It was scary and depressing and really jolted me into an awareness I thought I had, but was clearly lacking. It seems like a lot of us are on similar wavelengths. Thank you for this piece. A lot to think about.
Certainly addition of attention strengthening pastimes is beneficial, but I don't believe it is the solution. A pantry full of health food won't do much to help a morbidly obese person lose weight. A pantry devoid of junk food will. Short of the mental equivalent of a gastric bypass, I think that removal is the best option. If only we could make "good" activities more addictive than the "bad" ones without compromising flow states and critical thinking. An impossible task we haven't really achieved with health food yet either. Instant gratification is a bug being abused by attention merchants, perhaps the patch involves fostering deeper connections online? Those with strong social supports are less likely to fall into addictive habits. Maybe platforms that exploit our longing for deep social bonds over our penchant for novelty could help us become indifferent to fleeting content.
Hate to blow it to you, but people are already hammering in genes and industrial pollution (e.g. Lithium which messes with brain and hormone signaling) as root causes of obesity, dieting is mere symptomatic. http://achemicalhunger.com/
In the same vein, either someone is genetically disposed to ADHD, which means they should do more sportive work, or that they are exposed to something else that makes one crave instant gratification. Hypothesis based on Martha Turner and Eric Braverman: There is an absence of GABA-related relaxation inducing activities e.g. intimacy (instead of "sex"), slow artforms (instead of sensationalism), and tidying up (instead of physical exertion). Likely architectural design and city planning messed with peoples heads, and people self-medicate with social media, or that they do social media as an extension of their mental state. https://archive.fo/R5UMuhttps://www.uphs.upenn.edu/addiction/berman/relapse/
Problem: how can ADHD and media sensationalism be tied to one end, whilst media-related sadness aren't necessarily related to media addiction, but rather sensitivity? Also how are pathological narcissists (or in general those with dark traits) not getting messed with mentally compared to other illness, and can aggravate others and exit-at-will?
As a child I would, as the adults would say: "Waste away a beautiful day reading." This ended, as you can guess, with internet. It still is there in some sort of hibernating state - the urge to read. Overgrown with technological ivy it meets resistance every time I think of reading a real paper book. Reading your text today I fought with years and years of rewired brain connections that have built networks that block. But I have always maintained a pipeline (like a straw one can breathe through under water) to the top, where the sunshine is. If I focus hard enough I can still access it, the flow of reading. When I focus it comes back to me. I firmly believe it is an important part of being human. Sometimes I wonder if this is what it one day will feel like to lose one's memory. Thank you for handing us little straws so we can breathe under water.
Perfectly put Tom. I will probably tackle my own addiction and that of my loved ones untill the end of our lives. The successes are cyclical. Some days you beat it, some days you get beaten, hard.
But one day I hope the peace I feel whenever I use my phone less than 1 hour/day will be perenial. Doesn't even seem to be a large goal, but as you said, if everyone would be sleeping one hour earlier this very day as I write this whole systems would collapse.
The point about “flow” here is the be all and end all for me. I feel anxious if I don’t get that feeling at least once a day. I don’t think it’s good for us on any level to be perpetually distracted and unable to concentrate.
I suspect an uptick in anxiety disorders have directly resulted from our shot attention spans.
Anxiety disorders in teens correlate very neatly with smartphone adoption and instagrams increasing popularity in particular. I know correlation doesn’t equal causation but everyone I know who works in education tells me they have seen the stark change happen fist hand over the last decade.
The comment box limited me from making my third point. So read the first two remarks before reading this one.
3. I suggest that when reading Johann Hari that you put it to the test. In his article "Are Screens Robbing Us of Our Capacity to for Deep Reading?" (Jan. 2022), we have a good example of "knowledge statement without fact." He cites the conclusions of Anne Mangen as truths but gives no details of the study that her conclusion is based on. I can say with certainty that I do not read a PDF version of "Reuse of Egyptian Spolia" from a screen in a different way than I read it from a book (or try this with a Montaigne essay). Reading hundreds of things on the internet and on screens has not impaired my ability to concentrate. The problem is not the screen.
Shame the comment split like that because this was an excellent and in depth counter.
