Alan Jacobs

Recently I gave a talk at Vassar College for a meeting of LACOL, the Liberal Arts Consortium for Online Learning. Rather than writing out a lecture, I talked my way through the slides below. I’ve added some commentary so you can get a sense of what I talked about. This isn’t exact, but it’s the general picture.

I want to begin by talking about…

The person who has done the most to help us think about these matters is Katherine Hayles:

— who wrote in 2007 about two fundamentally different modes of attention.

This kind of attention has often been represented in art, and interestingly enough, more often than not women are the ones manifesting this attentiveness. This may be related to the association of deep attention and women alike with private spaces, as opposed to the public realm traditionally governed by men.

Our great documentarian of this kind of attention is the photographer André Kertész, whom we’ll return to soon.

But perfectly private spaces are not always available, and this requires the cultivation of certain sophisticated cognitive strategies for enabling deep attention. Dennis Marsden, an English sociologist who grew up in a rather impoverished home in the north of that country, tells the story:

Here’s a photograph by Kertész that seems to be visualizing for us Marsden’s cone of silence: note the hat pulled down over the reader’s forehead, the book pulled close to the face, and rest of the world apparently excluded from whatever is going on in that circle with a radius of about a foot.

To this mode of attention Hayles contrasts its opposite:

Hearing this description, we might think of something like this:

Which reminds me of something … what could it be? … Ah yes:

The resemblance is indeed quite close:

This masterful reader sitting at the center of his informational web certainly cuts a very different figure that the reader “lost in a book”):

So here are Katherine Hayles’s two master modes of attention:

To which she attaches (especially in her recent book How We Think, shown earlier, that develops the key ideas from her 2007 article) two corresponding ways of reading:

She then adds, in light of the work of Franco Moretti and others, a third category:

But we’re going to set machine reading aside today, having paused to note its existence — it’s important, but not germane to the topic of the day.

Having outlined Hayles’s basic distinctions, I now want to adapt and extend them. I think there’s a problem with the binarity of Hayles’s typology, and I want to suggest a more complex one in which we create not an opposition but a continuum:

If we look at things this way, we can see that hyper attention and deep attention have something interesting in common: they enable what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi famously calls flow, a total absorption of the whole person in a task.

And if truly deep attention and truly hyper attention are characterized by flow, then maybe this —

— isn’t a form of hyper attention at all, but was named more accurately some years ago by Linda Stone:

True hyper attention might look something more like this:

The addictive nature of early (largely pre-instrumental) flight, with the wide range of cognitive and physical demands it made — arms and legs moving in rhythm, eyes scanning the horizon, even the sense of smell engaged to note the changes in humidity that can betoken changes in air turbulence — is an ongoing theme of the romantic literature of pilots:

And if we want a contemporary equivalent of hyper-attentive flow, well, it might look something like this — yet another enterprise that calls for the aptly-named “joystick”:

Okay, so much for modes of attention. Now on to…

When we talk about these environments, there’s a word that turns up regularly.

I don’t think it’s a very good word. Too vague, comprising too many highly varied types of environment.

Let’s once more try a continuum instead of a binary:

So: private attention. A good thing and a rare, typically accessible only to those with a highly evolved consciousness.

But reading is never private. It is always, at minimum, intimate:

And when shared with others can be convivial (a term I am borrowing from Ivan Illich’s great text Tools for Conviviality):

Is this a convivial environment?

We teachers certainly want it to be. But all too often it devolves into a kind of anonymous publicness.

Now, these distinctions are not easy to make. What, for instance, do we make of this kind of experience?

To hear Dickens read his work, in the company of hundreds of others, is clearly not the same as to read him in your “cone of silence” with a codex held up before your face — but is it necessarily a public experience. Or might the presence of other Dickens aficionados make it somehow convivial? Might it even be private, as though Dickens is speaking to you and only you, as the other members of the audience fade from your consciousness?

We can ask the same questions of the online world:

Can an encounter of fellow Goodreads users be a genuinely convivial experience, especially when you are agreeing about the merits of a particularly excellent book? Or must it be merely public?

But surely there can be no conviviality when there are no names, no identities, just numbers of highlights divorced from any particular highlighters.

Of course, one may desire a merely public environment, in which case: no problem. But often we may find that the modes of attention we prefer —

— are in tension with the environments of attention in which we find ourselves.

And as if this isn’t all complicated enough, there is a third factor to consider.

Here too, as the philosopher Bernard Williams used to say, “We suffer from a poverty of concepts.” We operate too often with a simplistic distinction between book (or codex) and screen. This is a codex:

But then so is this:

These are screens, and rather different kinds of screens, with different conformations and affordances:

And so are these:

So it turns out that if we want to think seriously about how we read and the conditions under which we read, we require at the very least three-dimensional Cartesian coordinates:

As someone who was never very good with higher geometry, I am at this point tempted to retreat into a private realm:

But perhaps in that case I will not have earned my money. I shall therefore offer, by way of conclusion, …

For disputation.

(Precisely because it is task-specific, whereas the liberal-arts environment is devoted to the cultivation of more general intellectual habits, practices, and virtues.)

I want to talk for a few minutes about reading spaces at colleges and universities, some of which can be quite magnificent:

But magnificence is expensive — and may not be what we most need. There’s something to be said for other kinds of spaces, not grand enough to be public and too small to be especially convivial, that encourage intimate reading. (They should probably be Faraday cages, also.)

