There are awards for the best films of the year but not for the best Tik Tok videos. Which is too bad, as 2024 has produced many small masterpieces. From @yojairyjaimee, a flawless one-minute recreation of some bizarre 2009 theatrical patter by Kanye West (which now goes by Ye). From @accountwashackedwith50m, twelve seconds of chocolate-covered strawberries, shot from the position of an R&B saxophonist. From @notkenna, a seven-second dog shot to look, with preposterously low-budget effects, as if it were flying On a broomstick. Such online gems are what poet Patricia Lockwood called “the rubies of the moment.” Each captures the light in a strange and hypnotic way.
Just don’t stare too long. If every video is an explosion of emoji, then an extended TikTok session is fireworks in your face for hours. That can’t be healthy, right? In 2010, technology writer Nicholas Carr wisely raised this concern “Shallow: What the Internet is doing to our brains” Pulitzer Prize finalist. “What the Internet seems to be doing is diminishing my ability to concentrate and reflect,” Carr wrote. He reported increasing difficulty reading longer works. He wrote about a very brilliant philosophy student — in fact, a Rhodes Scholar — who didn’t read books at all but got what he could from Google. This student “seems more the rule than the exception,” Carr asserted ominously.
Carr caused an avalanche. Read a lot of works about our ruin attention Including Nir Eyal “Indispersible” Johann Hari “Stolen Focus” Cal Newport “deep work” And Jenny Odell “How come you do nothing.” Carr himself has a new book, “Super Bloom” Not just about distraction but all the psychological damage of the internet. We have experienced a “fragmentation of consciousness,” Carr wrote, where our world has become “incomprehensible by information.”
Read one of these books and you’ll feel stressed. But read two more and the skeptical demon in you will wake up. Weren’t critics horrified by the brain-distorting power of everything from pianos to brightly colored posters? Isn’t there actually a long section in Plato’s dialogue in which Socrates argues that writing will destroy people’s memories?
I particularly admire a disturbing essay by Nathaniel Hawthorne, from 1843. Hawthorne warns of the arrival of a technology so powerful that those born after it will lose the capacity for mature conversation. He predicts that they will look for separate corners rather than shared spaces. Their discussions will turn bitter, and “every mortal connection” will be “chilled by deadly frost.” Hawthorne’s concern? Replace the open stove with an iron stove.
It’s true that we have raised the alarm about things that seem light in retrospect, Carr Hurt responds, but how much solace should we take in that? It is clear that today’s digital formats are more addictive than their predecessors. You can even read past complaining as a measure of how bad things are. Perhaps the critics were right when they saw the danger on television, for example. If it now seems benign, it shows how bad current media is.
It’s been fifteen years since Carr’s “The Shallows” was released. Now we have what may be the most sophisticated contribution to the genre, “Siren Call.” By Chris Hayes, MSNBC anchor. Hayes acknowledges the long history of such panics. He admits that some of them look funny in hindsight, as with 1950s comic books. However, others seem prophetic, such as early warnings about smoking. “Has the global, pervasive, and chronically interconnected world of social media evolved more like comic books or cigarettes?” Hayes asks.
Great question. If we take the skeptics seriously, how well does the disaster argument hold up? Enough, Hayes argues, that we should be seriously concerned. “We have a country full of loudspeakers, an overwhelming wall of sound, and 24/7 casino lights flashing at us, all part of a system meticulously designed to draw our attention away from us for profit,” he writes. Thinking clearly and speaking sensibly under these circumstances is “like trying to meditate in a strip club.” The case he presents is thoughtful, informed and disturbing. But is it convincing?
History is full of laments about distraction. Revolving lights and strippers are not a new problem. But what is important to note about past discussions on this topic is that they were indeed discussions. Not everyone felt like the sky was falling, and dissenters raised related questions. Is it really a good idea to pay attention? Who serves his purposes?
Such questions arose in the eighteenth century with the emergence of a troublesome new commodity: the novel. Although today’s critics bemoan our inability to read long novels, such books were once widely considered the intellectual equivalent of fast food. “They concentrate the attention so deeply, and give such lively pleasure, that the mind, once accustomed to them, is no longer able to submit to the painful task of serious study,” complained the Anglican priest Visimus Knox. Thomas Jefferson warned that once readers fell under the spell of novels—“this mass of rubbish”—they would lose patience with “useful reading.” They were suffering from “inflated imagination, diseased judgment, and disgust toward all the real business of life.”
