos. And she hates reading. She actually shudders at the thought. "I look at this, all these words, and I think 'no'," she said, miming vigorous page-turning.

"I don't want to know all this stuff. I don't care who started this restaurant or why. I don't care about this person's life. I just want to know where it is and how much it is."

Despair on my side, tempered by the resignation I now feel about pretty much everything in this town. But it's a jarring realisation also: to think that the information superhighway that is now so much a part of modern life is all but obscured here. It's hidden under the shiny, deceptive surface of social media, over which the locals skitter endlessly, like pond-skaters, scrolling, scrolling endlessly with little thought to what lies beneath.

Sally Pryor is a Canberra Times journalist on leave in Laos.