Distracted? Don’t Blame Digital Technology
Attention- A Historical Detour
The contemporary era is obsessed with the distractions faced by people from the digital media. Claims are frequently made that our power of attention is neurologically compromised by exposure to digital technology and the Internet.[i] This focus on technologically driven inattention is understandable but misplaced. The history of inattention indicates that what fuels disquiet about its alleged perils are apprehensions about the consequences of failing to attend to moral authority.
Inattention emerged as a problem for the moral order in 18th century Europe. The word inattention made its formal entry into the English vocabulary in the early 18th century. The Oxford English Dictionary cites a 1710 entry from Tatler as its first reference to this word. In this entry inattention is coupled with indolence and both are represented as moral vices of serious public concern[ii].
Philosophers and moralists were in the forefront of the cultural constructionof what they characterised as the ‘habit of inattention’. Inattention was depicted as not simply a stand-alone moral failing but as also he source of other vices. The philosopher Adam Ferguson, a leading figure in the Scottish Enlightenment argued in his Institutes of Moral Philosophy (1769) that ‘a fault is a wrong done from inattention or ignorance’. An example of what he called the ‘faults of inattention’ was pride, which he believed was an ‘abuse’ that ‘sometimes proceeds from inattention to the propriety of language’[iii]
The Scottish moral philosopher James Beattie, who gained a reputation for voicing the moral anxieties of his epoch was strident in his denunciation of the ‘evil habits of inattention’. In his An Essay On Truth (1770) he located inattention as the source of the ‘criminal habits’ that ‘debase the moral faculty’. He asserted that ‘we have contracted many evil habits, which with proper attention, we might have avoided’[iv]. Beattie associated inattention with ‘unkindness and dissatisfaction’ and warned that if this vice was allowed to flourish, social order would be undermined[v].
In England, the18th century periodical press embraced the moral crusade against the vice of inattention. Leading literary commentators such as Richard Steele, editor of the Guardian, and the essayist and moralist Samuel Johnson regarded inattention as a symptom of an ‘undetermined manner of thinking’. Commentators offered advice on ways to counter ‘that hurry of mind’ to ‘which some busy spirits are subjected’[vi].
One of the most widely cited source of advice on the problem of inattention in the 18th century, was provided by Elements of a Polite Education: Carefully Selected from the Letters of the Late Honourable Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield to his Son (1774). The publication of Elements of a Polite Education proved to be an instant success. It was reprinted five times within the first year of its publication. A year later an American edition was released in New York and the book[vii] continued to be regularly republished throughout the 19th century[viii]. In numerous letters the Earl of Chesterfield warned his son about the risks of inattention. ‘I know no one thing more offensive to a company, than inattention and distraction’ he wrote to his son in March 1746. In a letter written in January 1752, he equated inattention with a ‘laziness of mind’ and claimed that both were ‘enemies to knowledge’[ix]. The unifying theme of Chesterfield thoughts on this vice was that the failure to pay attention corroded social hierarchy and the moral order.
In the 18th century the moral condemnation of inattention ran in tandem with the cultural sacralisation of attention [x]. The transformation of attention into a modern moral virtue was poignantly captured by the Methodist religious poem ‘On Attention’, which appealed to ‘Sacred Attention’ in its affirmation of this virtue. This was the Age of Reason, and the culture of the Enlightenment celebrated attention as the most important mental faculty for the exercise of reason .[xi] The historian Michael Hagner argued (2003) that by the end of the 18th century, ‘attention became more than a proper metaphor for enlightened ambitions’. It was also perceived as the medium of education as well as of spiritual and moral development.
The French philosopher Helvetius regarded attention as an important source of enlightenment. In his study De l'esprit, or, Essays on the mind, and its several faculties (1758) he associated ‘continued attention’ with ‘superior intellects’. However unlike most other admirers of attention, this radical atheist thinker was critical of society’s tendency to condemn inattention as a moral vice. ‘Of what importance is it to be incessantly representing their inattention as a crime?’ he asked, before rejecting this ritual of moral control[xii].
Attention was promoted as a moral accomplishment that was essential to the cultivation of a sound character. The philosopher Thomas Reid, the foremost exponent of 18th century Scottish ‘common sense’, argued in his Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind (1788) that ‘there are moral rules respecting attention’ which are ‘no less evident than mathematical axioms’[xiii]. The moral rules of attention required cultivation and training and it was the job of educators to ensure that the young were protected from acquiring the ‘habits of inattention’. Inattention was increasingly perceived as an obstacle to the socialisation of young people[xiv].
Countering the habit of inattention among children and young people became the central concern of pedagogy in the 18th century. Educators have always been pre-occupied with gaining children’s attention but in the 18th century this concern acquired an unprecedented importance. Attention was seen as important for the nourishment of the reasoning mind as well as for spiritual and moral development[xv]. Advice books directed at parents, such as Maria Edgeworth’s Practical Education (1798) insisted that the cultivation of concentration and attention required effort and skill[xvi].
