Abstract
Our digital gadgets are often blamed for introducing unprecedented levels of
distraction, but how might we recognize and harness the attentional
possibilities such an environment offers? This editorial essay introduces a
special issue of DHQ devoted to thinking about distracted reading, and sets out
an agenda and a context for our exploration of distributed modes of attention.
The Project
Central to the humanities is the theorization and practice of modes of attention.
Yet if digital technology has changed one thing above all else in the texture of
our everyday lives, it is precisely the nature of our attention to the world and
to the cultural artifacts within it. Indeed, within our teaching spaces many of
us devote much time to finding ways to redirect our students’ attention away
from the distractions of their multiple electronic gadgets. But what if we
consider how such distributed focus might enable new acts of attention and new
ways of reading? How might we think about pedagogically-inspired research
methods, in addition to the more usual research-led pedagogy? How might we
rethink our research methods and our pedagogy in an era of hyper-connectivity?
This is the context and these are the questions that motivated this special
issue, in which “reading” is taken to represent an act of critical
engagement with works in any medium (text, visual art, film, or music, for
example), and with the digital interfaces and devices through which we access
those media. Indeed, it is important that the essays in this issue engage with a
variety of art forms (from the visual arts, and cinema, to text) and with a
variety of digital contexts and information systems. This is a conversation that
has brought us together from across the humanities.
This special issue emerged from a project that ran over two years at New York
University and which involved two symposia over the course of 2016: one
milestone event in the school of the interdisciplinary global liberal arts,
Liberal Studies, and one in NYU’s Centre for the Humanities. Both gathered
scholars from across the disciplines, the first within a school, and the second
from across the university and beyond. The project was designed initially to
catch energies for new ways of working with digital technologies, to bring them
together, and to give a space in which they could be fostered, developed, and
shared with others. The initial aim, then, was to give us the space to
experiment and to think afresh about our ways of working within the institution.
However, the project attracted considerable attention from outside the
university and began to connect with existing initiatives and inspire new
projects in the work of scholars from across the US, Europe and Australasia. As
a result, this special issue includes work from all three of those continents.
It is a project that grew from the local to the global and whose growth was, of
course, facilitated by the digital cultures it explores.
The project community often worked with digital tools in a way that has become
expected of the digital humanities – sometimes misusing tools and technologies
creatively for new purposes and to provide new ways of thinking; sometimes
creating new tools to enable new methods of engagement. Above all, though, the
project has been centred not around a tool-led approach, but around an
engagement with the broader concerns of digital cultures and our operation
within them. The aim, ultimately, was to bring a greater self-consciousness to
our use of digital tools and technologies and to our thinking about the acts of
attention they entail, enable, or disable. Overall, the aim has been to think
more about how we read with them and through them rather than about their
ability to bring, for example, quantitative methods to the humanities. Digital
humanities might often be focussed on what technology can bring to our study of
the humanities, but it also reflects on what the humanities can bring to our
engagement with our technological present. And in the case of the latter, what
the humanities have to offer is, above all else perhaps, an assessment of how
digital technologies are changing our experience of the world in the most
profound and general of ways. A change in the way we attend is just one of
these, but one particularly important to scholars and teachers.
It is worth clarifying two points at the outset, then. The first is that
“distracted reading” is not about simply celebrating the anarchy of
distraction, but rather about exploring how distraction might involve acts of
micro-attention or a distributed focus that can be harnessed constructively as
useful methods of engagement for certain goals. The second: for all that the
essays here frequently explore the uses of digital distraction as a method of
study, this is not a manifesto for the use of technology, and it is certainly
not an insistence on a revolution in pedagogy that will displace other methods.
It’s worth stressing again that the main point of the project is rather to
encourage a more self-reflexive engagement with these gadgets (perhaps one of
the most important skills for our current age) – and should lead to exactly the
opposite of a blanket adoption of digital tools: it should lead to a more
conscious decision as to when and why one might want to harness their
distractive power and, equally, when and why one might call for an avoidance of
them. The key to this project is to be more aware of fitting the methods to the
aims, and to see — in a way that has not been adequately recognized —
technological distraction as one legitimate method, among many others, but
certainly not the only method, or even one that should be privileged. The point
is to explore the potential of a range of practices we might add to our
repertoire.
Consider, for example, enlivening the large lecture format by offering an
electronic message board to which any of the students can send a question during
the lecture if they are puzzled, or want more elaboration on a particular point.
