In late-19th-century Britain, Londoners could expect to receive up to 12 postal deliveries a day. Letters were often exchanged with the frequency that we imagine only occurred with the advent of email. Today, archives brim with scrawled missives detailing arrangements to meet for dinner that are made first thing in the morning, only to be followed by an argument unfolding in the middle of the day, culminating in a reconciliation and reinstatement of the plan to meet. All before nightfall.
We tend to think of the pre-digital era as much the same as now but without our myriad digital distractions, but it was not so. With ink blots and wild fountain-pen trails going up the margins, it is clear these historical writers were dashing off many such letters in a day. With the doormat filling up with mail every hour or so, even a gentleman or woman of leisure might have been forgiven for feeling rather distracted.
Distraction is claimed to be the underlying cognitive crisis of the digital age, and there is clearly a lot of very real, and justifiable, concern for younger generations. Indeed, I founded the Centre for Attention Studies to give space to this very exploration.
Little surprise then, perhaps, that in a recent piece in the Atlantic, headlined “The elite college students who can’t read books”, Rose Horowitch reports that these days university “students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet”. She reports that many middle and high schools in the US have turned away from literary texts in favour of short passages to enable the better teaching and testing of information skills that are directly relevant to the workplace.
But I wonder what we might learn if we set our current concerns in a broader historical context. Would it help those who lament our growing inability to sit attentively through a classical music concert to know that the 18th-century symphony was not designed with the expectation of an audience who listened with static, rapt attention? Or that the medieval monks did not need smartphones in order to believe their scribal work was threatened by the demon of distraction, Titivillus?
Accusations of shrinking attention spans have been a fairly consistent part of the narrative of modernity. Even in the early 20th century, the writer and critic Ezra Pound was identifying the turn from poetry to prose as the result of a distracted readership, unable to attend to the linguistic density of verse: “The art of popular success lies simply in never putting more on any one page than the most ordinary reader can lick off it in his normally rapid, half-attentive skim-over.”
Author Jonathan Bate spoke recently on the BBC Today programme about current education systems producing university students unable to attend to long-form novels. The casualties here, according to Bate, are the skills of concentration and critical thinking. Plus, he says, the focus of reading a long novel is good for our mental health. Bate laments the days in which he could ask a group of students to read three Charles Dickens novels in a week. Yet Bate’s trinity of Great Expectations (about 187,000 words), David Copperfield (about 358,000) and Bleak House (about 356,000) would take an average reader around 50 hours in total. Even a frenetic skim-read would leave little time for critical reflection and would almost certainly not be soothing for one’s mental health.
Horowitch complicates this picture by considering that we might not be seeing so much a decline in engaging with long texts as shifts in what is consumed and how: “A couple of professors told me that their students see reading books as akin to listening to vinyl records – something that a small subculture may still enjoy, but that’s mostly a relic of an earlier time.” Yet, simultaneously, we’ve seen the audience for audiobooks grow significantly. Her article suggests we might be witnessing not so much a loss of the skill to read a long novel as a shift in values: “Students can still read books […] they’re just choosing not to.” Is it not possible that the 19th-century novel, much loved by many boomers and members of gen X, is becoming for some in the younger generations as much of a slog as the 18th-century novel was for many literature students of the 1990s? Might what we have identified as an attention crisis be in part a shift in priorities?
None of this is to suggest we should be complacent. Far from it: it’s essential that we understand what the gains and losses of our shifting focus are and who is gaining and losing the most from these new attention economies. If our literary education systems are putting more of an emphasis on information-processing skills, then is this at the expense of the development of human empathy, or an understanding of identities different from our own, through engagement with imaginative fictional worlds?
Even more fundamentally, it is time to consider what types of attention we aspire to and why. What psychologists sometimes call unifocal attention (what we would think of focused rather than diffused attention) is only one way to attend, and it’s not always the most useful – as Chris Chabris and Dan Simons showed in their 1999 experiment known as the “Invisible Gorilla Experiment”. Asked to count the number of passes in a basketball game, the experiment’s subjects failed to notice the person in the gorilla suit dancing through the middle of the match. Focus trained intently on one thing can blind us to important but unexpected events. A more diffused focus might exercise different cognitive muscles and bring different rewards.
Is it possible there are modes of attention that a younger generation is developing that might be difficult for those of us who are older to value, but which bring new types of benefit? What of the rapid, quick-fire, written exchanges of instant messaging? The art of the pithy, witty expression condensed into 140 or 280 characters? What of the dexterity and reflex-training physical and mental movement of the video game, or the socially dispersed forms of collective attention that are possible in online environments?
We can, and should, be able to ask these questions while being clear there are very real problems with our contemporary attention economies. Maybe history can show us how to be more flexible in the ways we present, engage with, and enjoy long-form culture. And in a context that was unimaginable just decades ago, perhaps we can also identify the potential for emergent practices of attention that could be harnessed for social and individual good.