Along the same lines, we might think not just about books versus screens but about times to emphasize certain kinds of screens in preference to others:

Though we should never forget that not all connectivity derives from the internet:

[gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18499”]

architectural-review:

The ghosts of surveillance.

Sullivan’s statement was a missive from the bureaucratic bowels of an accounting machine. It was surely manufactured by public relations specialists and lawyers whose interests are simply fiduciary, concerned only with legal liability and fundraising. There are no people, just “interests”; no judgments, just “initiatives”; no moral failures, just “issues.” There were, as one of my colleagues put it, no rapes, no victims, no women, no perpetrators—just “issues related to sexual misconduct.” And the only response is more policies, more initiatives, more accounting.

The captains of erudition are firmly at the helm at the modern American university. With their phalanx of managers, they are guiding us into seas of indistinction, into a future where the university is just another modern bureaucracy without ends, without purpose. And the faculty is asleep on the deck.

According to a report by the Occupational Safety & Health Administration, the top ten leading causes of injury in the workplace are as follows:

• Lightning strikes
• Unknown
• Predation
• Betrayal
• Curses (ancient + modern)
• Ant bites
• Falling
• Spider bites
• Bites (other)
• Natural causes

I am not particularly interested in the book as object, or in the technology of the transmission of the text. Cuneiform, papyrus and codex, Linear A and B, the invention of movable type, all that sort of stuff. These have been recurrent topics in the new field since the 1970s, and the focus seemed almost wilfully to disregard the content of the texts that were transmitted. Do these new book historians actually love reading?

One of them, Frederick G Kilgour, has defined the book as “a storehouse of human knowledge intended for dissemination in the form of an artefact that is portable – or at least transportable – and that contains arrangements of signs that convey information. The information may comprise stories, myths, songs, and reality; the signs may be representations of human speech or graphic presentations of such things as maps, musical notes, or pictures.” The definition hardly trips off the tongue. No one, encountering such a formulation, is likely to get excited and set off in search of one of those. Give me Kafka’s definition of a book any day: “the axe for the frozen sea within us.” Admittedly that wouldn’t help you to find one of them in an attic, but you recognise immediately that Kafka gets it, and Kilgour does not.

[gallery] Paul Nash’s Landscape of the Megaliths, featured in Adam Thorpe’s On Silbury Hill. Image: Lauren McLean/V&A Images, via the New Statesman

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houghtonlib:

Poster for a 1917 production of Caliban by the Yellow Sands, a play written for Shakespeare’s tercentenary by Percy MacKaye. An outgrowth of MacKaye’s belief in community theater, it was first performed in St. Louis in 1914 with a cast of 7,000.

MS Thr 412

Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University

Not long ago an enterprising professor at the Harvard Business School named Mike Norton persuaded a big investment bank to let him survey the bank’s rich clients. (The poor people in the survey were millionaires.) In a forthcoming paper, Norton and his colleagues track the effects of getting money on the happiness of people who already have a lot of it: a rich person getting even richer experiences zero gain in happiness. That’s not all that surprising; it’s what Norton asked next that led to an interesting insight. He asked these rich people how happy they were at any given moment. Then he asked them how much money they would need to be even happier. ‘All of them said they needed two to three times more than they had to feel happier,’ says Norton. The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that money, above a certain modest sum, does not have the power to buy happiness, and yet even very rich people continue to believe that it does: the happiness will come from the money they don’t yet have. To the general rule that money, above a certain low level, cannot buy happiness there is one exception. 'While spending money upon oneself does nothing for one’s happiness,’ says Norton, 'spending it on others increases happiness.’

‘Social justice’ is an awkward term for an immensely important project, perhaps the most important project, which is to make the world a more equitable, fair, and compassionate place. But the project for social justice has been captured by an elite strata of post-collegiate, digitally-enabled children of privilege, who do not pursue that project as an end, but rather use it as a means with which to compete, socially and professionally, with each other. In that use, they value not speech or actions that actually result in a better world, but rather those that result in greater social reward, which in the digital world is obvious and explicit. That means that they prefer engagement that creates a) outrage and b) jokes, rather than engagement that leads to positive change. In this disregard for actual political success, they reveal their own privilege, as it’s only the privileged who could ever have so little regard for actual, material progress. As long as they are allowed to co-opt the movement for social justice for their own personal aggrandizement, the world will not improve, not for women, people of color, gay and transgender people, or the poor.

In his latest speech, Archbishop Welby acknowledged for the first time that the Lambeth conference—a once-in-a-decade gathering of Anglican bishops—might never happen again. Nor, he made clear, was it even certain whether the basis existed for convening another “primates’ meeting"—a global gathering of slightly lesser status which would normally take place every couple of years. In any case, he was no longer prepared to take sole responsibility for deciding such matters; instead there should be a "collegial model of leadership” with Anglican leaders from around the world deciding which meetings were worthwhile. Despite all this, the archbishop gallantly insisted, reports of the global club’s death were exaggerated. “The Anglican Communion exists and is flourishing in roughly 165 countries.”

That may be sort-of true as far as it goes, but it is rather like the Queen saying that the Commonwealth exists. Of course it does, in the sense that nobody has abolished it, and not many people have left it. But post-imperial arrangements can lose salience very very gradually, to the point where the boundary between existence and non-existence becomes almost imperceptible.