Famous writers take a different view, as English professor Natalie M. Phillips in her book “distraction.” They wondered whether unbiased attention was healthy. Maybe the mind needs a little jumping around to do its job. “The Loiter” (1750-52) and “The Idler” (1758-60), two series of essays by samuel Johnson, Rejoice in such mental wandering. Johnson was constantly picking up books and constantly putting them down. When a friend asked him whether Johnson had actually finished a book he claimed to have “researched”, he replied: “No, sir, don’t do that.” You reading books during?
As the multi-focal mascot, Phillips introduces Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne’s film hero. “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman” Published between 1759 and 1767. The novel begins with Tristram’s idea. His mother’s sudden intervention – “Pray, my dear, haven’t you forgotten to finish the hour?” -The moment his father reaches his sexual climax, Tristram is left mentally distracted. Even his name is a product of broken interest. It was supposed to be Trismegistus, but the maid assigned to tell the priest got distracted and forgot everything except the first stanza. Tristram tells this tale of woe in a tangle of digressions, punctuated by breathless dashes.
In nine scattered volumes, Tristram never gets to recount his life. However, readers found his flowing thoughts captivating. They may also have found it liberating, Phillips suggests, given the tendency of traditional authorities to demand unwavering focus. “What is the condition for combining prayers in the correct manner?” asked the widely used Anglican Catechism. “Close attention without wandering.”
Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary noted that the word “presence” has multiple meanings. The first, which should be emphasized, was related to the second, which was waiting as a servant. A Modern History of Concern in the United States in the Nineteenth Century, by Caleb Smith “Thoreau’s axe” He highlights this point clearly. Over the centuries, thinkers have sought to stave off distraction. But the loudest voices calling for attention were directed toward subordinates, schoolchildren, and women. “attention-TION!” Military commanders shout at their men to get them to stand up straight. The arts of attention are a form of self-discipline, but they are also ways to discipline others.
By the nineteenth century, some had become wary of the intense forms of concentration that industrial life required. Psychiatrist Jean-Etienne Dominique Esquirol introduced a new diagnosis, “monomania,” which was given the fashion that ADHD has become today. Esquirol felt it was the distinctive disruption of modernity. Herman Melville made it central “Moby Dick” Where Captain Ahab’s focus on the white whale leads to ruin. Hypnosis, an intense form of concentration, has become a topic of widespread concern.
It was Paul Lafarge, Karl Marx A Cuban-born son-in-law, who turned that fear of attention into a political platform. (His essays were recently reissued by the New York Review Books.) Lafarge believed that focusing on one’s work and suppressing one’s natural instincts in the 1980s was not a virtue. Rather, it was a matter of “playing the machine” on behalf of his persecutors. Lafarge insisted that revolutionary consciousness meant asserting “the right to idleness.” Workers of the world, relax.
One daydream about the Lafargo resistance, in which young men are recruited by samizdat versions of Tristram Shandy. But will they read it? I assign my college students about half what I was assigned as an undergraduate twenty years ago, and many professors have felt the need for a similar cutback. “I have taught at small liberal arts colleges for more than 15 years, and in the last five years, it has been as if someone flipped a switch,” theologian Adam Kotsko wrote. “Students are intimidated by anything longer than 10 pages, and seem to walk away from readings of less than 20 pages with no real understanding.”
Whatever previous writers might have thought about the virtues of caring, pessimists might argue that the problem is different now. It’s as if we don’t read books as much as books read us. TikTok is particularly adept at this; Just swipe and the app will learn — from your behavior, as well as other information gathered from your phone — about what might keep you addicted. “I wake up in a cold sweat every now and then and think: What have we brought to the world?” said Tony Fadel, one of the iPhone developers.
As a baseline, Chris Hayes points out Abraham Lincoln Debates with Stephen A. Douglass, 1750s: A three-hour exchange of speeches on the momentous subject of slavery. He marvels at the complexity and layering of the speeches, filled with “overlapping, overlapping sentences, with ideas introduced at the beginning of the sentence, left for a while, and then returned later.” He imagines the “absolute stamina of concentration” that Lincoln and Douglas’ audience must have possessed.
Those crowds were great. Would voters flock to something similar today? Not likely, says Hayes. Information now comes in “bites that are shorter than ever before,” and “focus is more difficult to maintain.” Hayes has seen this firsthand. His illuminating account of the behind-the-scenes of cable news describes thoughtful, self-deprecating journalists in their scramble to retain wayward viewers. Flashy graphics, loud sounds, quick topic changes, and exciting stories – it’s like jangling keys to lure a dog. The more viewers get their news from apps, the harder it will be for TV producers to get rid of these switches.
