We have been distracted for several centuries

From The ages of distraction: Busy, distracted, inattentive? Everybody has been since at least 1710 and here are the philosophers to prove it by Frank Furedi.

The rise of the internet and the widespread availability of digital technology has surrounded us with endless sources of distraction: texts, emails and Instagrams from friends, streaming music and videos, ever-changing stock quotes, news and more news. To get our work done, we could try to turn off the digital stream, but that’s difficult to do when we’re plagued by FOMO, the modern fear of missing out. Some people think that our willpower is so weak because our brains have been damaged by digital noise. But blaming technology for the rise in inattention is misplaced. History shows that the disquiet is fuelled not by the next new thing but by the threat this thing – whatever it might be – poses to the moral authority of the day.

The first time inattention emerged as a social threat was in 18th-century Europe, during the Enlightenment, just as logic and science were pushing against religion and myth. The Oxford English Dictionary cites a 1710 entry from Tatler as its first reference to this word, coupling inattention with indolence; both are represented as moral vices of serious public concern.

Philosophers and moralists at the forefront of cultural construction characterised the ‘habit of inattention’ as not simply a stand-alone moral failing but the source of other vices. In An Essay on Truth (1770), the Scottish moral philosopher James Beattie, who gained a reputation for voicing the moral anxieties of his epoch, located inattention as the source of the ‘criminal habits’ that ‘debase the moral faculty’. He asserted that ‘we have contracted many evil habits, which, with proper attention, we might have avoided’. Beattie associated inattention with ‘unkindness and dissatisfaction’ and warned that if this vice was allowed to flourish, social order would be undermined.

Interesting throughout.

Furedi's comments got me to thinking. What does the data say?


Click to enlarge

It says that we have, as Furedi indicates, long been concerned about distraction, inattention and laziness (and the connection between the three.) Those concerns subsided somewhat post-1850 to a long term steady state till circa 1980 when concern about distraction once again began to rise. We are twice as concerned about distraction as we were three of decades ago.

Both Ngram Viewer and Google Trends both indicate that we express much more concerned about distraction than we do about inattention.

That is an interesting distinction. Distraction generally comes from the outside (such as the internet, Twitter, or Facebook) whereas inattention is almost strictly a personal failing of the individual. Interesting to speculate about that distinction.