Give me a moral disease
This morning I started reading an(other) article about how the Internet is destroying our brains and rendering us incapable of paying sustained attention to anything for longer than forty-five seconds, but I ended up musing about the honor of being called a sinner. An unlikely trajectory of reflection, perhaps, but I’ll try to explain myself.
Frank Furedi’s “The ages of distraction,” like many other articles, is concerned about our present state of inattention. Unlike many other articles, he’s less interested in assigning blame than he is in locating the problem historically and philosophically—and to remind us that what we are so often tempted to think of as a brand new phenomenon is actually a very old one. People have always struggled to pay attention and to pay attention well. The Internet Age might symbolize a pivotal moment in human inattention, but the challenges it presents are mostly in degree not in kind.
At any rate, as I struggled to pay sustained attention to his argument diligently tracked with Furedi on his brief historical tour of inattention, my thoughts kept returning to a sentence, a phrase, located in the opening paragraph:
