We All Screen For i-Screens

I'm still finding it hard to get my head around the fact that there are people who think modern life is too easy. 

I mean, I just don't get it. At all. Sure, navigation is easier because you can outsource that to Google Maps, and you can order takeaways online, yes... and that's what's shutting down your critical thinking skills ? You don't have five hundred thousand other things demanding your attention instead ?

Wow. Must be nice. I only wish I had that problem.

Some have it that technology itself is the issue, and that we should claw back a more manual existence, both mentally and physically. I'm not entirely without sympathy here : as I've said before, I do think single-purpose "devices" like books are inherently better for developing focus and deep thought than devices which are designed to be multi-functional. Of course, in practise we need both sorts, but I think this maximal focus is particularly important for children. Reducing reliance on tech in schools is perfectly sensible, not least because kids will find their own ways to distract themselves regardless.

A good learning trajectory, I think is to first learn the fundamentals, do enough of the really hard basics yourself such that you develop a solid intuition for it, then gradually move up to dealing with the higher-level stuff, outsourcing the low-level aspects to dedicated tools. Do at least some addition and multiplication yourself before handing it over to a calculator; do at least a few Fourier transforms and differential equations the hard way before letting a computer handle it; look through an eyepiece before relying on a telescope's CCD*. Even if you forget the details later – and you will – you'll still be far better equipped to spot when things go wrong and figure out solutions. You'll also learn critical and analytical thinking along the way, and maybe even a little wisdom. Those kinds of skills have much broader applicability.

* Though there is no case whatever to be made for going back to an era in which you needed an acoustic coupler to send emails. Sometimes simplifying things is just good.

Then, so my pedagogical theory goes, you can start to ease off on the low-level stuff. To keep doing everything from first principles, solving every equation by hand, doing every task the hard way, is largely counter-productive, or even self-destructive, and futile. No, the point is that by having earned these core skills, you can free up your cerebral burden to concentrate on the bigger picture : deciding what problems to solve, how you want to solve them, and of course why. Your mind is still fully engaged, it's just doing less of the slog-through stuff (though it should probably also keep doing at least some of this) and more of the philosophy. 

This is likely true in general, it's just much more important when you're young because you have so much more to learn anyway. So yes, reduce tech even to zero for the youngest, then gradually introduce it at later stages of children's development. 

In that sense, I completely agree with Wes Streeting* that we should both reduce screen time for the youngest children and also more carefully monitor and regulate it for older children. That's common sense. Children need more sources of stimulation, and need to learn how to interact with each other far more than they need to learn how to use computers. Plenty of time for that later. 

* I had a lot of respect for the man until he decided he secretly loathed working for Keir Starmer for so many years despite being one of the most prominent faces of the refurbished Labour Party. Nevertheless, he's right about this. 

But for adults, I think "screens" as a being the, or even a, cause of society's ills doesn't have much merit to it. Multi-functionality is probably a bigger contribution, just because it's innately easier to get distracted and lose focus with a device that can do essentially unlimited things : if your main means of working is also your entertainment system, then it would be a rare person indeed who never got distracted by anything. 

Still, I think most people learn to overcome this. Most people are not so lacking in self-control that they find the mere presence of a shiny object irresistible.

No, I think the real problem is exactly as set out in this Aeon piece : it's a deliberate design problem. It's the way apps and social media have been constructed to form addictive, habit-forming, compulsive behaviours. It's not that they're just easy to use in a way which makes you want to continue out of a sense of progression and accomplishment – these kinds of apps aren't the pinnacle of productive user experience. It's more like they feed a constant low-level stream of dopamine, a sense that if I keep going just a bit longer, I'll get to the good stuff... which never arrives. We keep going out of a compulsion that's much harder to override than a genuine desire to continue in a task we actually enjoy.

Or, worse, they continuously enrage rather than engage. The brain seems to relish in arguing and it's addictive. Culture wars and Karens seem to strike at something deep in the subconscious.

To digress slightly, as this other article points out, unchecked complaining wires us to see the world differently, to insist that absolutely everything is awful and sink into a pit of doing nothing but whining. Complaints become a reflex action which overrides real thinking. It's such a common problem, and kudos to the article for noting this as a major symptom of the "these days" fallacy. That one in particular winds me up the wrong way (so I guess this is the wrong time to rant about it).

I think this sort of attitude is exactly what the press feed on : the tabloids in particular, but not exclusively. They present everything in the worst possible light. They make us believe, as the ancients did, that progress is impossible. They cultivate the death of hope for the sake of immediate profit. They seek out a deeply (small-c) conservative mindset, so common in the pre-modern era, the same one* which kept social change and improvement at bay for thousands of years. Both progress and conservatism tend to be self-reinforcing : progress by immediately normalising every development such that progressive voices always have something to complain about, and conservatism by insisting that nothing ever really changes so it isn't worth trying. Mix them together and it's all too easy to degenerate into nothing except perpetual whining**.

* I recommend making the time to watch this video as well as the one in the previous link. They're both more nuanced than the somewhat hyperbolic rhetoric I've adopted here, which should not be taken literally. 

