There are awards for the year’s best films but not for its best TikTok videos. That’s too bad, since 2024 yielded several tiny masterpieces. From @yojairyjaimee, a flawless, minute-long re-creation of some bizarre 2009 stage patter by Kanye West (who now goes by Ye). From @accountwashackedwith50m, twelve seconds of chocolate-covered strawberries, filmed from the vantage of a saxophonist in an R. & B. band. From @notkenna, seven seconds of a dog made to look, with preposterously low-budget effects, as if it were flying on a broomstick. Such Internet gems are what the poet Patricia Lockwood has called “the sapphires of the instant”; each catches the light in a strange, hypnotic way.
Just don’t stare too long. If every video is a starburst of expression, an extended TikTok session is fireworks in your face for hours. That can’t be healthy, can it? In 2010, the technology writer Nicholas Carr presciently raised this concern in “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” a Pulitzer Prize finalist. “What the Net seems to be doing,” Carr wrote, “is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.” He recounted his increased difficulty reading longer works. He wrote of a highly accomplished philosophy student—indeed, a Rhodes Scholar—who didn’t read books at all but gleaned what he could from Google. That student, Carr ominously asserted, “seems more the rule than the exception.”
Carr set off an avalanche. Much read works about our ruined attention include Nir Eyal’s “Indistractable,” Johann Hari’s “Stolen Focus,” Cal Newport’s “Deep Work,” and Jenny Odell’s “How to Do Nothing.” Carr himself has a new book, “Superbloom,” about not only distraction but all the psychological harms of the Internet. We’ve suffered a “fragmentation of consciousness,” Carr writes, our world having been “rendered incomprehensible by information.”
Read one of these books and you’re unnerved. But read two more and the skeptical imp within you awakens. Haven’t critics freaked out about the brain-scrambling power of everything from pianofortes to brightly colored posters? Isn’t there, in fact, a long section in Plato’s Phaedrus in which Socrates argues that writing will wreck people’s memories?
I’m particularly fond of a hand-wringing 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. They will seek separate corners rather than common spaces, he prophesies. Their discussions will devolve into acrid debates, and “all mortal intercourse” will be “chilled with a fatal frost.” Hawthorne’s worry? The replacement of the open fireplace by the iron stove.
It’s true that we’ve raised alarms over things that in retrospect seem mild, the Carr-hort responds, but how much solace should we take in that? Today’s digital forms are obviously more addictive than their predecessors. You can even read previous grumbling as a measure of how bad things have become. Perhaps critics were correct to see danger in, say, television. If it now appears benign, that just shows how much worse current media is.
It’s been fifteen years since Carr’s “The Shallows.” Now we have what is perhaps the most sophisticated contribution to the genre, “The Sirens’ Call,” by Chris Hayes, an MSNBC anchor. Hayes acknowledges the long history of such panics. Some seem laughable in hindsight, he concedes, like one in the nineteen-fifties about comic books. Yet others seem prophetic, like the early warnings about smoking. “Is the development of a global, ubiquitous, chronically connected social media world more like comic books or cigarettes?” Hayes asks.
Great question. If we take the skeptics seriously, how much of the catastrophist’s argument stands? Enough, Hayes feels, that we should be gravely concerned. “We have a country full of megaphones, a crushing wall of sound, the swirling lights of a 24/7 casino blinking at us, all part of a system minutely engineered to take our attention away from us for profit,” he writes. Thinking clearly and conversing reasonably under these conditions is “like trying to meditate in a strip club.” The case he makes is thoughtful, informed, and disquieting. But is it convincing?
History is littered with lamentations about distraction. Swirling lights and strippers are not a new problem. What’s important to note about bygone debates on the subject, though, is that they truly were debates. Not everyone felt the sky was falling, and the dissenters raised pertinent questions. Is it, in fact, good to pay attention? Whose purposes does it serve?
Such questions came up in the eighteenth century with the rise of a disruptive new commodity: the novel. Although today’s critics rue our inability to get through long novels, such books were once widely regarded as the intellectual equivalent of junk food. “They fix attention so deeply, and afford so lively a pleasure, that the mind, once accustomed to them, cannot submit to the painful task of serious study,” the Anglican priest Vicesimus Knox complained. Thomas Jefferson warned that once readers fell under the spell of novels—“this mass of trash”—they would lose patience for “wholsome reading.” They’d suffer from “bloated imagination, sickly judgement, and disgust toward all the real business of life.”