Philosophers and educators believed that the vice of ‘habitual inattention’ could be overcome if tackled early in life. This belief was expressed by the Earl of Chesterfield, who informed his wayward and allegedly inattentive son that there was still hope since ‘every man can get the better of the distraction, when, he thinks it worth his while’[xvii]. Dugald Stewart, in his Outlines of Moral Philosophy, for use of students in the University of Edinburgh (1793) was slightly more cautious when he warned that the habit of inattention is ‘not easily surmountable in our mature years’[xviii]. However, the possession of a moral virtue could not be taken for granted – James Beattie warned that attention was a virtue that could be extinguished by ‘idleness’ and therefore had to be constantly cultivated.[xix]
The Diseasing of Inattention
Despite the celebration of the virtue of attention, educators, religious commentators and medical professionals constantly expressed fears about the moral harms of inattention. From the later 18th century onwards anxieties about the ‘habit of inattention’ were increasingly represented as a moral disease. The German physician Melchior Adam Weikard in his medical textbook (1775) diagnosed the condition of what he termed, as ‘lack of attention’ (Attentio Volubilis or mangel der aufmerksamkeit). Weikard description of Attentio Volubilis continually shifted between medical and moral deficits. According to Weikard inattentive people lacked the stability and moral fibre necessary for concentration. They were ‘characterised as unwary, careless, flighty and bacchanal’[xx]. They were portrayed as relatively immature, reckless and unreliable. Weikard believed that poor childrearing practices were a source of the disease of inattention and that the condition was more common amongst the young than among older people. To cure the inattentive mind, he offered an 18th century variant of character training. He prescribed sour milk, steel powder and horseback riding.
The first text dealing with the disease of inattention in the English language was Alexander Crichton’s study, An Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Mental Derangement (1798). Crichton saw the disorder of inattention as ‘belonging to the domain of medicine’ but one that was influenced by social and cultural factors[xxi]. He claimed that attention could be adversely affected by poor education, lack of motivation and family influences. Both habitual inattention as well as the extreme overuse of attention could weaken the capacity to concentrate to the point that it became a medical illness. Crichton asserted that those who suffered attention deficit were agitated by an “unnatural degree of mental restlessness’. He wrote that those who suffer this debilitating condition have a ‘particular name for the state of their feelings’; they ‘say they have the fidgets’[xxii].
During the 19th century the pathology of inattention became thoroughly moralised. Inattentiveness was perceived as a threat to industrial progress, scientific advance and prosperity. The Scottish political economists, William Playfair summed the prevailing consensus on this subject when he stated that
‘The degradation of moral character; the loss of attention to the first principles to which society owes its prosperity and safety, both of which accompany wealth, are most powerful agents in the decline of nations’[xxiii]
From this perspective inattention to the normative foundation of daily life could have destructive consequences for society. Playfair claimed that that in France ‘the inattention of the nobility to their duty was one cause of the revolution’.[xxiv]
Religious and cultural commentators concerned with the preservation of the moral order perceived inattention as a character flaw. They frequently asserted that ‘indolence and inattention’ was a vice to which society was increasingly inclined[xxv]. By the end of 19th century inattention served as a marker for racial degeneration. In his fin de siècle classic, Degeneration (1895), the social critic, Max Nordau warned that ‘untended and unrestrained by attention, the brain activity of the degenerate and hysterical is capricious and without aim or purpose’[xxvi].
Until the 1970s the condition of inattention tended to be represented principally as one of defective moral control. George Still’s pioneering 1902 lectures on ‘Some Abnormal Physical Conditions in Children’ focused on the pathology of moral control. Children afflicted with this condition possessed such negative traits as ‘spitefulness-cruelty, jealousy, lawlessness, dishonesty, wanton, mischievousness-destructiveness, shamelessness-immodesty, sexual immorality, and viciousness’[xxvii]. Traces of this pathologisation of inattentive behaviour remained evident in the 1970s as psychologists continued to posit a ‘theoretical connection between attentional processes and moral behavior’[xxviii]. This sentiment underpinned Maggie Jackson’s Distracted: The Erosion Of Attention And The Coming Dark Age(2008) with its claims that attention ‘tames our inner beast’ and is ‘integral to developing a conscience’[xxix].
The recent decades has seen a dramatic reversal in the conceptualisation of inattention. Unlike in the 18th century when inattention was perceived as abnormal today it is often presented as the normal state. The current era is frequently characterised as the Age of Distraction and inattention is no longer depicted as a condition that afflicts a few. In the Age of Distraction the erosion of humanity’s capacity for attention is portrayed as an existential problem.