And my desire to further explore the ‘sitting on a bench observing’ genre of essay is what fuelled this piece, bizarrely. Lots of thoughts on screens and tech welling up in me for a while so I had to say my piece to move on. Otherwise screens might have transformed from a mere problem for me (at least at times) into a scapegoat.
Thanks for your excellent comment as always, Lynn.
Lynn, maybe there is some intrinsic immunity to it but how do you overcome the attention robbing (or as Carr put it, the information "jet skiing") that many people feel that while reading a screen you get the dreaded "F-Pattern reading"? At least for me, I hate the "tug" I feel when reading screens (even e-readers) of where I am "rushing" by the 6th line (I am hitting the ever narrower "stem" of the "F") instead of absorbing and making associations. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/f-shaped-pattern-reading-web-content/
There are some possible explanations for how I avoid attention robbing (based entirely on my experience and not scientific study).
1. Environment: I only screen-read on a computer. I have absolute silence in my room. I turn off my email and notifications. I use Ad Block Plus. I read in full screen mode. I ignore side panels and boxes (or go back to them later).
2. Syntactic reading: Each sentence automatically maps onto a template of grammar in my mind. In slow motion, this would be like diagramming a sentence into subject, verb, object, and prepositional phrases (nothing more detailed than that). The schools drilled sentence diagramming into us in elementary and middle school (in the 1960s). The template is now automatic for me.
3. Speed: I deliberately slow down my reading speed. This slower speed is a by-product of being a copyeditor. I cannot catch small errors at normal reading speeds. Sometimes, if I get carried away by the ideas, I read too fast and miss mistakes that I should have corrected. Other times, my eyes are moving faster than my mind. So, fine-tuning the control of reading speed might aid concentration (and comprehension).
4. Good vocabulary: Ideally, you would know the meaning of every word you read.
When you come across a word that you don’t know, you have a “blank” in the text. This immediately derails concentration. Sometimes if you don’t look up the word, the rest of the article becomes difficult to understand. The more blanks, the more difficulty you will have. You begin skipping the sentences with blanks. You end up running your eyes over the article but not understanding it.
I am still thinking through the idea of “knowledge statements without facts” and the emptiness that comes from it. I hope someone will help me out here.
Thank you for the thoroughly articulated response, Lynn. Take your time but chime back in if you clarify the "knowledge statements without facts" more to your liking. I love not only your suggestions, but moreover the tone of them. I intuit real world rigor-time tested with professional skill. I imagine your reading is not unlike an assassin cleaning her guns, you plan the work and work the plan. You read not for "production" as an endpoint, but for comprehension, clarity, and evaluation of your own views.
I will add the (sadly) handful of times in the last 6-7 years I have truly debugged my reading and learning in a way that harkens back to pre-Internet days I have noted these features:
1. It took me at least 2 weeks to detox.
2. At the 2 week point, much like physical muscle and exercise, my mind felt stronger. I could literally feel it. I knew I was "back". I was recalling, applying, and organizing into meaningful frameworks (for me) new material in ever increasing blocks- 30 min, 45, min, and then my max of 1 hour 15 min before a small break. My schooling was in the 1980s through the 1990s, and I felt like I had returned to my halcyon days. Like erosion though, society and its screens have weakened me.
3. I appreciate the insight of how your ingrained "muscle memory" as a copy editor helps you fight. You then arrange your environment to augment the fight.
Side note- I recently read an odd work (for me and my science life) suggestion from STSC- Metaphors We Live By, by Lakoff and Johnson. It helps me now see how my tone and your tone reveals much about society, learning, and its relation to the Internet. Thanks again, WW
I can second points one and two. Perhaps my timeframe was a little more truncated due to the latent powers of attention I had built up pre internet use but still the principle remains. This is a vital topic that more people need to be honest about imo. A silent epidemic, even.
Feb 28, 2022·edited Feb 28, 2022Liked by Thomas J Bevan
I want to focus on a comment that you made in section III: “All inputs now seemingly exist on the level of mere information because to internally transmogrify them into knowledge, let alone wisdom takes a level of sustained attention and reflection that the lure of said endless information has largely robbed us of.”
1. For most of my life, I have put “fact-knowledge-wisdom” on a continuum with “fact” being the least valued and “wisdom” the most. In the past couple years, I have reversed the order. The informational content of the internet, which often purports to be knowledge, is slim on facts. In academic writing, if you transmogrify the information you have collected into knowledge, you must also supply the facts on which you base your “knowledge statement.” That way, the readers can decide for themselves if your interpretation is sound, and they can also come up with their own transmogrification of the facts. My objection to what I read on the internet is that the “information” is really “knowledge statements without fact.” This is the reason it goes through our heads and leaves no trace. We need the facts (or let us say, highly specific details) to anchor the information in our minds. There is nothing wrong with my ability to focus—the problem is in the writing not in the reader.
2. If someone were to ask me, “Without looking at his book of essays, which essay by Bevan comes first to your mind?” I would say, “The one where he is sitting on a park bench doing nothing and reporting what he observed.” When Mary Oliver writes “To pay attention, that is our endless and proper work,” she was talking about more than just “focusing.” All of her poetry and essays are grounded in the observation of specific facts (the spider in the doorway). She is a keen observer of world. Her poetry is a record of the observations that she made while actually walking in nature, not an abstraction that she created out of memories of “what nature is like” while sitting in front of a computer.
Ironically I went down a rabbithole on pinterest to find it. I believe it’s from a 1930’s pulp sci fi cover, but I can’t find the title again now. If I do, I’ll let you know.
As follow up this is precisely why I (admittedly sporadically) participate in the STSC- you are surrounded by people sincerely looking for "flow" and also trying to remove things that impede "flow". But to people discouraged don't worry, Silicon Valley will soon offer us escape in the Metaverse...problem solved:)..insert sarcasm. Never forget the greatest commodity of the 21st century is not oil or gold, but your attention span. Sadly it once was not relegated to being an interchangeable commodity. WW
‘Never forget the greatest commodity of the 21st century is not oil or gold’
Couldn’t agree more. For this issue to properly be resolved on a systemic level, I believe the whole Silicon Valley business model would have to change from ad based (which requires attention) to subscription based. Whether that will ever come to pass remains to be seen.
I think the bit about addition you have at the end is crucial. Simply "quitting" a habit is dangerous, because you create a void in yourself that must be filled. If you don't fill it with something good, something worse will come along to take the place of what you removed. It might be a more extreme version of the old habit, or you might go from smoking cigarettes to shooting heroin.
With behavioral addictions, I think a lot of this occurs through spiritual growth. We can recognizing that satisfying our emotional needs through an addictive behavior isn't good, but creating or finding new ways to satisfy those needs is difficult, because it involves self-transformation. Sacrifice, death and rebirth, etc. You can't rewrite the rules of your own way of being just by thinking about it really hard (as much as I wish I could). A spiritual journey is necessary to undergo such transformation.
I agree. Pure cold turkey ‘dopamine fasting’ can but you some breathing space to gain enough temporary attention span to think through your problems but without new activities everyone will default to their old habits. In fact, all of this screen use, all of this searching for information may well be a displacement activity to avoid faving what we need to face.
This essay is a good attention lengthening exercise in itself.
Personally, I'm trying to provide an off-ramp for people via Deprocrastination. It warms my heart to think of the people who I've talked to that have reduced their use of social media, and spent more time creating things or being present with others as a result. This makes the work meaningful.
I'm curious to see what happens next in the next few years. All of the books you mention are a part of the cultural immune response, but is that enough? It might take time, like in the case of smoking. We'll see.
I agree, I made it so long to act as an attention span test for both myself as writer and the audiences as readers!
The smoking comparison is an interesting one. I’m an on again, off again smoker as you know and personally I find screens to be *way* more addictive than cigs.
Perhaps the cultural immune response will only gain traction once a critical mass is reached, once people realise that the way we use screens is as mental (and even physically) as unhealthy as smoking is. Perhaps nothing can happen without political action and new laws. Not saying that that is the way necessarily, but I guess something of that magnitude would have to happen.
Thomas,
A friend just passed this article along after reading my recent piece about how being on the phone trying to help my wife with something made me lose track of my daughter at the playground: https://alexanderhellene.substack.com/p/the-worst-feeling-in-the-world
It was scary and depressing and really jolted me into an awareness I thought I had, but was clearly lacking. It seems like a lot of us are on similar wavelengths. Thank you for this piece. A lot to think about.
