Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction (2019)
A lot of the comments in this thread confirm that a) the Internet and social media are problems that distract us, and b) there are ways to fight the addictive behaviors they encourage. They can be made succinctly.<p>(I agree with both points, and admire those who attempt to regain control of their attention.)<p>This comment is about the tone of the post in The Paris Review. There&#x27;s a kind of elegiac primitivism circulating among the cultural elite that rubs me wrong, both in Birkerts and the contemporary reviewer.<p>The constant evocation of &quot;loss&quot; associated with some intangible trauma seems like a cheap trick to hack our empathy. By cheap trick, I mean, &quot;a trick that a lot of people use, which like Hollywood&#x27;s emotional manipulations, is getting old.&quot;<p>One hallmark of this genre is that an essay that seems like it&#x27;s about one thing (&quot;reading in an age of distraction&quot;), is really about the author&#x27;s &quot;I&quot;, a foray into autobiography. Another hallmark is that it says nothing new. It is completely safe, a piece of writing well within the received wisdom. Readers of The Paris Review would be hard pressed to object to any substantial point the writer made, except, maybe, that those points did not need making to that audience.<p>I hope that we get more people working on tools and methods that save us from the Internet, and fewer posts asking for our attention while they lament it.