Blaming the Social Media: An Excuse For Human Fragility And Failure

It is not the social media that makes us distracted but our crisis of meaning!

Have you noticed how virtually every social problem is blamed on social media? Numerous psychologists insist that the epidemic of anxiety sweeping the Western world is caused by social media. The renowned psychologist Jonathan Haidt insists that social media is a major contributor to the outbreak of teenage anxiety and depression that kicked in during the 2010s. He also believes that political dysfunction and polarisation are also attributable to the influence of social media.

The Internet is frequently blamed for cyberbullying, social anxiety, depression, and internet addiction. Apparently, it increases the craving for attention and leads to a loss of creativity. It is sometimes held responsible for the breakdown of relationships.

The spread of Fake News is said to be an accomplishment of social media, which is also blamed for radicalising Islamic terrorists and lone-wolf shooters. The rise of populism and radical social movements is often linked to social media. During my research on childhood, I noted that virtually every affliction children suffer is attributed to social media. As an educator, I have been struck by the frequency that the problems in the classroom are blamed on children’s social media consumption. This sentiment is echoed in higher education, where the apparent inability of undergraduates to concentrate on their course material is also linked to social media.

In a recent discussion, the slow collapse of the Humanities in universities was depicted as the direct consequence of young people’s inability to concentrate and pay attention to the texts assigned by their professors. Why? Because of the dreadful effect of social media. James Shapiro, a distinguished scholar of early modern literature at Columbia University, stated that ‘technology in the last 20 years has changed all of us’ to the point that people have lost the capacity for sustained reading’. His point is echoed by Ross Douthat, the New York Times commentator who contends that ‘you simply cannot sustain a serious humanism as an integral part of a digitalized culture; you have to separate, at least until we figure out a way to be digital that isn’t just the way of the addict or the surfer skimming and never going deep’.

Apparently, we live in an Age of Distraction, and our very humanity is at risk from digital technology. This sentiment is widely held in culture, education, childrearing and business. Proponents of the claim that we live in a unique Age of Distraction argue that this has undermined our capacity to pay attention and now exercises a decisive influence over institutions of education. Our unhealthy addiction to blaming social media for virtually every problem we face has a particularly deleterious effect on our understanding of education. Numerous commentators go so far as to claim that the meaning and practice of reading have changed in our digital world to the point that our capacity to reflect is at risk.

The Myth Of The Age of Distraction

Every time I participate in a discussion of educators – sooner or later, I will encounter the lament that ‘sadly ours is an Age of Distraction’. The conviction that we live in an age of distraction has become an incontrovertible truth. Teachers and commentators are also said to be afflicted by the disabling effects of their distracted minds. Discussions on literacy often blame digital distractions for our allegedly poor reading habits. Commentators assert that digital dependence is ‘eroding human memory’. According to one study of the memory habits of 6000 adults, our habit of looking up information online ‘prevents the building up of long-term memories’. It seems that if all the recent reports of memory loss and diminishing attention spans are to be believed, it is unlikely that you will get to the end of this Substack post.

The allegation that the distracting effects of the media landscape has a deleterious impact on children’s attention spans and are responsible for their poor reading habits is rarely questioned. Commentators on technology and culture regularly remind the public that we live during an Age of Distraction where a significant proportion of the population – especially the younger generations – no longer possess the attention span necessary for close reading. Their diagnosis of attention deficit is usually blamed on digital technology, and the principal marker for this disease is said to be the addiction to multitasking. Statements on this subject convey the conviction that the condition of distraction is an existential fact. According to one account, ‘it seems clear that a hyper-digital culture has fostered in students — indeed, in most of us — an expectation of immediacy, and, not least, the pressure to multitask’.

Increasingly adults – including grown-up writers and intellectuals – have written about their struggle to read seriously without being distracted by diverse online attractions. The author and essayist Tim Parks wrote of his struggle to read. ‘What I’m talking about is the state of constant distraction we live in and how that affects the very special energies required for tackling a substantial work of fiction’, he stated. Recently, Ross Douthat wrote that he is a reader who is ‘too attached to the distracting present to enter fully the complex language of the past’.

If a serious commentator like Douthat struggles to ‘enter fully the complex language of the past,’ what hope is there for millions of undergraduates who are expected to engage with demanding texts of their discipline?  Unfortunately, academic culture has adopted a fatalistic orientation towards living under the spell of digital technology. Academic departments worldwide have sought to adjust to the supposed problems thrown up by the Age of Distraction by lowering their expectation of students’ capacity to concentrate and read.

When I told my American colleagues at a sociology conference in Chicago that I expect students to read Emile Durkheim’s Suicide for a seminar discussion, they reacted with a gesture of incredulity. One colleague informs me that you ‘can’t expect them to read the old way’ since ‘these kids don’t have the attention span that we had in college’. I am not surprised by their response since, time and again, I encounter the argument that serious reading has become a lost art. The lament about the precarious status of people’s attention spans has acquired the status of a conventional truth.

