It feels like we live in an era of constant distraction, but the truth is more complex
?”, there has been a sense of crisis around our concentration spans. Distraction is everywhere, and so are its putative antidotes. Apps such as PawBlock, offering cute animal pictures instead of your social media fix, and screen modes such as Microsoft’s Focus, are the tech versions of mindfulness, the perceived panacea for all modern ills. On the other hand, speed‑reading programs such as QuickReader hold out the promise of absorbing more content in less time.
For example, concentration became a crucial part of the ideology of work-discipline during the Industrial Revolution. This was historian’s term for the admonitory regime of clocking in and out ushered in by new forms of capitalism. In that environment, to concentrate was to acquiesce as a good worker in the factories, mills and schoolrooms of Victorian England.
Children and women were thought particularly susceptible to these fictive worlds. The female novel reader reclining in an armchair was a focus for the sort of disapproval directed towards couch potatoes today. As the philosopher and early feministput it, disapprovingly, women’s focus on reading served “to feed habits of improper indulgence, and nourish a vain and visionary indolence, which lays the mind open to error and the heart to seduction”.
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