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Hello there ā Iāve had a sudden influx of new subscribers so I just want to tell you two things very quickly:
I didnāt have time to write a newsletter this week, so I am literally winging it on Friday morning and then hitting send straight away. Horrific/Terrific is usually a lot more like last weekās post.
I checked my āabout pageā on Substack for the first time since I started Horrific/Terrific (which was like three years ago now) and fucking hell it was the cringiest thing Iāve ever read. So last night I changed it to this, which I think more accurately describes what Iām doing here.
Okay letās dive inā¦
Itās okay to āpay attentionā to the internet, calm down
So this week I had so much client work that I didnāt have time to ingest and form an opinion on any tech news. The only thing I will say is that Iām finding it hilarious how news outlets are bending over backwards to call SpaceXās rocket explosion a āsuccessā.
But anyway, I did have an interesting conversation with a new client (so glad to be working with her tbh) about how digital products and the internet in general saps your attention. I cannot stress enough how much none of us need to talk about this anymore. I understand why people keep coming back to this, but to me ā someone who reads blogs and reports for a living, basically ā this is such a tired and overworked argument.
Okay so the internet is sapping my attention, fine. But what is it sapping it away from? This argument seems to assume that thereās something else out there that we should all be paying more attention to. Sorry but I like the internet, and I donāt actually care if itās scrambled my brain ā I am okay with being scrambled. Please stop inventing diseases for me.
What is this other, much more urgent, and probably higher-quality thing that weāre supposed to be looking at that isnāt the internet? Well obviously itās BOOKS isnāt it? A few months ago I went to a talk by Alice Bennett, who has written extensively about the perceived ācrisis of attentionā that society is currently tolerating. This talk made me realise that a lot of the people who complain about how the internet has obliterated our attention spans, are people who author clever books or very long think-pieces for legacy media organisations. It makes you wonder, is there a ācrisis of attentionā or is it just a bunch of sad writers who are worried that no one will read their work any more? (Maybe they should try making it less boring by adding animated gifs? Just a thought)
So hereās where Iām at with all this: the rash of people who think we should put our phones down and read more are just wrong. I am fucking reading more ā if it wasnāt for the internet, I wouldnāt read at all. When Harry Potter came out, I was undoubtedly its target audience, and I still didnāt read it. I was once tagged in a tweet asking me to list my six favourite books and I replied with āI havenāt even read six books in my lifeā. That is because I am too busy āpaying attentionā to the internet, a place where you can āreadā in a hundred different ways: audiobooks, blog posts, newsletters, podcasts, tweet threads, Hacker News, hilarious Amazon product reviews, web comics, completely unhinged youtube comments. Sorry, but thereās so much out there.
The idea that digital products are infecting our minds and making us forget our own names completely flattens out any nuance. There are very bad dynamics that have emerged from how information proliferates across the web, but there are also books which, when published, captured the collective psyche with extremely damaging misinformation. Have you ever read Freakonomics?
Something else that Alice Bennett said in her talk was that we all assume that attention is finite ā that itās something that you will somehow āuse upā so you need to be careful what you put it on. What if we assumed instead that it wasnāt this way? I have stopped writing this post about ten times to look at my phone, but the post is still getting written and the stuff on my phone got the attention it needed. Itās almost as if I can pay attention to two things at once! I am also non-monogamous, have two girlfriends, and love them both. Whatever the ācrisis of attentionā is, I am definitely not going through it.
Thank you for reading ā interested to know what you all think about this stuff. Please leave a comment or hit reply and let me know!
š Pay Attention
I also find concerns of "short attention span" to be inconsequential. Yes, TikTok and Twitter have meant I'm always scrolling, looking for the next dopamine hit. But that's about it. There's no real harmful consequences other than when I have to rewind the show I was watching because I missed a part.