Popular writers took a different view, as the English professor Natalie M. Phillips explains in her book “Distraction.” They wondered if unstraying attention was healthy. Maybe the mind required a little leaping around to do its work. “The Rambler” (1750-52) and “The Idler” (1758-60), two essay series by Samuel Johnson, exulted in such mental wandering. Johnson was constantly picking up books and just as constantly putting them down. When a friend asked whether Johnson had actually finished a book he claimed to have “looked into,” he replied, “No, Sir, do you read books through?”
As the mascot of multifocality, Phillips presents Tristram Shandy, the hero of Laurence Sterne’s “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman,” published between 1759 and 1767. The novel starts with Tristram’s conception. His mother’s sudden interjection—“Pray, my dear, have you not forgot to wind up the clock?”—at the moment of his father’s sexual climax leaves Tristram congenitally scatterbrained. Even his name is the product of broken attention. It was supposed to be Trismegistus, but the maid tasked with telling the curate got distracted and forgot all but the first syllable. Tristram relates this tale of woe in a tangle of digressions, punctuated with breathless dashes.
In nine distracted volumes, Tristram never manages to narrate his life. Yet readers found his rollicking thoughts captivating. Perhaps they also found them liberating, Phillips suggests, given the tendency of traditional authorities to demand unwavering focus. “What is requisite for joining in prayer in a right manner?” a widely used Anglican catechism asked. “Close attention without wandering.”
Samuel Johnson’s dictionary noted that “to attend” had multiple meanings. The first, to focus on, was related to the second—to wait on, as a servant. A recent history of attention in the nineteenth-century United States, Caleb Smith’s “Thoreau’s Axe,” draws out this point clearly. Across centuries, thinkers have sought to fend off distraction. But the loudest calls to attention have been directed toward subordinates, schoolchildren, and women. “Atten-TION!” military commanders shout at their men to get them to stand straight. The arts of attention are a form of self-discipline, but they’re also ways to discipline others.
By the nineteenth century, some had grown wary of the intense forms of concentration that industrial life demanded. The psychiatrist Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol introduced a new diagnosis, “monomania,” which was doled out with the faddishness that A.D.H.D. is today. Esquirol felt it to be the characteristic disorder of modernity. Herman Melville made it central to “Moby-Dick,” in which Captain Ahab’s fixation on a white whale brings ruin. Hypnosis, an intense form of focus, became an object of widespread concern.
It was Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx’s Cuban-born son-in-law, who rolled this trepidation about attention into a political program. (His essays have been reissued recently by New York Review Books.) Focussing on one’s work and suppressing one’s natural instincts, Lafargue argued, in the eighteen-eighties, was no virtue. It was, rather, to “play the part of the machine” on behalf of one’s own oppressors. Revolutionary consciousness meant asserting “the right to be lazy,” Lafargue insisted. Workers of the world, relax.
One daydreams of a Lafarguean resistance, in which the youth are recruited with samizdat copies of “Tristram Shandy.” But would they read it? I assign my college students about half of what I was assigned as an undergraduate twenty-odd years ago, and many professors have felt the need for similar scaling back. “I have been teaching in small liberal arts colleges for over 15 years now, and in the past five years, it’s as though someone flipped a switch,” the theologian Adam Kotsko writes. “Students are intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.”
Whatever thoughts past writers have had about the virtues of attention, pessimists would argue that the problem is different now. It’s as if we’re not reading books so much as the books are reading us. TikTok is particularly adept at this; you just scroll and the app learns—from your behavior, plus perhaps other information harvested from your phone—about what will keep you hooked. “I wake up in cold sweats every so often thinking, What did we bring to the world?” Tony Fadell, a co-developer of the iPhone, has said.
As a baseline, Chris Hayes points to Abraham Lincoln’s debates with Stephen A. Douglas, in the eighteen-fifties: three-hour exchanges of orations about a momentous topic, slavery. He marvels at how complex and layered the speeches were, stuffed with “parenthetical and nested clauses, with ideas that are previewed at the beginning of a sentence, left for a bit, and then returned to later.” He imagines what “sheer stamina of focus” Lincoln and Douglas’s audiences must have possessed.
Those audiences were large. Would voters flock to something similar today? Not likely, Hayes says. Information now comes in “ever-shorter little bites,” and “focus is harder and harder to sustain.” Hayes has seen this firsthand. His illuminating backstage account of cable news describes thoughtful journalists debasing themselves in their scramble to retain straying viewers. Garish graphics, loud voices, quick topic changes, and titillating stories—it’s like jangling keys to lure a dog. The more viewers get their news from apps, the harder television producers have to shake those keys.
