What’s awkward about this whole debate is that, though we speak freely of “attention spans,” they are not the sort of thing that psychologists can measure, independent of context, across time. And studies of the ostensible harm that carrying smartphones does to cognitive abilities have been contradictory and inconclusive. A.D.H.D. diagnoses abound, but is that because the condition is growing more prevalent or the diagnosis is? U.S. labor productivity and the percentage of the population with four years or more of college have risen throughout the Internet era.
The apparent decline of reading is also not so straightforward. Print book sales are holding steady, and audiobook sales are rising. The National Center for Education Statistics has tracked a recent drop in U.S. children’s reading abilities, yet that mostly coincides with the pandemic, and scores are still as good as or better than when the center started measuring, in 1971. If reading assignments at top colleges are shorter, it might be because today’s hypercompetitive students are busier, rather than because they’re less capable (and how many were actually doing all the reading in the old days?). What about Nicholas Carr’s insistence in 2010 that a Rhodes Scholar who didn’t read books heralded a post-literate future? “Of course I read books!” that Rhodes Scholar protested to another writer. Today, he holds a Ph.D. from Oxford and has written two books of his own.
After decades of the Internet, the mediascape has still not dissolved into a froth of three-second clips of orgasms, kittens, and trampoline accidents, interspersed with sports-betting ads. As the legal scholar Tim Wu argues in “The Attention Merchants,” the road to distraction is not one-way. Yes, businesses seize our attention using the shiniest lures available, but people become inured and learn to ignore them. Or they recoil, which might explain why meditation, bird-watching, and vinyl records are in vogue. Technology firms, in fact, often attract users by promising to reduce distractions, not only the daily hassles—paying bills, arranging travel—but the online onslaught, too. Google’s text ads and mail filters offered respite from the early Internet’s spam and pop-ups. Apple became one of the world’s largest companies by selling simplicity.