When I told my American colleagues at a sociology conference this summer that I expect my students to read Émile Durkheim’s Suicide, they reacted with incredulity. One of them informed me that you “can’t expect them to read the old way” because “these kids don’t have the attention span that we had in college.” Time and again I encounter this view. Serious reading, I’m told, has become a lost art. Indeed, the precarious status of people’s attention has acquired the status of conventional truth.
In her recent book, Reclaiming Conversation, Sherry Turkle observes that “these days, attention is in short supply — in college classrooms.” Sven Birkerts contends that human beings have become psychologically transformed through their immersion in digital technology. He writes of a world where people who face “the stimulus barrage of modern life” find it “ever harder to generate and then sustain a level of attention — focus — that full involvement in experience requires.”
We talk a lot about distraction, but the way we tend to talk about it suffers from historical amnesia. Since the invention of writing, people have warned about its supposedly harmful effects. Socrates thought it would weaken readers’ memories. “Be careful,” Seneca warned, “lest this reading of many authors and books of every sort may tend to make you discursive and unsteady.” In his Moral Letters to Lucilius, written between AD 63 and 65, Seneca touches on a condition that today might be diagnosed as attention deficit disorder. The “reading of many books is a distraction,” he cautioned, that leaves the reader “disoriented and weak.”
Every phase of technological innovation in printing and publishing has been paralleled by an outburst of anxiety about the public’s capacity for attention. The growth of mass-market publications in the 18th century provoked a veritable moral panic. Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) was condemned for distracting young readers from their proper duties, and also for provoking a wave of copycat suicides.
It was around this time that a morally charged vocabulary emerged to describe the harmful conditions associated with reading — terms like “Bibliomania,” “book madness,” “reading rage,” and “reading mania.” The overwhelming concern with reading was that it was risky, as if an unrestrained lust for fiction could cause readers to lose control of their lives. In 1750, Lord Chesterfield warned his son, “Beware of Biblomane,” adding that there was “no one thing more offensive to a company than that inattention and distraction.”
In the late 19th century, the academic study of distraction and attention became an area of great interest to the emerging field of psychology. William James devoted a chapter of his path-breaking The Principles of Psychology (1890) to the issue.
Turn-of-the-century sociology was also drawn to the modern predicament of urban distraction. Georg Simmel, for example, offered a compelling — and still influential — account in his 1903 essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” Simmel explored the “intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli.” He argued that distraction was brought on by the “fluctuations and discontinuities” of the urban milieu, the “unexpectedness of violent stimuli.” People cope by adopting a habit of mutual reserve, indifference — a style of studied inattentiveness. Simmel’s claim that distraction constitutes an integral feature of modern subjectivity has influenced subsequent sociological theories of alienation.
Since the early 20th century, innovations in media technology have been regularly criticized for their distracting effect on the public. Television was a regular subject of concern to cultural theorists such as Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Raymond Williams, who claimed it fostered an unfocused imagination.
The distraction debate reflects an anxiety about how to gain the attention of students. One underlying issue raised in Turkle’s book is what happens when a student experiences a “moment of boredom.” Though boredom can be associated with inattention, it also raises questions about why professors struggle to cultivate curiosity and interest in the classroom. At the very least, a historical perspective should make us wonder if the apparent decline of attention is a technological or cultural issue.
In previous centuries, people sought distraction by reading novels. Today the concern is that people have become distracted from reading itself. One distinctive feature of this current narrative of distraction is a disturbing tendency to accommodate the supposed problems that people have reading texts. Some assert that “deep attention,” the cognitive style associated with the humanities, has become alien to the mental outlook of digitally savvy young people, who are said to be disposed toward “hyper attention.”
For some the loss of deep attention is an opportunity rather than a problem. The literary critic Katherine Hayles calls for embracing the culture of hyper attention and changing the educational environment to “fit the students.” Demands for getting rid of lectures, written essays, and the serious reading of books are justified on the ground that education needs to be reorganized around the cognitive styles of young people. Many universities have responded by adapting to the sensibility of digital natives, who apparently cannot be expected to read books. In some classrooms, texting or browsing online during lectures is represented as a form of educational research.
Rather than resign ourselves to students’ frayed attention, let’s win it back.
Such attempts to hold the attention of students with gadgets simply evade an age-old problem. Gaining attention has always involved a struggle of ideas and ideals. The Protestant Reformation launched a veritable literacy campaign as thousands of hitherto nonliterate believers sought to read the vernacular Bible. In the 19th century, barely educated socialist workers throughout Europe taught themselves how to read because they associated literacy with human emancipation. Captivating content always trumps distraction. In the end, what motivates students is not the availability of fancy gadgets but the quality of the content of their education.
The act of paying attention to a text, a lecture, or a speech is mediated through culture. Literacy comes into its own when people read what matters to them. Today, not even the sound of shots being fired on the battlefield in Northern Iraq can distract Kurdish Peshmergas fighters from attending night schools to learn how to read. For these fighters, reading is an integral dimension of their cause.
Unfortunately, in many universities reading is not seen as a cause worth fighting for. Academics who ought to know better have accepted the idea that students no longer possess the attention span required to read a book. Such claims serve as justifications for adopting a narrow, instrumental attitude toward reading. This flight from demanding and challenging texts is often awarded the praise of “good practice” on the grounds that it is relevant to the needs of the digital generation. Sadly, such accommodation merely intensifies the problem that it is meant to avoid: intellectually switched-off students will become seriously distracted.
Instead of blaming our supposed Age of Distraction or turning the lecture hall into a digital playpen, we should think harder about how we can earn the attention of our students.