Then every fifteen minutes or so (which in reality is the length of most
people’s attention span) the lecturer stops to answer some of the questions. The
questions do in a sense distract from the onward flow of the lecture, and they
certainly break up its texture, but they do both in a way that promotes
understanding of the content and, I would argue, attention. The technique
results in the students feeling involved — the lecture becomes a two-way
interaction — and of course this method has a core pedagogical purpose: in such
a large group, without such techniques it is virtually impossible, otherwise, to
know whether most students are following the lecture or completely lost. The
lecturer can modulate the content in light of the level of understanding
demonstrated in the questions posted. Moreover, in such a large lecture format
it will always be impossible to strictly enforce a ban of technology, so it
might be an occasion on which embracing its potential is more appropriate.
However, there are still plenty of teaching sessions in which one might want to
insist on the absence of electronic gadgets and work with pen and paper alone.
There might be good reasons to do this for particular purposes; studies have
shown that the phenomenological engagement involved in the inscription of
cursive on the page is a better route towards certain types of mental activity
than typing on a keyboard [
May 2014].
Introduction to the Essays
The essays in this issue fall naturally into three groups. The first two essays
begin by thinking about the processes of research and reading: how do
distraction and distributed attention function within economies of information?
We start with Jennifer Edmond’s insightful, detailed, and fascinatingly
evidenced analysis of distraction as a fundamental, but often undervalued, part
of the process of humanities research. Focussing particularly on historians, her
analysis of the methods of the humanities scholar is enlightening and
refreshing. Moreover, her call for an exploration and validation of the
distracted reading processes central to some research methods is essential.
Tully Barnett’s essay then goes on to think about “distributed reading” as
a generative concept for understating processes of reading in the digital era.
Barnett thinks about the impact of digitization on reading by exploring what it
means to read through interface. She draws our attention to reading as a process
within a network of “devices,
platforms, features, networks, contexts”, in order that “these can usefully be understood as
forming an infrastructure of reading”. These first two essays frame
the field in different ways, but both offer a good platform for rethinking the
informational economy of the humanities around notions of attention,
distraction, and distribution.
The next three papers outline particular pedagogical strategies, and experiments
with students, that are based on an interest in the type of distracted reading
our engagement with electronic gadgets encourages. These three papers focus,
respectively, on art history, cinema studies, and literature, providing a strong
disciplinary range. Writing in the context of art history, Martha Hollander
describes her experiments with student phone and tablet use. Using the capacity
of students’ individual electronic devices to call up a wealth of images to
supplement those that are the focus of the syllabus, Hollander incorporates them
into her teaching method. As she notes, with so many artworks being stored
rather than exhibited publicly, the smartphone becomes a vehicle for accessing
some of the “hidden treasures” of the museum. In requiring
the use of personal devices in this way, Hollander keeps students active as
individual participants, asking “What constitutes distraction as opposed to associative or divided thinking?
How would we characterize a habit of mind enabled, rather than created, by
personal digital devices?” For Hollander these methods have enabled
an importantly different approach to learning the history of art; one which
involves starting not with the reified canonical example, but with a mass of
examples that give a feel for the genre or the artist’s style before proceeding
to the particular images she has chosen as the focus for communal attention. In
other words, these new pedagogical strategies reflect and capitalize on the
abundance of data now at our fingertips. Also working with visual images, but in
the very different disciplinary context of cinema studies, Marina Hassapopoulou
explores distraction through the idea of play and gamification, asking how
“social media, remixing, GIS
tools, and augmented reality” can be incorporated into pedagogical
methods. Platforms and technologies that are more often experienced by students
as distractions from study are repurposed by Hassapopoulou to enable “productive models of distributed
attention and collective intelligence”. Countering claims that
shorter attention spans in younger audiences are damaging students' ability to
learn, Hassapopoulou explores the new cognitive skills that media theorists have
argued might be emerging: “such
as the ability to process information more rapidly as a result of a less
linearly-constrained and more interactive thought process”. Moving
next to literary studies, Sarah E. Kersh and Chelsea Skalak offer an analysis of
the development and use of an annotation tool that helps their students read
recursively. Noting that student assignments often presuppose a textual
environment very different from that which exists for the students in actuality,
they seek to enable them to create hypertext analyses. Working with the
understanding of “hypertext-enabled
radial reading” as a distracted form of reading, they show how such
acts of overlaying and interconnecting readings helped students to understand
the relationship between the theories and methodologies they were exploring.
