Short Attention Span? It’s Not Your Laptop, Mr. Carr: It’s You

The following essay is in response to this forum over at Britannica Blogs, which is itself a discussion of the Nick Carr piece, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, which I recently blogged about. In his article, Mr. Carr contends that the internet is fostering short attention spans and shallow reading, thereby fostering shallow thinking, and damaging the ability of users to concentrate on a single text for a long period of time. Carr of course entirely ignores the role of the user’s intentions; his internet users seem to be helpless automatons, forced to click links and graze on RSS feeds against their own will by the nefarious machine.

As you might expect, Sven Birkerts has chimed in, and after all these years, he still seems to believe that a lengthy text is somehow vitiated when it is read online, in the presence of other texts, otherwise known as hyperlinks. (As if reading a book in the public library doesn’t expose you to similar temptations!) And then this other guy Clay Shirky foolishly proclaims that literary culture is so 19th century, and the web will kill it once and for all.

What follows is a skeptical response to all of the above. Not surprisingly, I find myself agreeing most with Kevin Kelly in this forum. I think the web and our new tools will inevitably replace paper technologies if only for economic reasons — and that we have a huge opportunity now to determine the form they will take in the decades ahead. I also think we have the challenge of keeping our tools subservient to our humanity — a challenge that every technological advance has posed to date.

. . .

One of the things that surprised me most in reading this whole debate is this: nobody has yet acknowledged that it is entirely possible to read, be absorbed in, and thoroughly enjoy a book-length work of literature (or a book-length argument) on a screen. And not just contemporary works, but classics too. Not simply in spite of the availability of the web and recently-developed technologies, but because of it.

My discussion is going to take us slightly away from the web for a moment, but bear with me: I’ll make the connection presently.

Four years ago I bought my second PDA, to replace an old, creaky green-screen model I’d had for years. I’d read (and composed) a lot of plain text on that old PDA, and I enjoyed that well enough. But this new PDA had the advantage that it could display DRM-protected PDF files. That meant I could now read not only public-domain classics from Project Gutenberg on it, but also contemporary titles purchased from Amazon and other online vendors (they do exist).

With this new power, I bought and devoured Haruki Murakami’s masterpiece Kafka on the Shore — not a short book. Because I was interested in Proust and had just read Swann’s Way with such enjoyment, I bought (and read!) the PDF versions of Within a Budding Grove and the Penguin Lives biography. (It wasn’t so expensive from Amazon, back in the day.) I also read Norman Mailer’s book The Spooky Art, no longer available (for now) as PDF. Those are just the titles that really stand out in my memory. I know I read dozens more, mostly business and self-help books that seemed to offer something to me. My list of classics from Project Gutenberg was just as packed. I remember reading Tolstoy’s trilogy of memoirs (the Hogarth translation), DeQuincey’s Confessions, and a great deal of Robert Louis Stevenson’s travel writings. I read some Montaigne, and Seneca. All this over a period of a couple years, when I was also reading quite a number of other things — mostly magazines and novels — in paper form.

My point in citing all that is to exonerate the medium of the screen itself. There is nothing inherently bad about reading or writing on a screen, at least these days. So long as the contrast is good and you can turn the brightness down to a level suitable for hours of reading, so long as there’s enough text between “page turns” that you’re not pressing a button more than once every 200 words or so, so long as the battery life is long enough and you can sit comfortably while using the device, you should have no trouble getting lost in a long text.

Now, let me bring it back to the web. You might raise the objection that reading a PDF or a text file on a PDA is not reading “in cyberspace.” After all, I did load that device with these book-length texts, and it was disconnected from the web the whole time. Those texts contained no hyperlinks to tempt me off the lines I was reading.

All that is true, but it seems to me a distinction without a difference. I sold that PDA to a refurbisher a long time ago, and in the meantime I’ve used two laptops, both with wireless internet connectivity. (I’m using one of them now.) In both cases I find myself perfectly capable of switching to a long text when I want to, and concentrating on it for long stretches of time, whether for pleasure or for work. Recently I devoted two entire days to reading and digesting Lawrence Lessig’s book Free Culture, in PDF form, on my laptop. The entire time that I was focused on his arguments, I might have switched over and checked my email, or read my RSS feeds, or I might have made a blog post of my own, but I didn’t — at least until I needed a break.