In the current era the condition of inattention is typically linked with the allegedly corrosive effects of digitally driven distractions and the Internet. The ‘Net seizes our attention only to scatter it’ contends the author of The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we read, think and remember[xxx]. According to the neuroscientist Daniel Levitin the distractions of the ‘modern world is bad for your brain’[xxxi]. Yet the moral concerns that have always underpinned society’s preoccupation with inattention still lurk in the background. As the literary critic Sven Birkerts recently acknowledged, in is lament about the Age of Distraction; ‘what I do know is that the words attention and moral came together for me with an electric immediacy’[xxxii].
Attention To What?
The present day focus on a technologically produced Age of Distraction encourages the mystification of the problem of inattention. Throughout its history inattention has served as a sublimated focus for apprehensions about moral authority. That it was discovered in the 18th century is not surprising. The intellectual temper of the Age of Reason rejected the sacred truths of tradition and insisted that arguments should be based on evidence and reason.[xxxiii] The contestation of cultural and intellectual authority that erupted during the era of the Enlightenment has led to an unending competition for the ear of the public.
As teachers throughout history know gaining the attention of young people is always a challenge. But once moral authority became a site of contestation the question of who would gain the attention of young people became a more pressing matter. That is one reason why moral philosophers were drawn to the problem of inattention. This was a point recognised by the John Dewey in his 1897 article ‘The Psychology of Effort’ where he noted that we become aware of attention when society is faced with competing claims for it.[xxxiv]
So although inattention is represented as a polar opposite of attention it is more useful to perceive the issue of distraction as a concern about people not attending to what is represented as the legitimate focus of attention. It also expresses the fear that the inattentive may be paying far too much attention to the wrong texts and cultural practices. This point is recognised by Sherry Turkle who recently observed that a ‘lot is at stake in attention’ because ‘where we put it’ is ‘how we show what we value’[xxxv].
The perception of an Age of Distraction is related to our uncertainty about the answer to the question of ‘attention to what or to whom’. The sublimation of anxieties about moral authority through the fetish of technologically driven distraction has acquired pathological proportions in relation to children and young people. Yet as most sensible observers understand children who are inattentive to their teachers are often obsessively attentive to the text messages that they receive. The constant lament about inattentive youth in the Anglo-American world should be interpreted as a symptom of problems related to the exercise of adult authority[xxxvi].
Often the failure to inspire and capture the imagination of young people is blamed on their inattentive state of mind. Too often educators have responded to this condition by adopting a fatalistic approach of accommodating to the supposed inattentive reading practices of digital natives. This pattern is evident in higher education where the assumption that college students can no longer be expected to read long and challenging texts or pay attention to serious lectures has led to the adaptation of course material to the inattentive mentality of the digital native. Calls to change the educational environment to ‘fit the student’ have become widespread in higher education[xxxvii]. How different to the reaction of 18th century moral philosophers!
In the 18th century academics like Dugald Stewart were also concerned with the problem of the inattentive student. But Stewart, author of Outlines of Moral Philosophy, for use of students in the University of Edinburgh, still believed that the problem of inattention overcome through moral education. Unlike some contemporary academics he regarded the ‘early habit of inattention’ as a problem to be solved rather than unalterable fact of existence. Helvetius fervently believed that everyone had the potential to acquire ‘continued attention’ and ‘triumph over indolence’[xxxviii].
Regrettably the optimism of Helvetius has given way to a mood of resignation. Attention is still seen as desirable but almost impossible to achieve. Yet, it still retains normative content and its supposed loss in the current age of distraction is a subject of constant lament. As one such alarmist account warns ‘an epidemic erosion of attention is a sure sign of an impending dark age’[xxxix]. Helvetius would have been distressed by the fatalism expressed by this lament.
A version of this article appeared in Aeon, https://aeon.co/essays/busy-and-distracted-everybody-has-been-since-at-least-1710
[i] See for example Nicholas Carr (2010) The Shallows: How the internet is changing the we read, think and remember, Atlantic Books : London, pp.118-121.
[ii] It states ‘1710 Tatler No. 187. ⁋6 The universal Indolence and Inattention among us to Things that concern the Publick’. "inattention, n.". OED Online. December 2015. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com.chain.kent.ac.uk/view/Entry/93183?redirectedFrom=inattention (accessed January 13, 2016).
[iii] Ferguson,A. (1800) (originally published 1769) Institutes of Moral Philosophy, (new edition) 1800, James Decker : Basil, pp. 74 & 195.
[iv] See Beattie, J. (1770) ‘An Essay of Truth’ in James Beattie: Selected Philosophical Writings(2004), Imprint Academic : London, no pagination.
[v] James Beattie is cited in ‘On the importance of Attention’, The Scots Magazine, June 1783,p.287
[vi] See ‘Helps For Memory’ The Edinburgh Magazine, 1795, p.291.
[vii] See http://www.aba.org.uk/getattachment/9372AD18-1526-440E-8088-7615982197E8/first-american-small-title2.pdf, pp.24-25 on the history of its publication.
[viii] See http://www.aba.org.uk/getattachment/9372AD18-1526-440E-8088-7615982197E8/first-american-small-title2.pdf, pp.24-25 on the history of its publication.
[ix] See ‘Letter CLXII’ and ‘Letter CXXXII’ in Elements of a Polite Education: Carefully Selected from the Letters of the Late Honourable Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield to his Son (1774) available on-line http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=3361 .
[x] On ATTENTION. 1781. Arminian Magazine consisting of extracts and original treatises on universal redemption, Jan.1778-Dec.1797, 4, pp. 115.—edited by John Wesley
[xi] This point is well argued by Hagner, M. (2003). Toward a history of attention in culture and science. MLN,118(3), 670-687.
[xii] Claude Adrien Helvetius (1810) (originally published 1758) De l'esprit, or, Essays on the mind, and its several faculties, Vernor, Hood and Sharpe : London, p.479.
[xiii] Reid, T. (1803)(originally published in 1788) Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, Bell & Bradfute : Edinburgh, p.91.
[xiv] See Chapter 3 Neil Postman (1983) The Disappearance Of Childhood: How TV is Changing Children’s Lives, Comet Book : London.
[xv] Sobe, Noah W. "Concentration and civilisation: producing the attentive child in the age of Enlightenment." Paedagogica Historica 46.1-2 (2010), p.150.
[xvi] See the discussion in Sobe (2010).
[xvii] See ‘Letter CLXII’ in Elements of a Polite Education: Carefully Selected from the Letters of the Late Honourable Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield to his Son (1774) available on-line http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=3361
[xviii] Stewart, D. (1793) Outlines of Moral Philosophy, for use of students in the University of Edinburgh (2nd ed. 1801) William Creech : Edinburgh) pp.31-32.
[xix] James Beattie is cited in ‘On the importance of Attention’, The Scots Magazine, June 1783,p.286.
[xx] Barkley, R. A., & Peters, H. (2012). The earliest reference to ADHD in the medical literature? Melchior Adam Weikard’s description in 1775 of “attention deficit”(mangel der aufmerksamkeit, attentio volubilis). Journal of attention disorders, vol.16, p.627.
[xxi] Palmer, Erica D., and Stanley Finger(2001) "An early description of ADHD (inattentive subtype): Dr Alexander Crichton and ‘Mental Restlessness’(1798)." Child Psychology and Psychiatry Review 6.02 p.68.
[xxii] Cited in Palmer & Finger (2001) p.69.
[xxiii] William Playfair (1805) An Inquiry into the permanent causes of the decline and fall of powerful and wealthy nations, Greenland Norris ; London, p.91
[xxiv] William Playfair (1805) An Inquiry into the permanent causes of the decline and fall of powerful and wealthy nations, Greenland Norris ; London, p.126.
[xxv] ‘British Catalogue. Divinity’ The British Critic, vol XV, 1800, London,p.553,
[xxvi] Nordau, M. (1895) Degeneration, (D. Appleton : New York) p.56.
[xxvii] See Palmer & Finger (2001) p.70.
[xxviii] See Douglas, V.I. (1972) ‘Stop, look and listen: The problem of sustained attention and impulse control in hyperactive and normal children’, Canadian Journal of Behavioral Science, vol.4, no.4, p.279.
[xxix] Maggie Jackson(2008) Distracted”The Erosion Of Attention And The Coming Dark Age(2008)p.23.
[xxx] Nicholas Carr (2010) The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we read, think and remember, Atlantic Books : London, p.118.
[xxxi] Daniel, J. Levitin ‘Why the modern world is bad for your brain’, The Observer; 18 January, 2015.
[xxxii] Sven Birkerts (2015) Changing the Subject, Grawof Press : Minneapolis, p.180.
[xxxiii] The consequences of the contestation of authority in the 18th century is discussed in Furedi, F. (2013) Authority: A Sociological History, Cambridge University Press : Cambridge, chapter 9.
[xxxiv] ‘The Psychology of Effort’, John Dewey The Philosophical Review, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Jan., 1897), p. 56.
[xxxv] Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, Penguin Press 2015.
[xxxvi] See my arguments in http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/kids-don-t-need-pills-they-need-parenting-8759095.html
[xxxvii] Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes
Author: N. Katherine Hayles, Profession 2007, pp. 187–199 (13).
[xxxviii] Helvetius (1758) p.242.
[xxxix] See Maggie Jackson (2008) Distracted: The Erosion of Attention And The Coming Dark Age, Prometheus Books : Amherst, N.Y., p.26.