The final two papers consider digital humanities courses themselves, asking what
role digital humanities pedagogy can play in helping us think about economies of
attention. Paul Fyfe argues that introductory digital humanities courses offer
unique opportunities for exploring the act of reading itself. Focussing
particularly on “metacognition” and “transfer”, he describes how a
focus on acts of attention might help students learn how to read in a more
self-aware manner, in addition to enriching their sense of the possibilities for
engaging with the “distributed facilities
and extra-disciplinary partnerships” across the university that can
help integrate their learning. He describes how his digital humanities pedagogy
can help make students aware of how attention itself is mediated. Focussing on
the relationship between medium and meaning, he uses this analysis of mediated
attention to encourage students to reflect upon the problems and possibilities
for knowledge creation within their own educational environment. In the closing
essay Grant Wythoff also writes about how the digital is both the object and the
method of study in his course “Introduction to Digital
Media”, describing various strategies he offers to think about acts
of attention. These methods include turning the distracted attention our digital
devices often elicit from us into a “deep material literacy” of those same devices. This is achieved by
having students literally deconstruct the physical make-up of those devices in
all their material complexity. In addition to this close attention, Wythoff
proposes another, rather more surprising pedagogical experiment. Thinking about
distraction as an act of attention, but one “no longer directed by volition, discipline, or
desire”, he explores something that we might sometimes think of as
the opposite of distraction: boredom. Using Kracauer to theorize acts of
attention, he considers boredom as a valuable experience of the self that we
rarely have to confront when we have our digital devices with us (which for many
is almost always). Yet what happens if we insist on preserving some spaces free
of digital distractions; “What might
dwelling with our boredom open up to students?”
Some Context
It might seem odd to be working with, rather than against, technological
distractions (even with the two important caveats introduced in the first
section of this essay) in an age in which distraction is often perceived as the
enemy of everything universities hold dear about education. Indeed, in May of
2017, a researcher at Oxford University was the first winner of the Nine Dots
Prize (awarded for work tackling cotemporary societal issues) for an essay arguing that the distractions of digital technologies are
fundamentally undermining our political processes. James Williams’s essay “Stand
Out of Our light: Freedom and Persuasion in the Attention Economy”
argues that digital technologies privilege “our
impulses over our
intentions” and distract us from goals we may want
to achieve [
Williams 2017]. The distraction is, of course, often
to the benefit of advertisers and other commercial interests, and Williams — who
himself worked in the tech industry for ten years — argues that the very design
principles of some of the digital platforms most central to our lives are guided
by the aim of hijacking our attention.
[1] In Williams’ words, these technologies,
can distract us from living the
lives we want to live, or, even worse, undermine our capacities for
reflection and self-regulation, making it harder, in the words of
philosopher Harry Frankfurt, to “want what we want to want.” A
primary effect of digital technologies is thus to undermine the
operation and even development of the human will. This militates against
the possibility of all forms of self-determination at both
individual and collective levels, including all forms of politics worth
having.
[Williams 2017]
As one reviewer summarises, “Attention is our most precious
resource, and it’s being taken away from us”
[
Tinworth 2017].
There is an implicit assumption in many of these reports on Williams’s work that
the information environment we live in has changed categorically as a result of
the digital revolution: “Back in an information-scarce
environment, the role of a newspaper was to bring you information — your
problem was lacking it. Now it’s the opposite. We have too much”
[
Gallagher 2017]. Yet it is easy to imagine the information culture of, say, the
nineteenth century as similar to that of the present minus the digital
technology, when in fact the reality of up to twelve postal deliveries a day in
London in the late nineteenth century created a situation in which letters were
often exchanged with a frequency we now associate with emails: whole
conversations unfolded over the course of a day in quickly scribbled ink on
paper. The proliferating worlds of sales, advertising, journalism, and new
technologies in the later nineteenth century were also experienced as a
revolution in the demands on attention (for example, the distractions of a
constant onslaught of sales boys selling “papers and candy” and “new novels” to a captive audience on the train
is documented in Brander Matthew’s satiric pantoum “En
Route”
[
Matthews 1887, 124–6]). Modernity seems intrinsically tied
to concerns about distraction
at least since the second industrial
revolution (the revolution of the commodity in the latter half of the nineteenth
century).
