The same technologies accused of shortening attention spans are also creating highly obsessive micro-tribes and fandoms. This contradicts the narrative of a universal decline in focus, suggesting a shift in what we pay attention to, not an inability to focus.
The concept of a universal "attention span" is a myth. How long we focus depends on our motivation for a specific task, not a finite mental capacity that gets depleted. This reframes poor attention from an innate inability to a lack of interest or desire.
Accepting the narrative that attention spans are shrinking is dangerous. It can lead educators and creators to give up on encouraging deep, focused tasks like reading long novels, thereby causing the very outcome they fear by lowering their expectations and standards.
While society now worries about distraction (ADHD), the 19th century’s concern was “monomania”—an obsessive, machine-like focus on a single task demanded by industrial capitalism. This shows that anxieties about attention are shaped by the economic structures of the era.
Long novels, now the gold standard for deep focus, were once considered dangerous “junk food” that distracted people from prayer and duty. This historical pattern suggests our current panic over digital media may be similarly shortsighted and lacking perspective.
Critics lament declining focus, yet popular video games like Baldur's Gate 3 demand 75+ hours of intense concentration. This is over five times longer than Wagner's entire Ring Cycle opera, a historical benchmark for sustained cultural attention, quantitatively refuting the attention decline narrative.