“’Serious’ art, which is not primarily about getting money out of you, is more apt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort…. The problem isn’t that today’s readership is ‘dumb,’ I don’t think. Just that TV and the commercial-art culture’s trained it to be sort of lazy and childish in its expectations.”
– David Foster Wallace, 1993
In the eighteen years since David Foster Wallace articulated this critique in an interview with Larry McCaffery, there have been massive, rapid changes in the way people communicate and access information. It seems fair to say that these technological transformations, for all their positive effects, have also exacerbated the problem that Wallace points to—it is now harder than ever to maintain the kind of sustained, committed attention that he thought necessary for truly satisfying experiences.
There’s so much that we could be paying attention to at any moment, that we tend to try to take in as much of it as possible by reducing everything to smaller pieces—videos to clips, albums to songs, e-mail to texts to tweets.
We are now constantly connected to work, to family and friends, and to endless possibilities for entertainment and information; it feels like there is always more going on than we could ever keep up with. With so much activity, and so little time to spare, how do we decide what’s worth our attention?
Increasingly, the words, ideas or images that hold our attention at all are those that promise not to hold it for very long. There’s so much that we could be paying attention to at any moment, that we tend to try to take in as much of it as possible by reducing everything to smaller pieces—videos to clips, albums to songs, e-mail to texts to tweets. In rushing to get a little bit of everything, we don’t actually get far enough with anything to feel very interested or satisfied—all the tiny random bits don’t add up to anything of lasting importance.
It could also be that the very idea of “lasting importance” is starting to lose its meaning.
It could also be that the very idea of “lasting importance” is starting to lose its meaning. Now that technology changes so quickly, and new modes of communication go from revolutionary to obsolete practically overnight, we have little reason to assume that a design or product will be interesting or relevant for long—in fact, we generally assume the opposite. Maybe we’re heading to a point where we no longer expect anything—not art, not ideas, not people—to be interesting or relevant for very long. Is our increasingly noncommittal approach to technology also affecting the way we see the content, the actual thoughts and feelings that are being communicated?
It can be overwhelming to try to figure out what’s worth paying attention to in such a turbulent sea of information; there’s this anxiety that if we aren’t constantly on the look-out, we’ll miss something important. We need to remember that the most meaningful ideas aren’t regulated by the changing demands of the consumer market; they will remain worthwhile through the new iPhone, and the next new iPhone, and the new iPhone after that, and would be interesting whether we accessed them on a Kindle or a clay tablet.
If we want to make sense of so much information at such high speeds, we may need to relax and slow down a little. This way, we can find the ideas that are actually worthy of our sustained attention, and ignore the stuff that’s not. Breaking experience apart into small, easily digested fragments only seems to add to the confusion—we need the big ideas to help us make real connections.