Attention Must Be Paid—But To Whom?

 

In Arthur Miller's famous play "Death of a Salesman," the salesman Willy Loman's wife Linda cries out at the climax, "Attention, attention must be paid to such a person."  If we love someone, we honor them with attention, which is something only a conscious being can pay.  In a recent issue of The New Yorker, Daniel Immerwahr takes a look at current concerns that our attention spans are growing shorter because of social media and smartphones. 

 

Some academics see the crisis as real.  Immerwahr quotes theologian Adam Kotsko, who teaches at a small liberal-arts college, as saying ". . . in the past five years, it's as though someone flipped a switch . . . . 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."  On the other hand, media that use modes other than just text are getting longer.  Immerwahr notes that one of the most award-winning films of 2024, "The Brutalist," runs well over three hours.  And a highly popular video game called "Baldur's Gate 3" takes a dedicated player about seventy-five hours to play.

 

As Immerwahr points out, every new medium from the printed novel to radio and television gave rise to similar concerns that people will no longer be able to pay adequate attention to things they should attend to.  Interactive media such as TikTok, Facebook, and the like have added a new factor:  the carefully-honed algorithms that profile user preferences and give them more of what they like.  That is how you can pick up your smartphone to check the weather forecast, finally shake yourself forty-five minutes later and ask, "What have I been doing?" and not be able to come up with a satisfactory answer.

 

Overall, though, Immerwahr concludes that if attention spans are in trouble—a concept he says even psychologists can't satisfactorily define—we are still able to devote long unbroken spans of time to things that we are interested in, or things that attract us.  At the end of his essay, he concludes that the real problem is not so much that we can't pay attention, but that what we pay attention to is often overhyped, inflammatory, divisive, or false. 

 

Rod Dreher couldn't agree more.  In his new book Living in Wonder:  Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age, Dreher calls for a recognition that modern societies have adopted a set of undebated underlying assumptions about the world that derive from the fact that we are, in a pungent phrase, Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic—conveniently abbreviated WEIRD.  This combination of background factors is highly unusual in world history, and has led us into a materialistic, scientistic worldview that excludes the supernatural from practical consideration.  That, Dreher points out, is a real problem, because the world simply isn't that way.

 

Attention is a kind of love.  One cannot love something, or someone, to whom one pays no attention.  Dreher makes no secret of the fact that he is a capital-O Orthodox Christian.  The Orthodox family of churches sat out the Reformation, and preserve an unbroken tradition of acknowledging the supernatural in worship and theology that goes back all the way to the time of Christ.  His book is full of stories of dreams, visions, apparently coincidental meetings, and similar phenomena that support his contention of God, and demons too, being all around us. 

 

His chapter most relevant to our topic is "Aliens and the Sacred Machine."  In search of meaning, we will pay attention to all sorts of things that don't necessarily fit into the materialist worldview.  With the advent of artificial-intelligence companions (AI girlfriends, for example), some men find that they are more comfortable talking to a machine, or even doing other things with it, than with going through the effort to meet and get to know a real woman. 

 

But that isn't all.  According to Diana Pasulka, a professor of religious studies at University of North Carolina Wilmington, many influential people think that AI reveals "nonhuman intelligence from outside our dimension of space-time."  In other words, the "I" that software like ChatGPT uses isn't just a function of the program—there's a non-material personality at work in there somewhere.  And according to Dreher, if it's not God, it's from the other place—in other words, demonic.

 

Reading this section of Dreher's book reminded me powerfully of C. S. Lewis's 1945 science-fiction dystopia That Hideous Strength.  In that book—which has a sketchy outline of what is recognizably the Internet, 45 years before its advent—scientists manage to revive the decapitated head of an evil genius so it serves as a medium of communication between them and certain forces which turn out to be demonic.  Their regard for what they call the Head can only be described as worship, and when people cease to believe in God, they will end up worshiping either themselves or something outside themselves that eventually enslaves them. 

 

When the first caveman painted the first cave painting, he was probably tempted to sit and admire his work instead of paying attention to his fellow cave-dwellers, so in a sense, the problem of distracted attention has always been with us.  But not until recently has it been super-powered by AI algorithms that insidiously lead us away from God and the human beings who deserve our attention, and into the rabbit-holes and dungeons of distraction that wastes the only thing all of us have the same amount of every day—time. 

 

Dreher relates how he was rescued from a near-suicidal focus on his own misery by the ancient practice of reciting the Jesus Prayer, five hundred times a day.  This forced his attention away from himself and his distractions, and while he still has plenty of problems, he was able to get moving again and write a remarkable book. 

 

Those of us who grew up in a less distraction-prone age—the 1960s, say—have no idea what younger people struggle against in trying to pay attention to those objects and people which they know deserve it.  If you believe in such things, say a prayer for them as we face the assaults of AI-powered social media, and be aware that, as Dreher begins his book, "The world is not what we think it is."

