The big idea: are our short attention spans really getting shorter?
Since at least 2008, when the US tech journalist Nicholas Carr asked: “Is Google making us stupid?”, there has been a sense of crisis around our concentration spans. Distraction is everywhere, and so are its putative antidotes. Apps such as PawBlock, offering cute animal pictures instead of your social media fix, and screen modes such as Microsoft’s Focus, are the tech versions of mindfulness, the perceived panacea for all modern ills. On the other hand, speed-reading programs such as QuickReader hold out the promise of absorbing more content in less time. We are utterly conflicted about the relationship between concentration and distraction.
Behind these worries and their remedies are two connected assumptions, typically blamed on our addiction to the dopamine highs of social media. The first is that our distractedness is both recent and negative; the second, that our concentration was better in the past. Carr recollects that formerly he would read immersively, engaging deeply with narrative, like a scuba diver. Now he is a jetski reader, skimming across the surface at speed. It is a compelling, and immediately recognisable, assessment.
But maybe these narratives of decline are misplaced – or, rather, like most narratives, their trajectory is shaped by the place we choose to start them. Comparing our concentration with an idealised recent past misses the fact that our attention has always been structured by the wider context. It’s not just smartphones that have had an impact. Every new technology, from the earliest books to portable timepieces, via reading glasses and trains, has changed our forms of apprehension and engagement with the world. Every generation thinks its own changes are more precipitate or significant than those of its grandparents.
For example, concentration became a crucial part of the ideology of workdiscipline during the Industrial Revolution. This was historian EP Thompson’s term for the admonitory regime of clocking in and out ushered in by new forms of capitalism. In that environment, to concentrate was to acquiesce as a good worker in the factories, mills and schoolrooms of Victorian England. Charles Dickens gave his cold schoolmaster Mr Gradgrind a “deadly statistical clock”, “which measured every second with a beat like a rap upon a coffin-lid”, as the model for this crushingly instrumentalist time
keeping. Seen in this light, distractedness is less a personal failing and more a radical alternative to an internalised puritan work ethic.
In what we used, revealingly, to call “free time” (is the opposite of “free” “paid for” or “occupied”?), some of our nostalgic assumptions need a bit of interrogation. Immersive concentration, in, say, reading, was never a natural default. It, too, was a learned behaviour, prompted by new media, produced by specific historical and technical circumstances. Like the digital distraction of our own day, deep, concentrated reading was the consequence of a particular new technology. That technology was the novel.
When long-form prose works started to emerge from the printing shops of the mid-18th century, they, and the time they promised to eat up, prompted something like a moral panic. Now we fret that children do not read (except, of course, when we are banning unsuitable books); our forebears were panicking that they did, diagnosing them with novel addiction, and worrying that they might copy the actions of their fictional heroes.
Children and women were thought particularly susceptible to these fictive worlds. The female novel reader reclining in an armchair was a focus for the sort of disapproval directed towards couch potatoes today. As the philosopher and early feminist Hannah More put it, disapprovingly, women’s focus on reading served “to feed habits of improper indulgence, and nourish a vain and visionary indolence, which lays the mind open to error and the heart to seduction”. There was only a short step from absorbed reading to ruin.
When the novel was new, then, deep, immersive reading was not seen as a sign of superior concentration. Rather, it was feared as the means to disconnect impressionable readers from the real world, with deleterious effects on their posture, eyesight and morality. There are some overlaps here with our fussing over the impact of mobile phones, but these past anxieties were attached to the very opposite of what we now worry about. Novelphobes were tut-tutting about scuba diving, not jetskiing.
The so-called reading revolution of the 18th century is often understood as a change from the intensive, repeated reading of a small number of works, usually moral or religious in tone, to wider consumption of numerous secular fictions. This intensive reading and rereading of a limited number of improving texts was itself the product of particular attitudes and media. Marginal notes in Renaissance books, and the development of indexes to direct the reader to pages of interest, were technologies that responded to, and enabled, a magpie-like form of reading.
Readers in the 16th century did not often read a book from start to finish, nor for its unfolding and complex narrative. Rather, they were “commonplacing”, or cherrypicking, looking for quotations, ideas, and phrases that could be cut and pasted from the text into their own writing, sometimes via a commonplace book or collection of such quotations. They were closer, perhaps, to our world. The fantastically powerful microcomputer almost everyone carries in their pockets is a commonplace book of snippets from our lives, displaying an impulse to customise the world that would be familiar in the age of Shakespeare.
Our own perceptions of our current period of distraction therefore need to be seen in a longer perspective. Concentration is a social, learned behaviour that is more necessary in some contexts than in others. The modern appetite for bingeing on box sets and multiepisode podcasts makes it clear that we are not losing the ability to concentrate, merely directing it towards different media. We concentrate when we want to. Distraction allows for different, not simply lesser, possibilities than absorption. And reading a book from start to finish is not a moral act.
• Emma Smith is professor of Shakespeare studies at Hertford College, Oxford.
Further reading
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman (Vintage, £10.99)
Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgenceby Anna Lembke (Headline, £10.99)
Writing on the Wall: The Intriguing History of Social Media, from Ancient Rome to the Present Day by Tom Standage (Bloomsbury, £14.99)
Readers in the 16th century did not often read a book from start to finish, nor for its unfolding and complex narrative