By all accounts, attention has become a scarce resource. In her recent book Reclaiming Conversation, the digital scholar Sherry Turkle observes that ‘these days, attention is in short supply – in college classrooms’. Others portray our era as one where the human capacity for attention is overwhelmed by the mega-power of distraction. It is frequently claimed that distraction haunts the digital world. Sven Birkerts contends that human beings have become psychologically transformed through their immersion in digital technology. He writes of a world where people who face ‘the stimulus barrage of modern life’ find it ‘ever harder to generate and then sustain a level of attention – focus – that full involvement in experience requires’.

As it happens, a far greater problem than the force of distraction is the all-pervasive sense of historical amnesia that permeates western culture. The current discussion about the threat that distraction poses to the capacity for attention serves as a striking illustration of the condition of historical amnesia. Claims about the distracting effect of new technology have been around since the invention of writing. Since its invention, commentaries have warned about this technology’s harmful effect on memory and attention span. Thousands of years before the current alarmist statements about the loss of attention of university students, Socrates condemned writing for weakening the reader’s memory. His health warning about the distracting perils of writing and reading would be repeated in the centuries to come.

Almost two thousand years before the advent of digital technology, the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca raised the alarm about the threat of distraction and the dizzying emotional effects posed by the availability of a diverse source of reading. ‘Be careful’, warned Seneca, ‘lest this reading of many authors and books of every sort may tend to make you discursive and unsteady’. In his Letter To Lucilius, written between 63 and 65 AD, Seneca dwelt on the condition today diagnosed as Attention Deficit Syndrome. He warned that the ‘reading of many books is a distraction’ that leaves the reader ‘disoriented and weak’. His warnings about the perils of distracted reading would be frequently repeated by cultural commentators in the centuries to come.

The mood of unease with the supposed corrosive effect of modernisation and technological change on human cognition intensified in the 19^th century. The new site of concern was the seductive appeal of the novel and its toxic consequence for the exercise of cognition.

In the 19^th century, the association of the distraction of modern life with the alleged diminishing of attention became the focus of psychological and sociological investigation. References to poor or short attention spans first emerged around the middle of the 19^th century, and the shortening of the reader’s attention span became a theme for discussion at the turn of the twentieth century. Almost a century before the rise of digital culture, the German sociologist Georg Simmel offered a compelling account of the modern condition of distraction. In his essay, The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903), Simmel explored the ‘intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli’ The discovery of the modern condition of distraction and loss of attention occurred a very long-time before the arrival of the Internet and social media.

From my study of the history of reading, I have concluded that the perennial preoccupation with attention is principally a moral or cultural rather than a medical problem. So is the contemporary fetishisation of the power of social media. In education, it often reflects anxieties about how to gain students' attention. One underlying issue raised in Sherry Turkle’s study of our current predicament is what happens when that ‘moment of boredom’ kicks in the classroom.[Though boredom can be associated with inattentive behaviour, it also raises questions about why teachers and wider society have difficulty cultivating young people's curiosity and interest. At the very least, a historical perspective on the problem of distraction ought to raise the question of whether the apparent decline of attention is a technological or cultural issue.

Conclusion

It is tempting to blame the current crisis of attention on the workings of digital technology. However, it should be evident that the natural capacity for attention has not diminished. Young people fixated on their text messages have no problem attending to their mobile phones. Attention is a cultural accomplishment, and the decision to pay attention to some but not other phenomena is not the direct consequence of the effects of media technology. If people find it difficult to pay attention to serious texts, it is not because they have become slaves to their mobile phones. What’s really at issue is society’s failure to cultivate a love of learning and an intellectually inspiring educational setting. A narrow instrumental ethos dominates campus life. Students are frequently assigned the role of consumers. Taking an interest in ideas for their own sake is often dismissed as an outdated and irrelevant practice.

Academics who ought to know better have accepted the idea that digital distractions have contributed to a situation where young adults no longer need to possess the attention span required for reading a book. Claims that undergraduates are far too easily distracted by the temptations offered by the digital era to absorb themselves in serious reading have served as justifications for adopting a narrow functional and instrumental attitude towards reading. This flight from demanding and challenging content is often awarded the praise of ‘good practice’ on the grounds that it is relevant to the needs of the digital generation. Sadly, the accommodation to instrumental reading intensifies the problem it is meant to avoid – intellectually switched-off students will become seriously distracted and easily bored.

The best way to gain people's attention is to take their education seriously. Blaming social media serves to deflect attention from the real problems of our time. Whatever the long-term impact of social media, it did not cause the current state of distraction. Our distraction is a cultural accomplishment founded upon society's difficulty in generating inspiring ideals. The real issue at stake is the inability of contemporary society to develop the intellectual resources to give meaning to human experience. Appealing to the power of social media and the Age of Distraction is a cop-out from confronting this problem.

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