Certainly addition of attention strengthening pastimes is beneficial, but I don't believe it is the solution. A pantry full of health food won't do much to help a morbidly obese person lose weight. A pantry devoid of junk food will. Short of the mental equivalent of a gastric bypass, I think that removal is the best option. If only we could make "good" activities more addictive than the "bad" ones without compromising flow states and critical thinking. An impossible task we haven't really achieved with health food yet either. Instant gratification is a bug being abused by attention merchants, perhaps the patch involves fostering deeper connections online? Those with strong social supports are less likely to fall into addictive habits. Maybe platforms that exploit our longing for deep social bonds over our penchant for novelty could help us become indifferent to fleeting content.
Hate to blow it to you, but people are already hammering in genes and industrial pollution (e.g. Lithium which messes with brain and hormone signaling) as root causes of obesity, dieting is mere symptomatic. http://achemicalhunger.com/
In the same vein, either someone is genetically disposed to ADHD, which means they should do more sportive work, or that they are exposed to something else that makes one crave instant gratification. Hypothesis based on Martha Turner and Eric Braverman: There is an absence of GABA-related relaxation inducing activities e.g. intimacy (instead of "sex"), slow artforms (instead of sensationalism), and tidying up (instead of physical exertion). Likely architectural design and city planning messed with peoples heads, and people self-medicate with social media, or that they do social media as an extension of their mental state. https://archive.fo/R5UMu https://www.uphs.upenn.edu/addiction/berman/relapse/
Problem: how can ADHD and media sensationalism be tied to one end, whilst media-related sadness aren't necessarily related to media addiction, but rather sensitivity? Also how are pathological narcissists (or in general those with dark traits) not getting messed with mentally compared to other illness, and can aggravate others and exit-at-will?
As a child I would, as the adults would say: "Waste away a beautiful day reading." This ended, as you can guess, with internet. It still is there in some sort of hibernating state - the urge to read. Overgrown with technological ivy it meets resistance every time I think of reading a real paper book. Reading your text today I fought with years and years of rewired brain connections that have built networks that block. But I have always maintained a pipeline (like a straw one can breathe through under water) to the top, where the sunshine is. If I focus hard enough I can still access it, the flow of reading. When I focus it comes back to me. I firmly believe it is an important part of being human. Sometimes I wonder if this is what it one day will feel like to lose one's memory. Thank you for handing us little straws so we can breathe under water.
Perfectly put Tom. I will probably tackle my own addiction and that of my loved ones untill the end of our lives. The successes are cyclical. Some days you beat it, some days you get beaten, hard.
But one day I hope the peace I feel whenever I use my phone less than 1 hour/day will be perenial. Doesn't even seem to be a large goal, but as you said, if everyone would be sleeping one hour earlier this very day as I write this whole systems would collapse.
Hope must be held up.
Thanks for writing.
I wonder if it is possible to read beyond the words to the unarticulated thoughts behind the writing. And how exactly would one do that?
This truly is one for the philosophers.
Excellent as always.
The point about “flow” here is the be all and end all for me. I feel anxious if I don’t get that feeling at least once a day. I don’t think it’s good for us on any level to be perpetually distracted and unable to concentrate.
I suspect an uptick in anxiety disorders have directly resulted from our shot attention spans.
Protect it at all costs.
Flow state daily to be pursued daily, this is kind of a nice metric you got here Craig...
YES. There is no satisfaction to be found in shallow mindless activity.
And yet many just keep on searching there anyway.
Anxiety disorders in teens correlate very neatly with smartphone adoption and instagrams increasing popularity in particular. I know correlation doesn’t equal causation but everyone I know who works in education tells me they have seen the stark change happen fist hand over the last decade.
The comment box limited me from making my third point. So read the first two remarks before reading this one.
3. I suggest that when reading Johann Hari that you put it to the test. In his article "Are Screens Robbing Us of Our Capacity to for Deep Reading?" (Jan. 2022), we have a good example of "knowledge statement without fact." He cites the conclusions of Anne Mangen as truths but gives no details of the study that her conclusion is based on. I can say with certainty that I do not read a PDF version of "Reuse of Egyptian Spolia" from a screen in a different way than I read it from a book (or try this with a Montaigne essay). Reading hundreds of things on the internet and on screens has not impaired my ability to concentrate. The problem is not the screen.
Shame the comment split like that because this was an excellent and in depth counter.
