You’ve probably heard the news: Nobody in tech-intensive cultures can pay attention anymore. Getting through an episode of “Frasier” without checking your phone is difficult. Forget about sinking yourself into Middlemarch all afternoon. I could slip into a deep attentive mode pretty easily when I was nineteen. Now it’s more difficult. Much of the time, my brain feels like burger.
I was talking to my students about this recently. As part of a writing project, we had just finished some visits to museums in Los Angeles, and while they enjoyed their time outside the classroom, many confessed that they often found it hard to focus on the exhibits. Even in quiet, contemplative spaces like museum galleries, minds drifted and surfed and clicked away, often literally, everyone’s smartphone being present. We were all—I experienced it too—pulled in multiple, twisting directions by our own twitchy brains.
The broad decay of attentional capacity is often articulated and diagnosed in scolding terms—people just don’t have the appetite or patience or sophistication or whatever for hard news, difficult poetry, long books, serious films, and so forth, compared to some putative golden age of intake.
But this criticism is flawed, because its terms, dialed in upon individual sloth and failure, obscure how little control a person in the urbanized world has over their perceptual fields, as every space we inhabit has been perforated by capital projects: by expanding cycles of production, consumption, and disposal. There’s always something flashing, dinging, humming, vibrating, linking.
In 24/7: Terminal Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Jonathan Crary argues that “there are now very few interludes of human existence (with the colossal exception of sleep) that have not been penetrated and taken over as work time, consumption time, or marketing time.”1 And capital is working hard to conquer and financialize our dreamworlds—or just eliminate them altogether. “The planet,” Crary observes,
becomes reimagined as a non-stop work site or an always open shopping mall of infinite choices, tasks, selections, and digressions. Sleeplessness is the state in which producing, consuming, and discarding occur without pause, hastening the exhaustion of life and the depletion of resources.2
Now “we face the near impossibility of living humanely”3 along with “an immense incapacitation of visual experience,” as all life is defined in terms of capitalist utility and corralled by grabby advertising technologies.4
For the historian of technology Justin E.H. Smith, much of this derives from how we experience and interpret so much of our life-world through the phenomenological grid of the hyperlinked, endlessly expansive and expanding thing we call “the Internet.” An Internet-driven “algorithmicization” of reality fractures our attentional capacities, but tech boosters will call you a crank if you complain about it. Supposedly, it just is; supposedly, goes the silicon wisdom, this is naturally how things had to turn out.
Meanwhile, anyone with a brain can tell you that a shattered attention span feels bad. Few want to live this way, even if it seems like we’re essentially required to now.
So a good Luddite wonders: What should we . . . do?
Sustained attention is a practice. As we’ve all been finding out, life with / on the Internet, tethered to Devices, militates against this way of being in the world.
For me at least, writing is a way to (re)train my attention.5 A simultaneously creative and critical mode, it has a corollary in deep reading.6 I do one, I can do the other. If I get depressed, I can’t do either well.
Both are cognitive practices that both concentrate the self and draw you outward toward the world, into a richer engagement with its rhythms, including those of other people. The work fights solipsism. Writing and reading, after all, can be forms of genuine if partial mind-melding, of socially reproductive consciousness-exchange. You are getting someone else’s thoughts, albeit in edited form.7
I emphasize this in class: Learning to write means learning to pay attention. Writers notice. Same goes for serious readers.
Teaching is also a mode of intense present-ness. Being tuned in with other minds in a live discursive space is cool. Granted, it doesn’t happen all the time; even for experienced professors, some sessions end up duds, and not all courses are discussion-based anyway. When a seminar room is humming, though, when the discussion is lively and the vibes are good, when the students are doing most of the work instead of passively listening to their teacher, it’s magic. You really can use that word.
Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Terminal Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (New York: Verso, 2013), 15.
Ibid., 17.
Ibid., 19.
Ibid., 33.
The deeply vexing irony is that I do my slow writing on the same machine that brings me the fast Internet.
Depth vs. surface is a useful-enough framing for reading practices. Perhaps one marker of “deep” reading is either temporal extension or lyrical intensity. But now we’re going down a rabbit hole of metaphors, and besides, this is just a footnote.
I realize that’s a big “albeit.” Even a Joycean stream-of-consciousness text redacts a lot and rearranges still more.
Just read this in my quiet apartment and it was nice. Silly of me to completely miss this for so long, but it occurs to me that listening to my records has been something that's helped keep my attention from completely fracturing and that I should use quiet Sunday mornings like this to read a bit more as well. Time to go grab that Elmore Leonard book I picked up yesterday.