Today's Reading

Some of the most grave and chilling descriptions of the effects of the attention age come from the workers who have engineered it. The hit Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma relies heavily on former Silicon Valley figures like whistleblower and former Google employee Tristan Harris to warn of the insidious nature of the apps mining our attention. Sean Parker, the creator of Napster and one of Facebook's earliest investors, describes himself as a "conscientious objector" when it comes to social media: "God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains," he has said. He is very much not alone. A New York Times Magazine article from 2018 tracks what the author calls the "dark consensus about screens and kids" among the Silicon Valley workers who themselves helped engineer the very products they now bar their own children from using. "I am convinced," one former Facebook employee told The New York Times in 2018, that "the devil lives in our phones and is wreaking havoc on our children."

I'm inclined to agree, but also find myself shrinking more than a little at how much the conversation around the evils of our phones sounds like a classic moral panic. Sociologist Stanley Cohen first coined the term "moral panic" in his 1972 book Folk Devils and Moral Panics, a study of the hysteria that surrounded different kinds of youth culture, particularly the Mods and Rockers in the UK in the 1960s. "Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic," Cohen writes. Some group or cultural trend "emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions."

We can also see this familiar pattern when the target is a new technology rather than a cultural trend or group: excitement and wonder that quickly turn to dread and panic. The cheap printing technology of the late nineteenth century that gave rise to paperbacks and dime-store novels occasioned one critic to decry the genre publisher for "poisoning society...with his smutty stories and impure example...a moral ulcer, a plague spot, a leper, who ought to be treated as were the lepers of old, who were banished from society and commanded to cry 'Unclean,' as a warning to save others from the pestilence." In 1929, as radio rose to become a dominant form of media in the country, The New York Times asked, "Do Radio Noises Cause Illness?" and informed its readers that there was "general agreement among doctors and scientific men that the coming of the radio has produced a great many illnesses, particularly caused by nervous troubles. The human system requires repose and cannot be kept up at the jazz rate forever."

The brilliant illustrator Randall Munroe, creator of the webcomic xkcd, captures much of this in a timeline called "The Pace of Modern Life" chronicling the anxiety of contemporary critics about the development of industrial modernity, particularly the speed of communication and proliferation of easily accessible information and its impact on our minds. He starts with the Sunday Magazine in 1871 mourning the fact that the "art of letter-writing is fast dying out.... We fire off a multitude of rapid and short notes, instead of sitting down to have a good talk over a real sheet of paper." He then quotes an 1894 politician decrying the shrinking attention spans: instead of reading, people were content with a "summary of the summary" and were "dipping into...many subjects and gathering information in a...superficial form" and thus losing "the habit of settling down to great works." And my personal favorite, a 1907 note in the Journal of Education that laments the new "modern family gathering, silent around the fire, each individual with his head buried in his favorite magazine."

All of this now seems amusingly hyperbolic, but there are two different ways to think about these consistent warnings and bouts of mourning for what modernity has taken from us. One way is to view it all as quaint: there will always be some set of people who will freak out about the effects of any new technology or media, and over time those people will find out that everything is fine, that the rise of, say, magazines, of all things, doesn't rot children's brains or destroy the fabric of family life.

But I don't think that's right. Rather, I think these complaints and concerns about accelerating technology and media are broadly correct. When writing was new, it really did pose a threat to all kinds of cherished older forms of thinking and communicating. Same too with the printing press and mass literacy, and then radio and television. And it is when a technology is newest, when it's hottest to the touch, that it burns most intensely.

The very experience of what we call modernity is the experience of a world whose pace of life, scope of information, and sources of stimulus with a claim on our attention are always increasing. At each point up this curve, the ascent induces vertigo. When Henry David Thoreau escaped to Walden Pond in the summer of 1845, it was as a refuge from this precise experience, the invasive omnipresence of modernity and the way it can cloud a person's faculties. Of our so-called modern improvements, he writes, "There is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance...Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things."
...