** PLEASE, for the love of sanity, just shut the fuck up for five fucking minutes about Donald Fucking Trump. 

And with digital devices this is ramped up to eleven. Which swings me nicely back to the Aeon piece I want to concentrate on. Because, it's not the devices themselves that are responsible for this. They just make this much, much easier to do. No, the problem lies with the human beings designing the algorithms, deliberately keeping everyone pissed off so they can't think rationally and see through this endless stream of utter garbage.

Consider a simple observation. The same person who cannot get through a novel can watch a three-hour video essay on the decline of the Ottoman Empire. The same teenager who supposedly lacks attention span can maintain game focus for hours while parsing a complex narrative across multiple storylines, coordinating with teammates, adapting strategy in real time. That’s not inferior cognition. It’s different cognition. And the difference isn’t the screen. It’s the environment.

...The fragmentation correlates not with screens in general but with specific design patterns: notification systems, variable reward schedules, infinite scroll. These are choices made by specific companies for specific economic reasons. They are not inherent properties of the medium.

Though I would interject to point out that this doesn't mean there isn't a real problem with declining attention spans, it's just that the cause is not the digital or screen-based nature of the entertainment. And spending hours on a complex game, where things are constantly changing, isn't really the same as spending hours on a single difficult problem. But I take the point that not all forms of modern approaches are by any means bad, especially the tendency towards multi-hour YouTube videos.

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, novel-reading itself was the existential threat. The terms used were identical to today’s moral panic: ‘reading epidemic’, ‘reading mania’, ‘reading rage’, ‘reading fever’, ‘reading lust’, ‘insidious contagion’. The journal Sylph worried in 1796 that women ‘of every age, of every condition, contract and retain a taste for novels … the depravity is universal.’

The predicted disasters were apocalyptic. J W Goethe’s epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) was blamed for triggering copycat suicides across Europe. Johann Peter Frank’s six-volume A System of Complete Medical Police (1779-1819) listed ‘reading of poisonous novels’ among the causes of suicide. Arthur Schopenhauer in 1851 described ‘bad books’ as ‘intellectual poison’. If the manipulative potential of novels were truly that great, as one historian dryly notes, women would have been eloping in hordes.

They didn’t. The disaster never materialised. But the panic served its purpose.

The expansion of literacy from a tiny elite to the general population scared a lot of conservatives. The panic wasn’t really about literacy declining. It was about literacy escaping elite control.

The historical pattern is well described, but I don't think much of the modern panic is really all about "elite control". There might be that aspect to it, a sort of snobbery : "you shouldn't be doing this largely harmless thing you enjoy because I never did that, or I just don't like it", rather than much in the way of "you plebs shouldn't learn anything". And to be fair, the author does go on to note that some of the panic arises from people enjoying themselves in the "wrong way" rather than learning the wrong things. 

But the main concern is that the new ways of learning will be genuinely harmful, both in terms of the effects on attention, memory, cognitive skills, and the actual information conveyed. Nobody is now concerned that women will overheat their brains by learning, but people do worry they will be misinformed : this is not the same moral panic as in earlier eras. Still, while digital media is different on all fronts from printed materials... the article is right that this doesn't make it necessarily better or worse. Merely talking to your friends is no more likely to give you the correct information than reading a book or watching a YouTube video is.

Indeed, for all the problems of echo chambers, the internet still gives you vastly better access to genuine expertise than in previous eras. People only remember the classics of literature and forget the trashy novels, the crappy magazines, the stupid TV series of yesteryear, the misinformation and delusions of past ages. We have a survivorship bias, remembering the geniuses but forgetting the contemptible fuckwits of past ages (largely because we have out own to deal with).

I would accept that this is all part of the continuous pattern the author describes, and if anything I might say the similarities are actually stronger. Then as now, the concern wasn't (all) about control, but conservatism : the tendency to see anything different as bad... but stemming from legitimate observations that some things the next generation do really are indeed just bad. The mistake is to think the previous generation never did anything equivalent, just because the mistakes they made were different.

What demonstrates that these panics were exaggerated? The predicted disasters never arrive. Adolescent aggression continued after comic book restrictions – because comics weren’t the cause. Novels didn’t trigger mass elopements. Radio didn’t destroy children’s capacity for thought. Each panic uses identical rhetoric: addiction metaphors, moral corruption, passive victimhood, apocalyptic predictions. Each time, the research eventually shows complex effects mediated by content, context and individual differences. And, each time, when the disaster fails to materialise, attention simply shifts to the next technology.

Absolutely fair. Which is not to say that there are never any disadvantages to new approaches at all – there absolutely are – but in terms of the apocalyptic rhetoric, I think all of it is nonsense.

These publications and technologies existed alongside serious thought. The penny dreadfuls didn’t prevent Charles Dickens, John Stuart Mill or Charles Darwin from flourishing. What’s different now isn’t the existence of shallow content, which has always been abundant. What’s different is the existence of delivery mechanisms actively engineered to prevent the kind of attention that serious thought requires. The penny dreadfuls didn’t follow you into your bedroom at midnight, vibrating with notifications.