Moreover, from the turn of the twentieth century we can find examples of such
concerns informing theories of reading. Ezra Pound asserted in the 1930s, “The main expression of nineteenth-century
consciousness is in prose”. Why? Because “The art of popular success lies
simply in never putting more on any one page than the most ordinary
reader can lick off it in his normally rapid, half-attentive
skim-over”
[
Pound 1918, 32]. Readers were too distracted to be able to attend to the density of
poetry, and its play with multiple resonances. According to this narrative, the
novel became much more popular than poetry in the second half of the nineteenth
century because it could be read while distracted. Whether or not this is the
reason for the dominance of the novel over poetry after the industrial
revolution, it is fascinating to see this articulation of a crisis in
“modern” culture, and in reading specifically, attributed
to the saturation of modern life with distractions that destroyed the capacity
for attention that was necessary for reading linguistically complex literary
forms. It feels so familiar, in spite of being written nearly a hundred years
ago.
Of course, one might argue that whether unprecedented or not, the distractions
of new technologies are to be resisted. Many scientific studies show the damage
to IQ effected by distraction, and this has become a popular theme in some media
outlets [
Levitin 2015]. Adam Alter’s
Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping
us Hooked (Penguin 2017,
passim)
suggests our relationship with technology might actually be pathological. And I
would be lying if I did not admit that in the middle of this project I received
from a fortune cookie the following simple legend, on a thin piece of cheap
paper:
Yet “distracted reading” as we frame it in this issue is not about simply
succumbing to the random demands on our attention from pinging phones, screen
notifications, and step monitors. The project asks instead how we might harness
these delicious distractions as attentional devices - and in the process develop
much greater self-awareness of the role these technological tools play in our
lives, and, crucially, the role we
want them to play in our lives.
Experimenting with distraction is about exploring how we regulate attention, and
becoming more aware of how we distribute our attention. After all, our acts of
attention are, arguably, rarely other than partial. For some cognitive
theorists, attention requires a state analogous to an orchestra playing in
unison: the synchronised activity of relevant processes (see [
Mole 2011],
passim). Under such a
definition, focussed attention is a rare achievement. As Christopher Mole notes,
Philipp Koralus has suggested that such approaches could better encompass
divided attention if we think of attention as something structurally analogous
to the answering of a question [
Koralus 2014]
[
Mole 2017]. Naomi Eilan also characterizes attention as “the means by which we answer
questions about the environment”
[
Eilan 1998]
[
Mole 2017]. Needless to say, the “means” are more and more likely to involve our
electronic devices.
Distributed Cognition?
Recent thinking about distributed cognition might offer a useful framework for
furthering this idea and for reconsidering the role such gadgetry can play in
our cognitive economy. This is a framework psychologists and philosophers are
using for thinking about cognitive processes (what we might call mind) as not
being solely brain-based but being distributed across the body, across social
groups, and also across the electronic gadgets that become extensions of our
cognitive selves. What does it mean to think about mind as dispersed across
objects external to our bodies? One of the key examples used to launch a central
line of enquiry in this field focuses on the cognitive function of memory and
the possibility for its extension outside of the body. In “The Extended Mind” (from 1998), Andy Clark and David Chalmers offer
the thought experiment of “Otto”, an Alzheimer’s sufferer
whose process of “remembering” relies on consulting a
notebook in which he has key facts written down. Exploring the role the notebook
plays in Otto’s beliefs and action, the authors argue that it constitutes a
technology of the extended mind because of the way it drives cognitive processes
– it “plays the role usually played by a
biological memory”
[
Clark and Chalmers 1998, 12]. (It is important to note that it is not the
processes of
consulting the notebook or referring to biological memory that are thought to be
equivalent here; what is similar is the role of the notebook and/or memory in
acting as the basis for beliefs and actions.) “Otto
himself”, they conclude, “is best regarded as an extended
system, a coupling of biological organism and external resources”
[
Clark and Chalmers 1998, 18]:
Clearly, Otto walked to 53rd Street because he wanted to go to the
museum and he believed the museum was on 53rd Street. And just as Inga had her belief even before she
consulted her memory, it seems reasonable to say that Otto believed the
museum was on 53rd Street even before
consulting his notebook. For in relevant respects the cases are entirely
analogous: the notebook plays for Otto the same role that memory plays
for Inga. The information in the notebook functions just like the
information constituting an ordinary non-occurrent belief; it just
happens that this information lies beyond the skin.
