IIn late 19th-century Britain, Londoners waited up to 12 days to receive postal deliveries. Letters are often exchanged with a frequency that we only imagine with the advent of email. Today, they fill the notebooks with the famous messages of explanations arranged for breakfast, which are done early in the morning, only to follow the argument unfolding in the middle of the day, accumulated in the reconciliation and restoration of the plan to meet. All before the night.
We tend to think of the pre-digital times as the same as now, but without our myriad digital distractions, but that was not the case. With oblivious ink and a wild pen rising to the edges, it is evident that the historical writers scratched out many such letters in a day. With emails filling up every hour or so, even a gentleman or woman of leisure could be forgiven for feeling distracted.
He claimed to be subject to distraction the cognitive crisis of the digital ageand there is clearly a great deal of real and plausible interest in youth. Indeed, I set up a Center for the Study of Work in order to give space to this very thing exploration.
Little wonder then, perhaps, that in recent! part of the Atlanticheadlined “Choice college students who can’t read books”, Rose Horowitch reports that these days universities “students are having trouble staying in tune with the intent.” She reports that many middle and high schools in the US have turned away from literary texts in favor of short passages to better teach and practice information skills that are directly relevant to the job.
But I wonder what we can learn if we place our concerns in a larger historical context. Does it help those who lament our inability to sit attentively through a classical music concert to realize that an 18th century symphony was not designed with the expectations of an audience who listened statically, intently? Did the monks of the Middle Ages not need smartphones to trust their scribe’s work to be threatened by the demon of distraction, Titivillus?
Accusations of refusing to pay attention to palms have been fairly consistent in recent history. Even at the beginning of the 20th century, the writer and critic Esdras Pound recognized the poetic version of the prose as alienated from readers who could not pay attention to the linguistic density of the verses: “The popular art of success consists simply in never putting it down.” more on each page than the ordinary reader can lick it up in his usual quick, more attentive half.
Author Jonathan Bate recently spoke on the BBC Today program about current education systems producing university students unable to access new long-term forms of education. At issue here, according to Bate, are the skills of intentionality and critical thinking. Plus, he says, focusing on reading a long novel is beneficial to our mental health. Gone are the days when a group of students could be asked to write three Charles Dickens books a week. However, Bate’s trinity of Great Expectations (about 187,000 words), David Copperfield (about 358,000) and House Bleak (about 356,000) would take the average reader about 50 hours in total. Even a frenzied lymph will leave little time for critical reflection and will almost certainly not be able to soothe mental health.
Horowitch engages with this table by considering that we should see both a decline in long texts being entered and variations in consumption and how; “I’ve been told by a couple of professors that their students reading books is akin to listening to vinyl records – a small subculture that you may still enjoy, but which is mostly a relic of an earlier era.” Yet we saw you together the audience for audiobooks is growing significantly. His article suggests that we may see not so much a loss of skill in reading a long novel as a change in values: “Students Can I still read books […] just not choosing. “Is it possible that the 19th century novel, much loved by many boomers and gen 10 members, is becoming as much of a slog in some younger generations as the 18th century novel was, in many literary studies of the 1990s? So that what we have noticed in the crisis of attention be in part A change in priorities?
We should not be complacent about any of this. Absence: it is essential that we understand what are the gains and losses of our mobile focus and who will be most interested in gaining and losing these new economies. If our literary education system has more emphasis on information processing skills, is this at the expense of the development of human empathy, or the understanding of identities different from our own, through engagement with fictional imaginary worlds?
Even more fundamentally, it’s time to consider what kinds of attention we crave and why. What psychologists sometimes call unifocal attention (which we think of as focused rather than diffused attention) is only one way to pay attention, and it’s not always the most useful – as Chris Chabris and Dan Simons showed in their 1999 experiment called “The Invisible Gorilla Experiment.” He was asked to count the number of jumps in a basketball game, because the test subjects ignored the man on the court during the middle jumps of spikes. Focusing intently on one thing can blind us to important but unexpected events. A diffused Jupiter could exercise different cognitive muscles and bring different rewards.
Are there ways of caring for the younger generation that are difficult for those of us who are older to value, but bring new benefits to the species? What’s fast, what’s rapid fire, written messages in minutes? The art of brevity, the expression of humor in 140 or 280 concrete characters? What about the dexterity and reflexivity of physical and mental movements in video games, or the dispersed social forms of collective attention that are possible in online environments?
We can and should ask these questions, while they are clearly very real issues with our attention to our economy. Perhaps history has shown us to be more flexible in the ways in which we practice the present and enjoy a long-lasting culture. And in a context that has been invaluable in recent decades, it is possible to recognize perhaps also the potential for emergent practices of attention, which could be linked to social and individual good.