This distinction matters because it changes everything about the available responses... if the problem is design, then we need design activism and regulatory intervention. The same screens that fragment attention can support it. The same technologies that extract human attention can cultivate it. The question is who designs them, for what purposes, and under what constraints.

Yes, this ! Far from making life too easy, the modern user experience is far, far too difficult. Every single fucking website requires you to click through a list ten feet long to reject cookies, dismiss the "subscribe" box, actively opt-out of signing up for notifications.... The stream of interruptions is what kills attention and renders impotent any attempt at focus. Having digital access to work and entertainment is not the problem at all : having the experience be equivalent to finding oneself in a rowdy nightclub in order to read a short article about snails is where it's all gone wrong. 

At best, technology is a proxy for the real problems : taking ourselves offline will help only because those same problems don't exist in most other media. But there is absolutely no reason whatever why those problems have to exist in our digital worlds.

These aren’t concessions to declining attention spans. They’re recognitions that human understanding has always been richer than any single medium could contain. We’re not abandoning literacy. We’re discovering what literacy meant all along: not just the ability to decode symbols on a page, but the capacity to move fluently between all the ways humans encode meaning.

Exactly. If the goal is to be able to think deeply, to be able to process, analyse, and evaluate complex information, then insisting that there is only one correct way to do this simply wrong.

The pattern I observe repeatedly: people who ‘can’t focus’ on traditional texts can maintain extraordinary concentration when working across modes. They struggle with philosophy textbooks but thrive when they can listen to lectures while taking visual notes, discuss ideas in study groups, and write while pacing. 

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. You parse information simultaneously across text, image, sound and motion. You navigate conversations that jump between platforms and formats. You synthesise understanding from fragments scattered across a dozen different sources.

But 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 hand them infinite information and wonder why they drown. We give them tools designed to fracture attention and blame them when their attention fractures. We built a world that profits from distraction and then pathologise the distracted.

Once again, exactly this. It's the content that matters, not the way it's presented. Those who prefer thinking by discussion should do so (for me, trying this for the low-level stuff is like trying to pee while someone's looking right at me). Those who prefer to read their information alone should be able to, and those who want pre-recorded audio-visual should have it. And deep focus on a complex problem can indeed require multi-modal processing as much as it can solitude and simplicity.

What we need is to prioritise and customise the user experience, facilitating access to the information that's required, when it's required, and in what format. Simply hurling everything at everyone, and making them click away a dozen different unnecessary dialogue boxes to get what they need but then having to organise it themselves, and ejaculating pop-up windows at them at random... this isn't helping anyone. Not in science, not in social media, and not in society.

Not all deep thinking needs to be multimodal though. Clearly, the geniuses of the past were able to manage just fine without any of our modern devices and made the breakthroughs that made our modern world possible. My suspicion is that the process of synthesis, the all-important moment when multiple factors come together to create a new, meaningful statement about the world, is something that happens primarily in the mental domain. The external cognition we use is a necessary precursor to that crucial moment, that threshold when all the collective information we've considered crystallises into a hard, transmissible fact. That moment is a purely mental one.

A genius, then, I might define as someone who can do as much of this process purely in their head as possible. Good for them. But most of us mere mortals need our external supports, and fortunately for us, the impact of any breakthrough depends only on what our discovery is, not how it was made. At least in the terms of knowledge work, rather than insisting that we all refrain from reaching for our digital aids and deliberately make out lives more difficult, what we should be doing is streamlining the experience as much as possible, letting us organise things efficiently, collating and comparing what's relevant while discarding what we find superfluous as we choose. 

Often, this means beginning with a wealth of multi-modal data, sifting and examining in vibrant and unpredictable ways until we eventually reach the key moment of discovery. That the final step usually requires intense focus does not mean the preceding labyrinth should follow the same "everybody fuck off and leave me alone" part of the process. Nor does the fact that the route to discovery is often convoluted and fraught with wrong turns and dead ends mean that we should never try and reduce this as much as possible. 

In both science and society, sometimes we need to struggle and sometimes we need to simplify, and to say it's all just one or the other is just wrong-headed : you want people to think critically about their social media posts, but you don't want them to spend hours selecting the appropriate font; solving a scientific problem should involve some amount of difficult thought but it shouldn't be debilitating. And simplification is all too often compensated for as we just do more and more of the original activity, or something else comes along that consumes all the time we've saved.

No, I think the road to improving things lies almost entirely in terms of reducing our struggles, not in cultivating them – at least for adults. Maybe one day we'll have to deal with people genuinely getting lazy and stupid because everything is too easy, but that day is probably somewhere – as H. G. Wells predicted – around the year 800,000 AD, not next Tuesday. 

Until then, we should actively work towards more digitisation and more simplification... what we need less of is not technology, but interruptions not of our choosing. We need to minimise unwanted distractions and addiction-forming interfaces. We need designs that respect how people genuinely work, and think in longer timescales : maybe giving everyone dopamine hits is good for quarterly profits, but it's absolutely shit for the economy when, years later, they all forget how to turn their devices on because their brains have been turned to mush by a relentless barrage of doom-scrolling websites that insist they fill in another 300-question survey every twenty minutes.