[Clark and Chalmers 1998, 13]
This seminal journal article has generated much discussion among
philosophers and psychologists over the past couple of decades, and the issues
it raises for our relationship with our smartphones, for example, are clearly
very interesting. In their later work, Clark and Chalmers sometimes use
technology in examples of extended mind theory, with Chalmers starting his
Foreword to Clarke’s book,
Supersizing the Mind,
with the claim that his iPhone “has
already taken over some of the central functions of my brain”. “Friends joke”, he goes on, “that I should get the iPhone
implanted into my brain, but if Andy Clark is right, all this would do
is speed up the processing, and free up my hands. The iPhone is part of
my mind already”
[
Chalmers 2010, 1]. The implication of this for our relationship with technology has been
picked up by bloggers and commentators who have explored, for example, the
complex issues this theory raises for the real-life case of the rights of the
police to access a suspected terrorist’s smart phone [
Smith 2016].
Theories of extended mind ask us to rethink the nature of our relationship with
our electronic gadgets, and in turn we must rethink our relationship with the
possibilities for distributed attention they offer. Perhaps our tendency to keep
facts to hand in Wikipedia rather than in the brain, and to keep our sense of
direction in a map app rather than in our heads, is not so much a failure as a
success by other means: demonstrating a suitable deployment of extended mind
technologies. Perhaps our constant need to consult with these devices is not
necessarily a sign of lack of attention so much as a different kind of
attention. So, while distraction by new technology is not a new phenomenon, the
idea of “distracted reading” has a new currency and relevance in our
current moment in key part because of changing thinking about cognition. As we
begin to understand better the role digital gadgets play in our cognitive
economy, the capacity they hold for forms of distributed attention might be more
easily recognized and used constructively. What happens if we take this idea
into our research and our teaching, and harness the relationship between the
student or scholar and their electronic devices as a mode of distributed
cognition? What then (to follow up on the second and third strands of the
distributed cognition framework introduced at the start of this section) if we
also consider cognition as embodied, or as a social phenomenon among groups of
students and/or researchers?
The contributors to this issue were not asked to engage specifically with the
concept of extended mind, or the framework of distributed cognition, but it is
interesting to see how much those ideas resonate with what is written here.
Edmond’s analysis of the process of research, for example, is one that speaks
profoundly to ideas of distributed cognition. She notes how the piling and
arrangement of papers on the top of a scholar’s desk becomes what we might call
an extended mind system for “arranging
ideas, building a knowledge organization system”. The messy, crowded
desk might facilitate the distracted processes of reading necessary for the type
of research practices she explores, or the systems of arrangements of papers on
the desk might “optimise certain kinds
of concentration”. Either way, the surface of the desk might become a
kind of cognitive technology. In the third essay, Hollander’s sense of the
personal digital device as as a sort of technologically extended mind has
important consequences for her pedagogical vision: taking on board the extended
mind capacities of the devices in the classroom she notes that her assessment is
now geared toward “test[ing]
research skills rather than memorization”. Similarly, Paul Fyfe
gestures towards this kind of cognitive extension when he points to Malcolm
McCullough’s work in Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age
of Embodied Information, which notes how interface design is often
geared not toward demanding our focussed attention but toward introducing new
things to the periphery of our attention – making them available for more
central focus as and when needed. His interest in such “extended cognition” within our digital
environments might sound very familiar to extended mind theorists. In a rather
different way, Hassapopoulou’s interest in collaborative learning resonates with
the idea that social groups and networks can also provide extended-mind
environments. Finally, the claims for embodiment made repeatedly through this
issue make a great deal of sense in relation to work on embodied cognition.
Hassapopoulou writes of moving away from “ocular-centric paradigms of media
reception” to “challeng[e] our bodies to, literally, make sense of mediated
information using other modes of perception besides vision”. And
note, particularly, Fyfe’s comment about how critical-making projects can render
us aware of cognition as “an unfolding,
embodied relation”. Clearly, then, the recent interest in distributed
cognition (and its claims for the extension of mind across external devices,
social groups, and our bodies) makes itself felt in the concerns of this issue,
and creates a timely context in which to think about distraction and distributed
attention.
Conclusion
This special issue aims to showcase and prompt new thinking around how we might
harness modes of attention that have been embedded in our everyday lives by
digital technologies. Our aim is to inspire new techniques for research and for
pedagogy, and to inspire innovation in method as much as we seek innovation in
content. More broadly, though, this special issue suggests that a new wave of
work in digital humanities is taking on, and will have to take on, the
revolution in cognition that is quickly transforming the way we think about our
relationship with digital technologies. The speed with which the digital
revolution changed older industrial processes is being matched by the speed with
which the cognitive revolution is, in turn, transforming our use of digital
technologies. Whether of the distributed or “in unison” kind,
more attention needs to be devoted to our cognitive engagement with digital
tools, and we need to continue to become more self-reflexive in our use of
them.
Works Cited
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