Well, what about hyperlinked web pages? What then? Aren’t those links irresistably tempting to click? In a word, no. For example, I’ve spent hours of my free time reading and contemplating this very discussion, beginning with Nick Carr’s piece — which I read online, and yes, made a blog post about — without losing my focus. And anyway, you can always turn the wireless off.

Which brings me to my main point: your ability to concentrate on a long text is not a function of the medium of delivery, but a function of your personal discipline and your aims in reading. If you sit down to read War and Peace with the aim of enjoying yourself, whether you have paper in your hands or plastic, you expect to be focused on it — joyfully focused, one hopes — for hours on end, perhaps the entire day. Whereas if you sit down to catch up on your RSS feeds — and might I point out how similar that activity is to catching up on your magazine and newspaper reading, in the “paper economy”? — you expect to spend your attention in short bursts, five minutes here, twenty there, perhaps an hour on a long article that especially interests you.

What about writing and thinking? Developing a long argument or meditation? Everything I said above about screen brightness and so on applies here, plus three simple words: full-screen text editor. Any program with a full-screen mode will do, but my personal favorite is DarkRoom, a clone of the Mac program WriteRoom.

I hate to be so bald about it, but my visceral reaction to Nick Carr’s piece was not the internet is destroying everybody’s attention span, but rather this guy obviously needs to take a month-long retreat somewhere and get his discipline back. My strong sense is that, medical conditions aside, the responsibility for an individual’s failure to concentrate rests with the individual who can’t bring himself to do it, not with the potential distractions his environment presents.

Nor do I think that the skill of focus will be any less relevant in the decades to come. The ability to concentrate on complex, abstract ideas for long stretches of time, despite potential distractions, is essential to success in the present economy, and it seems likely to remain so indefinitely. And a skill that you need for work, a skill you practice for forty hours a week, will have a way of infiltrating your leisure as well. Focus is a skill I find well-honed in almost everybody I know — they often refer to it as “work” or “reading for pleasure” — and everybody I know is deeply involved with the web. They use it to make a living, to make and connect with friends, and to find entertainment, which includes the possibility of deep reading, along with YouTube.

At this point you’re wondering what my exact demographic is. Well, if anybody is actually damaged by the web, I would be among them. I’m thirty, and I came of age in the 1990s, in an out-of-the-way corner of the Silicon Valley itself. By my reckoning, about 85% of my early friends went on to be software engineers. Consequently, my memory of a world without the interconnectedness of the web is pretty dim. (The Harper’s forum that Kevin Kelly exceprts ran two years before I started my first subscription to the magazine.) I dialed in to local BBS services when I was thirteen, and had access to the net via a friend’s UNIX system by the time I was fifteen. Today I live in San Francisco, where it’s difficult to even get in touch with certain people if you don’t have a smartphone. Those of my friends in their early twenties cannot even dimly recall a world without Google and Wikipedia and a web-connected gadget in every other pocket, never mind the web itself. For them, it has always been thus.

That earlier world, the one without the web and this connectivity, the one without Project Gutenberg and Google and Facebook and smartphones, feels like a Dark Ages to me; it’s not one that I would really want to go back and live in once more. Contra the fears of Sven Birkerts, I would feel more isolated, not less. By now I would have lost touch with almost all of the old friends I’m still in contact with, and I would have lost the power to easily reach out to strangers and make new friends of them. More to the point, I’d also be less well-informed: I would have lost the incredible power given me by the web to direct and focus my attention on whatever slice of information I happen to need to advance my personal, intellectual, and creative goals. Simply put, the web has enriched my life — my reading and writing life in addition to my social life — much, much more than it has impoverished it. If, indeed, it has done that at all.

In my experience, the distractions the web offers are entirely ignorable when you want to ignore them, and the web also enables deep research and contemplation to a degree that stretches far beyond the invention of the open-stack public library. There are drawbacks to every age, but I don’t think that the drawbacks of ours will include the total obliteration of prolonged thought and meditation, deep research, and the joy of getting lost in a really good work of literature. People will continue to require all of those things, both for work and for personal development, and they will not go neglected for long.

posted: 08 July 29
under: Open Folio