And my desire to further explore the ‘sitting on a bench observing’ genre of essay is what fuelled this piece, bizarrely. Lots of thoughts on screens and tech welling up in me for a while so I had to say my piece to move on. Otherwise screens might have transformed from a mere problem for me (at least at times) into a scapegoat.
Thanks for your excellent comment as always, Lynn.
Lynn, maybe there is some intrinsic immunity to it but how do you overcome the attention robbing (or as Carr put it, the information "jet skiing") that many people feel that while reading a screen you get the dreaded "F-Pattern reading"? At least for me, I hate the "tug" I feel when reading screens (even e-readers) of where I am "rushing" by the 6th line (I am hitting the ever narrower "stem" of the "F") instead of absorbing and making associations. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/f-shaped-pattern-reading-web-content/
There are some possible explanations for how I avoid attention robbing (based entirely on my experience and not scientific study).
1. Environment: I only screen-read on a computer. I have absolute silence in my room. I turn off my email and notifications. I use Ad Block Plus. I read in full screen mode. I ignore side panels and boxes (or go back to them later).
2. Syntactic reading: Each sentence automatically maps onto a template of grammar in my mind. In slow motion, this would be like diagramming a sentence into subject, verb, object, and prepositional phrases (nothing more detailed than that). The schools drilled sentence diagramming into us in elementary and middle school (in the 1960s). The template is now automatic for me.
3. Speed: I deliberately slow down my reading speed. This slower speed is a by-product of being a copyeditor. I cannot catch small errors at normal reading speeds. Sometimes, if I get carried away by the ideas, I read too fast and miss mistakes that I should have corrected. Other times, my eyes are moving faster than my mind. So, fine-tuning the control of reading speed might aid concentration (and comprehension).
4. Good vocabulary: Ideally, you would know the meaning of every word you read.
When you come across a word that you don’t know, you have a “blank” in the text. This immediately derails concentration. Sometimes if you don’t look up the word, the rest of the article becomes difficult to understand. The more blanks, the more difficulty you will have. You begin skipping the sentences with blanks. You end up running your eyes over the article but not understanding it.
I am still thinking through the idea of “knowledge statements without facts” and the emptiness that comes from it. I hope someone will help me out here.
This list is fantastic. I hope people come across it an implement the ideas here.
Thank you for this.
Feel free to use anything I say 'as grist for the mill'. I have no plan to write down my ideas or circulate them beyond the comment box.
Thank you for the thoroughly articulated response, Lynn. Take your time but chime back in if you clarify the "knowledge statements without facts" more to your liking. I love not only your suggestions, but moreover the tone of them. I intuit real world rigor-time tested with professional skill. I imagine your reading is not unlike an assassin cleaning her guns, you plan the work and work the plan. You read not for "production" as an endpoint, but for comprehension, clarity, and evaluation of your own views.
I will add the (sadly) handful of times in the last 6-7 years I have truly debugged my reading and learning in a way that harkens back to pre-Internet days I have noted these features:
1. It took me at least 2 weeks to detox.
2. At the 2 week point, much like physical muscle and exercise, my mind felt stronger. I could literally feel it. I knew I was "back". I was recalling, applying, and organizing into meaningful frameworks (for me) new material in ever increasing blocks- 30 min, 45, min, and then my max of 1 hour 15 min before a small break. My schooling was in the 1980s through the 1990s, and I felt like I had returned to my halcyon days. Like erosion though, society and its screens have weakened me.
3. I appreciate the insight of how your ingrained "muscle memory" as a copy editor helps you fight. You then arrange your environment to augment the fight.
Side note- I recently read an odd work (for me and my science life) suggestion from STSC- Metaphors We Live By, by Lakoff and Johnson. It helps me now see how my tone and your tone reveals much about society, learning, and its relation to the Internet. Thanks again, WW
I can second points one and two. Perhaps my timeframe was a little more truncated due to the latent powers of attention I had built up pre internet use but still the principle remains. This is a vital topic that more people need to be honest about imo. A silent epidemic, even.
It’s a valuable service you offer anyway. Your comments always make me think.
I want to focus on a comment that you made in section III: “All inputs now seemingly exist on the level of mere information because to internally transmogrify them into knowledge, let alone wisdom takes a level of sustained attention and reflection that the lure of said endless information has largely robbed us of.”
