WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN DISTRACTED

 If you suspect that 21st-century technology has broken your brain, it will be reassuring to know that attention spans have never been what they used to be. Even the ancient Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger was worried about new technologies degrading his ability to focus. Sometime during the 1st century CE, he complained that ‘The multitude of books is a distraction’. This concern reappeared again and again over the next millennia. By the 12th century, the Chinese philosopher Zhu Xi saw himself living in a new age of distraction thanks to the technology of print: ‘The reason people today read sloppily is that there are a great many printed texts.’ And in 14th-century Italy, the scholar and poet Petrarch made even stronger claims about the effects of accumulating books:

Believe me, this is not nourishing the mind with literature, but killing and burying it with the weight of things or, perhaps, tormenting it until, frenzied by so many matters, this mind can no longer taste anything, but stares longingly at everything, like Tantalus thirsting in the midst of water.

Technological advances would make things only worse. A torrent of printed texts inspired the Renaissance scholar Erasmus to complain of feeling mobbed by ‘swarms of new books’, while the French theologian Jean Calvin wrote of readers wandering into a ‘confused forest’ of print. That easy and constant redirection from one book to another was feared to be fundamentally changing how the mind worked. Apparently, the modern mind – whether metaphorically undernourished, harassed or disoriented –­ has been in no position to do any serious thinking for a long time.

Consider another example: have indexes in printed books made us more distracted readers? In Index, A History of the (2022), the English historian Dennis Duncan makes Plato’s anecdote about the Egyptian gods Theuth and Thamus the ancient point of origin for a long historical arc of tech anxiety bending towards Google. At points between Plato and search engines, Duncan plots the rise of the index as a necessary piece of search equipment for readers. Compilers and users of early indexes in the 16th century, such as the Swiss physician Conrad Gessner, saw great potential in them, but also had reservations. Gessner used this technology in many of his books, creating impressive indexes of animals, plants, languages, books, writers and other people, creatures and things. He thought that well-compiled indexes were the ‘greatest convenience’ and ‘absolutely necessary’ to scholars. Yet he also knew that careless scholars sometimes read only indexes, instead of the whole work.