But in the long run, societies don’t simply survive new media technologies passively. They negotiate with them. The eighteenth-century audiences who worried about novels didn’t stop reading them. Instead, they developed new practices for understanding what to get out of them. Eventually, they canonized some novels as “literature” worth sustained... See more

Our goal must be to deliberately, and flexibly, maintain conditions where sustained attention remains valued.

The kind of observation found in a book entitled The Evils of Adultery and Prostitution (1792) was not uncommon: “A ... cause of the profligacy of the present age, is that mass of novels and romances which people of all ranks and ages do so greedily devour. This is a new species of entertainment, almost totally unknown to former ages .... The great... See more

The actors and audiences of William Shakespeare’s plays were engaging in an activity that was considered “low-brow” and even unethical by many members of their society . Shakespeare’s theater, The Globe, was ultimately shut down in 1642 in a final win for the long-standing Puritan campaign against drama. One of Shakespeare’s primary competitors, in... See more

As a historian, though, I think there is one big thing missing from discussions of whether we are witnessing the end of books — or really, the age of sustained attention on anything .

“Mass market” books and periodicals were, themselves , once assailed as damaging to mental health, to attention, and to society.

The demise of writing matters, because writing is not a second thing that happens after thinking. The act of writing is an act of thinking. This is as true for professionals as it is for students... If reading and writing “rewired” the logic engine of the human brain, the decline of reading and writing are unwiring our cognitive superpower at the... See more