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Today's Reading

Some of the most grave and chilling descriptions of the effects of the attention age come from the workers who have engineered it. The hit Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma relies heavily on former Silicon Valley figures like whistleblower and former Google employee Tristan Harris to warn of the insidious nature of the apps mining our attention. Sean Parker, the creator of Napster and one of Facebook's earliest investors, describes himself as a "conscientious objector" when it comes to social media: "God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains," he has said. He is very much not alone. A New York Times Magazine article from 2018 tracks what the author calls the "dark consensus about screens and kids" among the Silicon Valley workers who themselves helped engineer the very products they now bar their own children from using. "I am convinced," one former Facebook employee told The New York Times in 2018, that "the devil lives in our phones and is wreaking havoc on our children."

I'm inclined to agree, but also find myself shrinking more than a little at how much the conversation around the evils of our phones sounds like a classic moral panic. Sociologist Stanley Cohen first coined the term "moral panic" in his 1972 book Folk Devils and Moral Panics, a study of the hysteria that surrounded different kinds of youth culture, particularly the Mods and Rockers in the UK in the 1960s. "Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic," Cohen writes. Some group or cultural trend "emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions."

We can also see this familiar pattern when the target is a new technology rather than a cultural trend or group: excitement and wonder that quickly turn to dread and panic. The cheap printing technology of the late nineteenth century that gave rise to paperbacks and dime-store novels occasioned one critic to decry the genre publisher for "poisoning society...with his smutty stories and impure example...a moral ulcer, a plague spot, a leper, who ought to be treated as were the lepers of old, who were banished from society and commanded to cry 'Unclean,' as a warning to save others from the pestilence." In 1929, as radio rose to become a dominant form of media in the country, The New York Times asked, "Do Radio Noises Cause Illness?" and informed its readers that there was "general agreement among doctors and scientific men that the coming of the radio has produced a great many illnesses, particularly caused by nervous troubles. The human system requires repose and cannot be kept up at the jazz rate forever."

The brilliant illustrator Randall Munroe, creator of the webcomic xkcd, captures much of this in a timeline called "The Pace of Modern Life" chronicling the anxiety of contemporary critics about the development of industrial modernity, particularly the speed of communication and proliferation of easily accessible information and its impact on our minds. He starts with the Sunday Magazine in 1871 mourning the fact that the "art of letter-writing is fast dying out.... We fire off a multitude of rapid and short notes, instead of sitting down to have a good talk over a real sheet of paper." He then quotes an 1894 politician decrying the shrinking attention spans: instead of reading, people were content with a "summary of the summary" and were "dipping into...many subjects and gathering information in a...superficial form" and thus losing "the habit of settling down to great works." And my personal favorite, a 1907 note in the Journal of Education that laments the new "modern family gathering, silent around the fire, each individual with his head buried in his favorite magazine."

All of this now seems amusingly hyperbolic, but there are two different ways to think about these consistent warnings and bouts of mourning for what modernity has taken from us. One way is to view it all as quaint: there will always be some set of people who will freak out about the effects of any new technology or media, and over time those people will find out that everything is fine, that the rise of, say, magazines, of all things, doesn't rot children's brains or destroy the fabric of family life.

But I don't think that's right. Rather, I think these complaints and concerns about accelerating technology and media are broadly correct. When writing was new, it really did pose a threat to all kinds of cherished older forms of thinking and communicating. Same too with the printing press and mass literacy, and then radio and television. And it is when a technology is newest, when it's hottest to the touch, that it burns most intensely.

The very experience of what we call modernity is the experience of a world whose pace of life, scope of information, and sources of stimulus with a claim on our attention are always increasing. At each point up this curve, the ascent induces vertigo. When Henry David Thoreau escaped to Walden Pond in the summer of 1845, it was as a refuge from this precise experience, the invasive omnipresence of modernity and the way it can cloud a person's faculties. Of our so-called modern improvements, he writes, "There is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance...Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things."
...

Join the Library's Online Book Clubs and start receiving chapters from popular books in your daily email. Every day, Monday through Friday, we'll send you a portion of a book that takes only five minutes to read. Each Monday we begin a new book and by Friday you will have the chance to read 2 or 3 chapters, enough to know if it's a book you want to finish. You can read a wide variety of books including fiction, nonfiction, romance, business, teen and mystery books. Just give us your email address and five minutes a day, and we'll give you an exciting world of reading.

What our readers think...