Attention

From Dense Discovery:

Here’s a familiar story we tell ourselves about our new inability to focus: screens bad, books good, civilisation circling the drain. It’s a seductive diagnosis – and also, probably, a lazy one.

Carlo Iacono is a librarian who spends his days watching how people actually engage with information, and in a recent Aeon piece he pushes back on that oversimplification. The issue isn’t screens, he argues. It’s habitat and design.

He first describes the kind of drowning many of us will recognise when trying to focus:

“Others are drowning, attempting sustained thought in environments engineered to prevent it. They sit with laptops open, seven tabs competing for attention, notifications sliding in from three different apps, phones vibrating every few minutes. They’re trying to read serious material while fighting a losing battle against behavioural psychology weaponised at scale. They believe their inability to focus is a personal failure rather than a design problem. They don’t realise they’re trying to think in a space optimised to prevent thinking.”

From here, Iacono makes a reframe I think deserves more credit than it usually gets:

“We haven’t become post-literate. We’ve become post-monomodal. Text hasn’t disappeared; it’s been joined by a symphony of other channels. Your brain now routinely performs feats that would have seemed impossible to your grandparents.”

“The real problem isn’t mode but habitat. We don’t struggle with video versus books. We struggle with feeds versus focus. One happens in an ecosystem designed for contemplation, the other in a casino designed for endless pull-to-refresh.”

The blame belongs somewhere specific, and Iacono is not shy about placing it:

“Expansion without architecture is chaos, and that’s where we’ve stumbled. The people who cannot sit through novels aren’t broken. They’re adapted to an environment we built. … We built a world that profits from distraction and then pathologise the distracted.”

What I appreciate most is that he refuses the fatalist’s exit ramp. The declinists often correctly identify the villains (you know who) – and then immediately surrender, treating the outcome as inevitable. Iacono is direct about what that surrender actually costs:

“To name the actors responsible and then treat the outcome as inevitable is to provide them cover. If the crisis is a force of nature, ‘screens’ destroying civilisation like some technological weather system, then there’s nothing to be done but write elegiac essays from a comfortable distance. But if the crisis is the product of specific design choices made by specific companies for specific economic reasons, then those choices can be challenged, regulated, reversed.”

The solution he proposes isn’t cultural or attitudinal. He’s not asking us to ‘try harder’:

“Reading worked so well for so long not because text is magic, but because books came with built-in boundaries. They end. Pages stay still. Libraries provide quiet. These weren’t features of literacy itself but of the habitats where literacy lived. We need to rebuild those habitats for a world where meaning travels through many channels at once.”

“The choice isn’t between books and screens. The choice is between intentional design and profitable chaos. Between habitats that cultivate human potential and platforms that extract human attention.”

I’d push back on a few of his points if we were at the pub, but these are quibbles around an otherwise solid argument. We didn’t drift into distraction – we were led there. The problem is architectural – which means the solution is likely too.

— Kai