THE BATTLE FOR ATTENTION

How do we hold on to what matters in a distracted age?

- NATHAN HELLER

Οn a subway train not long ago, I had the familiar, unsettling experience of standing behind a fellow passenger and watching everything that she was doing on her phone. It was a crowded car, rush hour, with the dim but unwarm lighting of the oldest New York City trains. The stranger's phone was bright, and as I looked on she scrolled through a waterfall of videos that other people had filmed in their homes. She watched one for four or five seconds, then dispatched it by twitching her thumb. She flicked to a text message, did nothing with it, and flipped back. The figures on her screen, dressed carefully and mugging at the camera like mimes, seemed desperate for something that she could not provide: her sustained attention. I felt mortified, not least because I saw on both sides of the screen symptoms I recognized too clearly in myself.

For years, we have heard a litany of reasons why our capacity to pay attention is disturbingly on the wane. Technology the buzzing, blinking pageant on our screens and in our pockets— hounds us. Modern life, forever quicker and more scattered, drives concentration For just as long, concerns of this variety could be put aside. Television was described as a force against attention even in the nineteen-forties. A lot of focussed, worthwhile work has taken place since then.