Reading in a connected age

There is no doubt that the internet has transformed our lives in multiple ways. Here I will focus on the ways in which it has transformed our cognitive environment. I’m writing these words in Australia; as soon as I press “publish” they will be available to readers all over the world. For an academic, the “tyranny of distance” is greatly reduced by the web: it doesn’t matter where I am or where the journal is; I can have immediate access and I can email the author queries as easily from Melbourne as from London. Notoriously, it has made information available in quantities many people report they find overwhelming. Many of the effects of the internet are beneficial; no doubt some are harmful (one might think of the economic effects of ecommerce, which has encouraged the growth of near monopolies and led to the closing of many retailers). I suspect, however, we are too quick to blame the internet for harms, without considering what would have happened without it. For instance, when internet communication leads to crime in the non-virtual life – a dating side assignation leading to rape, say – we blame the internet. The right question isn’t whether it is used for serious crime, but whether its use increases the level of serious crime.

Here I want to consider one potential negative effect of the internet. In a recent blog post, Tim Parks argues that the constant availability of the temptations of the internet has led to a decline in the capacity to focus for long periods, and therefore in the capacity to consume big serious books. Big serious books are still written and read, he notes, but “the texture of these books seems radically different from the serious fiction of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries”. Their prose has a “battering ram quality”, which enables readers to consume them through frequent interruptions.

But of course one would expect – fervently hope – that books written in the 21^st century are radically different from those written 100 years ago. After all, if you want to read Dickens and Dostoevsky and the like, there is plentiful quality literature from that period surviving: why would a contemporary writer add to those stocks? Its worth noting, as Francesca Segal points out, that Dickens’ own work was originally published in serial form: that is, in the bite-size chunks that Parks think characterise the contemporary novel in an age of reduced concentration spans.

Perhaps there is something to Parks’ hypothesis that the way the novel has changed reflects changes in the capacities of contemporary readers, but making that claim is going to take careful study. You can’t make it from the armchair. Without proper data and proper controls, we are vulnerable to the confirmation bias, where we attend to evidence that supports our hypothesis and overlook evidence that doesn’t, and many other biases that make these kinds of anecdotal reports useless as evidence.

Here is what may be happening to Parks. He is finding himself aware of a loss of focus more than he used to be. But is that evidence that he is actually losing focus more often than previously? Perhaps prior to the internet he would not have noticed he was losing focus as often as he does now, but he would have lost focus just as often. There is evidence that people fail to detect their own mind wandering in a significant proportion of cases. Perhaps people fail to notice mind wandering more in a distraction free environment because alternative activities are not salient. If that’s right, he might not actually be having a harder time concentrating; he might just be aware of it to a greater extent than previously.

This is merely offered as a hypothesis. I can’t rule out Parks’ alternative hypothesis. And other hypotheses seem quite plausible too (maybe he isn’t actually noticing that he is losing focus more often; rather he is misremembering his prior capacity to focus. Memory is highly fallible, as an enormous amount of evidence shows). That’s the real point: without proper data, we’re all just speculating.