 

Sources:  The article, "Check This Out" by Daniel Immerwahr appears on pp. 64-69 of the Jan. 27, 2025 issue of The New Yorker.  Rod Dreher's Living in Wonder was published in 2024 by Zondervan.  C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength is available in numerous editions.  And a description and explanation of the Jesus Prayer is at https://www.oca.org/orthodoxy/the-orthodox-faith/spirituality/prayer-fasting-and-almsgiving/the-jesus-prayer.

Is the Internet Making Us Too Literate?

 

Writing in the Spring 2022 issue of The New Atlantis, British author Kit Wilson wonders if the Internet is endangering our mental health by metaphorically burying us in words. 

 

In support of this conclusion, he cites some statistics.  For example, a report that the prestigious management-consulting firm McKinsey & Co. published in 2012 stated that the average time Americans spent reading or writing each day was between one and two hours from 1900 all the way up to 1990.  But when the Internet came along and was joined by text messaging, that number rose to around four to five hours a day—almost a third of a person's disposable free time (that is, when you're not doing something like eating or going to the bathroom—and I'm sure some people read while doing those things too). 

 

He also found a journalist who claims that your average person browsing the Internet as part of their daily routine may expose themselves to as many as 490,000 words a day, which approaches the length of Tolstoy's War and Peace (600,000 words, according to Wikipedia's "List of Longest Novels.") 

 

But nobody reads the Internet like you would read War and Peace, and therein lies the problem.

 

Have we exploited digital technology's amazing ability to multiply words practically without end to flood cyberspace with an ocean of words that threaten to drown us? 

 

My title is something of a conundrum.  Being unable to read is what illiteracy means, but what is the measure of reading too much?  We have all known the so-called bookworm type who seems to prefer the library to the clubroom or the bar.  That isn't the problem here, because there were bookworms before the Internet. 

 

For his part, Wilson seems to be concerned that as we deal with the world more and more as it is mediated to us in the form of words, we will lose track of what reality is really like and begin to treat it as an abstraction that words adequately describe.  The overarching theme of this issue of The New Atlantis is expressed by the somewhat grim cover title "Reality:  A Post-Mortem." 

 

I think it's a little premature to write reality's obituary just yet, but I have to admit a general sense of creepiness remains with me after reading it. 

 

The problem we face was captured neatly by C. S. Lewis in his 1946 sci-fi novel That Hideous Strength, which involves a young sociologist named Mark Studdock who gradually becomes embroiled in some sinister doings as a part of his new job with the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments (N. I. C. E.).  Mark was already in a bad way with regard to reality even before he took on his new job.  As Lewis points out:  " . . . his education had had the curious effect of making things that he read and wrote more real to him than things he saw.  Statistics about agricultural laborers were the substance; any real ditcher, ploughman, or farmer's boy, was the shadow."

 

So the tendency has been with us longer than the Internet to take the written word more seriously than the reality that it attempts (always incompletely) to describe.  As Lewis shows later in the novel, this habit allows wicked people to do heinous things with the stroke of a pen—after all, the only direct contact a manager might have with the consequences of his order to liquidate thousands of people will be the alteration in some columns of population figures. 

 

Having access to more words than ever isn't all bad.  When evil is exposed to the light, it can lead to good people fighting it more effectively.  The Internet makes keeping secrets much harder, especially if they are secrets about evil things done in public. 

 

I may not be the best person to write about this problem, because whether out of old habits or laziness or something else, I think I am on the low end of Wilson's estimates of how much time people spend reading stuff on the Internet.  While I will admit to the occasional lapse of falling down a rabbit hole out of random curiosity, I try to be in charge whenever I'm browsing and attempt to keep my destination in mind.  If you know what you want before you go into the store, you'll probably spend less time (and money) there, and the same thing is true of the Internet.

 

If there's a specific problem caused by the superabundance of words on the Internet, it consists in what it's done to our reading habits.  Back when it took a person half a bottle of ink and an hour to write a three-page letter, the recipient felt obliged at least to read every word, and maybe some parts over more than once.

 

But now that words are so cheap and easily multiplied, we just zip through paragraphs like kids hunting for Easter eggs on the lawn—who needs all this grass?  Get to the good part.  But what if the good part won't emerge unless you read the whole thing?

 

If you've done me the good turn to read every word I've written down to this point, you have my thanks and appreciation.  But you are probably the exception.  Nobody can pay that kind of close attention to 490,000 words a day, nor should they.  The best we can do is to be a lot more selective about the stuff we look for, and favor sites that are well-curated (the term used to be "edited") which allow in only material that is truly worth our attention.  Because attention is what we bring to the table, or the screen, and because it's so limited, we should treat it as the valuable commodity that it is, for our own good and for the good of society as well.

 

Sources:  Kit Wilson's article "Reading Ourselves to Death" appears on pp. 73-79 of the Spring 2022 issue of The New Atlantis.