The Tyranny of Attention

Duty and observance in the Digital Age

There was a recent scandal amongst The Sensibles of the commentariat that ‘The Kids Don’t Read’. The mild hysteria was prompted by an article in The Atlantic that cited no studies (“no comprehensive data exists on this trend”) but after interviewing 33 professors, the reporter, Rose Horowitch, found that students were arriving at college unwilling to read set texts due to having never read a full book before. This finding chimed with a recent trend on ‘BookTok’ where influencers casually state that they dislike books with too many words, or with too much description in them. The conclusion now, by many, is that young people now don’t know how to read.

This is alarming, if true. Being unable, or unwilling, to read a full length book is a problem. Reading these kind of texts is a life skill and one that has extensive personal rewards, so not doing that can have consequences, such as an underdeveloped set of critical abilities, being easily distracted by trivialities, and not having the sort of life skills many books can impart. The diagnosis by those paid to have an opinion on these things is that ‘kids these days’ attention spans have reduced. On the face of it this sounds about right. We live in an age where all human knowledge is instantly available in our pocket at all times, where all art can be viewed immediately at home even with follow up videos explaining said art, and where, if we find something boring, we can simply swipe past it. The profit incentive for all the corporations that own the giant media conglomerates who run our lives now, is aimed at our attention. Grab it and hold it, is the mentality. Netflix famously said that their “biggest competitor is sleep”. Under these conditions you’d be hard pressed to argue that attention spans would reduce. And this is the overall consensus amongst Those Who Know.

All the major outlets, and most of the smaller ones, had a think piece on the subject. Most of them, to their credit, treat the Atlantic article with some healthy skepticism. The Columbia Spectator took issue with the article’s claim that “Students at exclusive schools like Columbia … struggle to muster the attention or ambition required to immerse themselves in a substantial text”, stating that “the ‘vast majority’ of Columbia Professors [they] spoke…