hey you, pay attention!
Ever since Larry and Sergey put their tech-heads-together in the late 90s we have asked if Google is making us stupid? There is a palpable sense of crisis wrt our concentration spans together with our ability to finish the jobs we start and actually get anything done. Distraction is everywhere.
We are utterly conflicted about the relationship between concentration and distraction and behind these worries are two connected assumptions, typically blamed on our addiction to the dopamine hit delivered by social media via various intrusive devices. The first is that our attention-deficit is both recent and bad for us; the second, that our concentration was better in the past. Where once we would read, enjoy, understand and learn, we now skim, flirt and gain precious little.
But what if our understanding of this narrative is misplaced and our attention has always been affected by the wider context of society, its norms and expectations? It’s not just smartphones that have had an impact, every new technology, from the sundial to the printed word, has changed our forms of appreciation and engagement with the world. Furthermore, I suspect, every generation believes its own changes are more significant than those of their forefathers. After all, just imagine the fun Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble had when they invented the wheel and don’t forget that rumpty-tumpty was only discovered during the swinging sixties.
The Victorian digital-distraction was the humble novel. Believe it or not, the fictional long-form prose of the mid-18th century caused society to erupt in moral outrage at the mere thought of valuable time being wasted upon such a vacuous pastime and even Charles Dickens gave Hard Times’ Mr Gradgrind a “deadly statistical clock, which measured every second with a beat like a rap upon a coffin lid”. We now fret that children no longer read but, back in the day, our forebears were panicking that they did. In this context, where the opposite of ‘free time’ is worryingly ’paid time’ (ie not free) being distracted is an intentional alternative to the puritanical work ethic!
Consequently, our view on one’s distraction needs to be seen in the round and concentration is a socially learned and practiced behaviour. Our modern appetite for binge-watching Line of Duty and Killing Eve makes it clear we are not losing our ability to focus on overly-complicated-overly-long exercises, we’re just directing it a different manner, towards different media, towards different things. So, read a good book if you choose or follow the influencer of your choice, as neither should be seen as an act of moral courage, nor of diminishing intelligence.
