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?