Multiple-choice reading

In the decade when everyone began to carry a glass rectangle that could summon any fact, any song, any face, it became fashionable to say we were living through a crisis of attention. The diagnosis was delivered with the brisk confidence of a physician who has seen the same symptoms in a hundred waiting rooms: twitchy fingers, truncated sentences, an inability to endure even a modest silence. Yet the more I listened to the lament, the more it sounded like a particular kind of nostalgia masquerading as science—a longing not merely for slower days but for a world in which certain people’s habits of reading, thinking and speaking were treated as the natural tempo of the mind.

It is true that attention is not an abstract virtue floating above history. It is a practice, trained and rewarded. Monasteries cultivated it with scriptural discipline; Victorian clerks with ledgers; laboratory scientists with the patient repetition of measurements; painters with the sustained gaze required to see what the hurried eye misses. These were not simply personal achievements but social arrangements: time was carved out, distractions were managed, and the value of such concentration was agreed upon by institutions that could enforce it. To complain that we have “lost” attention, then, is to imply that it once belonged to everyone, evenly distributed like clean air. But it never did. The capacity to retreat into uninterrupted thought has always depended on someone else minding the door, tending the children, stirring the soup, or, in the modern variant, answering the emails.

If the current panic has a kernel of truth, it is not that our brains have been irreparably rewired by notification chimes, but that the economy has discovered how to monetise the smallest units of consciousness. The old industrial dream was to extract labour from bodies; the new one is to extract response from minds. A glance, a click, a flick of indignation—each is a measurable event, tradable in markets of prediction and persuasion. The rhetoric of “engagement” is revealing here: it borrows the language of romance and civic duty to describe what is, in practice, a form of low-grade coercion. We are not merely distracted; we are being solicited, constantly, by systems designed to learn what makes us flinch.

And yet the story is not simply one of decline. There is an odd democratic promise in the very technologies accused of making us shallow. A teenager in Lagos can watch a masterclass on Renaissance perspective; a retiree in Glasgow can fall into an online archive of Arctic exploration; an amateur botanist can join a global community cataloguing invasive species. What is new is not access to information—libraries have existed for centuries—but the frictionless immediacy with which curiosity can be indulged. The problem is that curiosity, like attention, is trainable, and the training offered by most platforms is not toward depth but toward velocity. They reward the quick take, the instant verdict, the moral adrenaline rush. They make it easier to feel informed than to become knowledgeable.

This is where the arts, so often treated as ornamental, begin to look like a form of resistance. To read a difficult novel is to submit, voluntarily, to another consciousness for hours; it is to accept that meaning will not arrive on demand, like a delivery rider. To listen to a symphony is to inhabit time that cannot be scrolled. Even contemporary art that seems designed for the age of distraction—installations that beg to be photographed, performances that go viral—can contain within it a critique of the very attention economy that circulates it. The most interesting artists are not those who scold us for looking away, but those who make looking strange again, who restore to perception its thickness and its moral stakes.

Science, too, offers a counternarrative, though not the one usually invoked in popular neuroscience. In the laboratory, attention is not a mystical faculty but a limited resource, allocated according to goals, fatigue, and context. Researchers know that the mind is not built for indefinite focus; it oscillates, it wanders, it returns. The romantic ideal of unbroken concentration—a thinker at a desk, hour after hour, untouched by impulse—is less a psychological truth than a cultural emblem. What matters is not whether we can hold our gaze forever, but whether we can choose, with some degree of autonomy, what deserves it. The question is political as much as personal: who gets to decide what interrupts us?

There are environmental resonances here that are easy to miss. The same civilisation that fragments our attention also fragments habitats, migratory routes, the slow cycles of soil and sea. We have become adept at treating everything as a feed: a river becomes a sequence of data points; a forest becomes a set of carbon credits; a species becomes a trending topic only after it is nearly gone. The philosopher’s term “instrumental reason” feels suddenly concrete when you watch a wildfire live-streamed between advertisements. To be sure, media can awaken compassion at a distance, but it can also convert catastrophe into spectacle, offering the viewer the consolations of feeling without the inconvenience of action.

So what would it mean to take attention seriously—not as a private self-help project but as a civic capacity? It would require more than individual discipline or the purchase of yet another app designed to block other apps. It would require the rebuilding of institutions that protect unprofitable forms of thought: public libraries that are not treated as nostalgic luxuries, universities that are not reduced to credential factories, newsrooms that can afford to investigate rather than merely react. It would mean designing technologies that assume users are citizens, not prey. And it would mean, perhaps most uncomfortably, admitting that the “crisis” is not only about screens. It is about the kind of society that cannot imagine value unless it can be counted, shared, optimised, and sold.

In that sense, the complaint about attention is a disguised argument about freedom. Not the theatrical freedom to do whatever one pleases, but the quieter freedom to decide what one’s mind will dwell on, and for how long, without being tugged at by invisible hands. Such freedom is not guaranteed by willpower alone. It is cultivated—like art, like science, like a landscape that needs time to recover—through collective choices about what we are willing to defend from the market’s ceaseless claim.