1. For most of my life, I have put “fact-knowledge-wisdom” on a continuum with “fact” being the least valued and “wisdom” the most. In the past couple years, I have reversed the order. The informational content of the internet, which often purports to be knowledge, is slim on facts. In academic writing, if you transmogrify the information you have collected into knowledge, you must also supply the facts on which you base your “knowledge statement.” That way, the readers can decide for themselves if your interpretation is sound, and they can also come up with their own transmogrification of the facts. My objection to what I read on the internet is that the “information” is really “knowledge statements without fact.” This is the reason it goes through our heads and leaves no trace. We need the facts (or let us say, highly specific details) to anchor the information in our minds. There is nothing wrong with my ability to focus—the problem is in the writing not in the reader.
2. If someone were to ask me, “Without looking at his book of essays, which essay by Bevan comes first to your mind?” I would say, “The one where he is sitting on a park bench doing nothing and reporting what he observed.” When Mary Oliver writes “To pay attention, that is our endless and proper work,” she was talking about more than just “focusing.” All of her poetry and essays are grounded in the observation of specific facts (the spider in the doorway). She is a keen observer of world. Her poetry is a record of the observations that she made while actually walking in nature, not an abstraction that she created out of memories of “what nature is like” while sitting in front of a computer.
Is wisdom universally good, or are "unearned wisdom" (in the insight porn TED sense) worse than pure facts/knowledge?
Where is the opening picture/drawing from?
Ironically I went down a rabbithole on pinterest to find it. I believe it’s from a 1930’s pulp sci fi cover, but I can’t find the title again now. If I do, I’ll let you know.
As follow up this is precisely why I (admittedly sporadically) participate in the STSC- you are surrounded by people sincerely looking for "flow" and also trying to remove things that impede "flow". But to people discouraged don't worry, Silicon Valley will soon offer us escape in the Metaverse...problem solved:)..insert sarcasm. Never forget the greatest commodity of the 21st century is not oil or gold, but your attention span. Sadly it once was not relegated to being an interchangeable commodity. WW
‘Never forget the greatest commodity of the 21st century is not oil or gold’
Couldn’t agree more. For this issue to properly be resolved on a systemic level, I believe the whole Silicon Valley business model would have to change from ad based (which requires attention) to subscription based. Whether that will ever come to pass remains to be seen.
I think the bit about addition you have at the end is crucial. Simply "quitting" a habit is dangerous, because you create a void in yourself that must be filled. If you don't fill it with something good, something worse will come along to take the place of what you removed. It might be a more extreme version of the old habit, or you might go from smoking cigarettes to shooting heroin.
With behavioral addictions, I think a lot of this occurs through spiritual growth. We can recognizing that satisfying our emotional needs through an addictive behavior isn't good, but creating or finding new ways to satisfy those needs is difficult, because it involves self-transformation. Sacrifice, death and rebirth, etc. You can't rewrite the rules of your own way of being just by thinking about it really hard (as much as I wish I could). A spiritual journey is necessary to undergo such transformation.
I agree. Pure cold turkey ‘dopamine fasting’ can but you some breathing space to gain enough temporary attention span to think through your problems but without new activities everyone will default to their old habits. In fact, all of this screen use, all of this searching for information may well be a displacement activity to avoid faving what we need to face.
This essay is a good attention lengthening exercise in itself.
Personally, I'm trying to provide an off-ramp for people via Deprocrastination. It warms my heart to think of the people who I've talked to that have reduced their use of social media, and spent more time creating things or being present with others as a result. This makes the work meaningful.
I'm curious to see what happens next in the next few years. All of the books you mention are a part of the cultural immune response, but is that enough? It might take time, like in the case of smoking. We'll see.
I agree, I made it so long to act as an attention span test for both myself as writer and the audiences as readers!
The smoking comparison is an interesting one. I’m an on again, off again smoker as you know and personally I find screens to be *way* more addictive than cigs.
Perhaps the cultural immune response will only gain traction once a critical mass is reached, once people realise that the way we use screens is as mental (and even physically) as unhealthy as smoking is. Perhaps nothing can happen without political action and new laws. Not saying that that is the way necessarily, but I guess something of that magnitude would have to happen.