Abstract
In the last chapter we showed how the attention is an oft-used tool in sleep-seeking strategies—how we might, say, focus on soothing sounds or comforting memories to distract ourselves from the annoying, anxiety-inducing ones that sometimes keep us awake. Our current technological milieu, however, undermines on several fronts this ability to focus our thoughts into a state of meditative calm. For not only does our current media surround us 24/7 with a swarming buzz of tweets or texts or feeds that atomizes and scatters our attention, but also—given the demands of this 24-hour media regime—we find that our culture actively valorizes and encourages attentive wandering itself. We are expected to be distracted and distractible. The rise of cable television with its hundreds of channels devoted to every human interest has helped to achieve this. So has the onset of “interactivity.” American Idol and related shows foster a new kind of democracy, a televisual suffrage wherein we cast instantaneous votes for this or that pop act or supermodel. Perpetual questionnaireing is now omnipresent. Countless websites allow us—encourage us—to log in and let everybody know what we think about the latest fashion designs, the latest truck muffler, the latest football trade … and many people—including this author—have felt this new interactivity to be an entertaining way to pass the time, a convenient way to achieve objectives, and a safe way to vent frustrations.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Cathy Davidson, Now You See It: How Technology and Brain Science Will Transform Schools and Business for the 21st Century (New York: Penguin, 2012), 7.
Christopher E Chabris and Daniel J. Simons, “Is Google Glass Dangerous?” New York Times, May 26, 2013, SR12.
Christopher F. Chabris and Daniel J. Simons, The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us (New York: Crown Publishing, 2010), 6–7.
Larry D. Rosen, iDisorder: Understanding Our Obession with Technology and Overcoming Its Hold on Us (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 106.
Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2008), 34.
Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 2.
For a discussion on attention in ancient times, see Gary Hatfield, “Attention in Early Scientific Psychology,” in Richard D. Wright, ed., Visual Attention (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 3–25.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Pauline Phemister (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 134–135.
George Cheyne, The English Malady: Or, a Treatise of Nervous Diseases of All Kinds, as Spleen, Vapours, Lowness of Spirits, Hypochondriacal, and Hysterical Distempers (London: G. Strahan & J. Leake, 1733), 5.
David Hartley, Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations (London: T. Tegg & Son, 1834), 5.
William Hamilton, Henry Longueville Mansel, and John Veitch, Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1860), 165.
Thomas Brown, Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: John Grigg, 1824), 409.
Hatfield, “Attention in Early Scientific Psychology,” 5. I use Hatfield’s paraphrasing of postulation 360 of Christian Wolff, Psychologia Rationalis (Francofurti & Lipsiae: Prostat in officina libraria Rengeriana, 1740), 288–289.
Brown, Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind. 409. Emphasis mine. See also Alexander Bain, The Senses and the Intellect (London: John W. Parker & Son, 1855), 461.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan & co., 1963), 138.
William Carpenter, Meredith Clymer, and Francis Gurney Smith, Principles of Human Physiology: With Their Chief Applications to Pathology, Hygiene, and Forensic Medicine (Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1845), 232.
Johann Friedrich Herbart and Margaret Keiver Smith, A Text-Book in Psychology (New York: D. Appleton, 1891), 47–48. Translation of Johann Friedrich Herbart’s Lehrbuch zur Psychologie, from the second revised edition published in 1834. (First edition, 1816).
Alexander Bain, The Emotions and the Will (London: John W. Parker & Son, 1859), 569–571. In a work published two decades later Bain says, similarly, that a strong impression “takes the attention by storm.” See Bain, Education as a Science (New York: D. Appleton, 1879), 179.
See Alexander Malcolm Williams, Johann Friedrich Herbart (London: Blackie and Son, 1911), 94–95.
Robley Dunglison, Human Physiology (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1850), 242.
Henry Maudsley, The Physiology of Mind, vol. 1 (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1877), 314.
See also Carpenter, Principles of Mental Physiology (New York: Appleton, 1874), 382.
Ribot, The Psychology of Attention (Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1896), 29.
Thomas Arnold, Observations on the Nature, Kinds, Causes, and Prevention of Insanity (London: R. Phillips, 1806), 165. Emphasis in the original.
Charles Follen Folsom, Mental Diseases (Boston: The author, 1886), 118.
Jean Étienne Dominique Esquirol and Ebenezer K. Hunt, Mental Maladies. A Treatise on Insanity (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1845), 378
Roger Luckhurst, “Ending the Century: Literature and Digital Technology,” in Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls, eds., Twentieth-Century English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 789.
Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 21, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 92.
Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (London: Harper and Row, 1977), 5.
See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
Kimberly Howey, Ezra Pound and the Rhetoric of Science, 1901–1922 (PhD thesis, University College London, 2009), 107.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, A Miscellany of Men (Norfolk, VA: HIS Press, 2004), 39.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, “A Real Danger,” Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1917), 185.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, ed. Denis J. Conlon (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 483.
Copyright information
© 2014 Lee Scrivner
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Scrivner, L. (2014). The Narrowing of the Attention. In: Becoming Insomniac. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137268747_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137268747_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-44359-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-26874-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)