January 27, 2025 Issue

Is it true that spending too much time on the Internet rots your brain? Daniel Immerwahr, in his absorbing “Check This Out,” in this week’s issue, suggests that it isn’t. He surveys a whole slew of books on the subject, e.g., Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, Nir Eyal’s Indistractable, Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus; Cal Newport’s Deep Work, Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, Chris Hayes’ The Sirens’ Call; Natalie M. Phillips’ Distraction, Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants, Neil Verma’s Narrative Podcasting in an Age of Obsession. He refers to, among others, Plato, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Johnson, Lawrence Sterne, Paul Lafargue, Bill McKibben, Alex Ross, Donald Trump, and Greta Thunberg. He discusses “fragmentation of consciousness,” “multifocality,” “the right to be lazy,” “attention capitalism,” “obsession culture.” He mixes all these variegated ingredients into his composition and – voilà! – produces a dazzling, coherent argument. It’s quite a performance! 

I like the way Immerwahr pushes back against conventional opinion. For example, he says of TikTok,

Even the supposedly attention-pulverizing TikTok deserves another look. Hayes, who works in TV, treats TikTok wholly as something to watch—an algorithmically individualized idiot box. But TikTok is participatory: more than half its U.S. adult users have posted videos. Where the platform excels is not in slick content but in amateur enthusiasm, which often takes the form of trends with endless variations. To join in, TikTokers spend hours preparing elaborate dance moves, costume changes, makeup looks, lip synchs, trick shots, pranks, and trompe-l’oeil camera maneuvers.

The Internet doesn’t shred our attention spans; it stokes our obsessions. Immerwahr writes,

The nightmare the alarmists conjure is of a TikTok-addled screen-ager. This isn’t a full picture of the present, though, and it might not reveal much about the future, either. Ours is an era of obsession as much as distraction, of long forms as much as short ones, of zeal as much as indifference. To ascribe our woes to a society-wide attention-deficit disorder is to make the wrong diagnosis.

I think he’s right.  

Postscript: A special shout-out to David Plunkert for his vivid illustration of Immerwahr’s piece.