Last 12 months, I made a case for “reading as rebellion,” a method of clawing again consideration from the companies and platforms searching for to colonize our minds. The response was encouraging. Many folks, younger and outdated, need to insurgent by studying extra.
But the follow-up query is sensible: How? Wanting to learn extra is one factor. Becoming a reader, in a world designed to forestall the form of deep focus studying requires, is one other.
The Problem Isn’t Just You
A latest essay by Carlo Iacono, a college librarian writing in Aeon, prompted me to replicate extra on the sensible facet of this query.
Iacono’s article challenges the standard hand-wringing concerning the loss of life of studying. Anxiety over new media is nothing new. In the late nineteenth century, greater than one million boys’ periodicals have been offered weekly in Britain—the “penny dreadfuls,” tales of sensational crime and horror. Victorian commentators nervous concerning the degradation of youth and the demise of great thought. Before that, novel-reading itself was the existential risk, described as a “fever,” “insidious contagion,” or “reading mania.”
The downside at this time, Iacono insists, isn’t screens however design. Treating “screen culture” as a unified phenomenon is, in his phrases, a class error. The similar system that delivers algorithmically curated outrage additionally incorporates the whole works of Shakespeare. The downside isn’t the know-how however its design.
Iacono factors to analysis from Gloria Mark, a professor at UC Irvine, who has tracked consideration spans on screens for 20 years. In 2004, folks averaged two and a half minutes on any display earlier than switching duties. By 2016, that had dropped to 47 seconds. The frequent conclusion is that screens have to be destroying our potential to focus. But Iacono factors out how the fragmentation correlates not with screens typically however with particular design patterns: notification programs, variable reward schedules, the infinite scroll. These aren’t properties of the medium. They’re decisions made by particular firms for particular financial causes.
The proof is true in entrance of us, Iacono says. That’s why the younger man who can’t get by way of a novel can watch a three-hour video essay on the decline of the Ottoman Empire. The teenager who struggles with a brief consideration span can spend hours in a fancy online game, coordinating teammates whereas adapting technique in actual time. Millions of individuals hear repeatedly to audiobooks or get pleasure from long-form podcasts that educate historical past, theology, or philosophy.
The youthful technology can focus when the surroundings invitations it. But social media platforms exploit the identical psychological mechanisms that make playing addictive, and the unpredictability of what you’ll discover retains you checking.
Why does this matter? Because it helps us contemplate a extra applicable response. If the issue is screens, full cease, then the answer is retreat. Summon the willpower to place down the system and decide up the guide. But if the issue is design, then the answer includes your surroundings. As Iacono places it, “Your inability to focus isn’t a moral failing. It’s a design problem. You’re trying to think in environments built to prevent thinking.”
Build Different Spaces
Iacono’s most helpful idea is what he calls “containers for attention”—bounded areas and practices the place totally different modes of engagement turn into attainable. He observes that the individuals who interact within the lifetime of the thoughts aren’t essentially extra disciplined.
Some folks have discovered to look at documentaries with a pocket book, take heed to podcasts throughout walks when their minds can wander productively, learn bodily books in intentionally quiet areas with telephones left behind. They’re not rejecting know-how. They’re choreographing it.
Others haven’t discovered this but:
[They are] making an attempt sustained thought in environments engineered to forestall it. They sit with laptops open, seven tabs competing for consideration, notifications sliding in from three totally different apps, telephones vibrating each jiffy. They’re attempting to learn severe materials whereas preventing a shedding battle in opposition to behavioral psychology weaponized at scale. . . . They don’t notice they’re attempting to suppose in an area optimized to forestall pondering.
If the answer isn’t self-discipline alone but additionally structure, we’ll want to think about totally different defaults and create totally different areas, with specific rhythms. This is an historic Christian intuition. Long earlier than the eye financial system existed, the church understood that formation requires surroundings. You can’t simply resolve to turn into a sure form of particular person; you organize your life in order that changing into that particular person is simpler than not. Secular observers again up this perception, as James Clear’s Atomic Habits makes clear: The nudges in the environment matter.
For studying particularly, which means making small architectural selections: a chair with out a telephone close by, a set time, a bodily guide somewhat than a display. It means treating areas of your property the best way you deal with the movie show, as areas the place totally different guidelines apply, the place the pull towards distraction is intentionally weakened.
Iacono contrasts feeds and focus. “One happens in an ecosystem designed for contemplation, the other in a casino designed for endless pull-to-refresh.” Reading labored for thus lengthy, he argues, not as a result of textual content is magic however as a result of books got here with built-in boundaries. They finish. Pages keep nonetheless. Libraries present quiet. These weren’t options of literacy itself; they have been options of the habitat the place literacy lived. If we’re to domesticate the lifetime of the thoughts at this time, we’ll must think about new habitats for focus.
Most Radical Container of All
Which brings me to the church.
A number of years in the past, I argued that the sanctuary ought to stand alongside the cinema as one of many final holdouts in opposition to the colonization of consideration. The cinema works as a result of it enforces a container. The expectation is that you simply’ll give up your telephone, dedicate two hours to a single story, and expertise one thing at a stage of depth that multitasking would destroy. And if we are able to do this for a movie, absolutely we are able to do it for the Word of God.
The church is for feeding, sure, however the meals is God’s Word, not the junk meals of our feeds. It’s a purpose-built habitat for orienting ourselves towards the One who most deserves our gaze. The rhythms of a worship service—gathering, confessing our religion, confession of sin, singing, listening to the Word of the Lord, feasting at his Table, being despatched out—are an architectural construction. They’re designed to reorder us, to attract our consideration upward earlier than strengthening us for the Lord’s service.
Felicia Wu Song, in Restless Devices, describes the psychological cocktail of fixed digital connection: pleasures, anxieties, felt expectations, all combined collectively and poured into each second of free time we have now. The church, at its greatest, may be an antidote to that cocktail. Not as an escape from the actual world however as an entry right into a extra actual one. She describes the church as a “counterspace” the place we’re confronted with time-tested fact and reminded of who we’re.
To select to depart your telephone within the automobile while you’re at church is to make an architectural determination. It’s saying, For this hour, I’m constructing a container. I’m making depth simpler than distraction. I’m giving my consideration to the One who gave every little thing for me.
Smarter Rebellion
My earlier column urged studying as revolt. I stand by that. But an insurgency requires technique, not simply resolve. It’s not a good battle after we attempt to learn in an area engineered to forestall studying, or attempt to worship in an area the place the feed’s slot machine is pulling for our consideration.
So construct the container. Arrange your chair. Silence notifications. Find your library, your quiet room, your sanctuary. Reading as revolt will occur not by summoning superhuman willpower however by making one small architectural determination at a time.
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