A wave of books in the last couple of years has warned of the mentally-unhealthy click bait diet and what it means for our attention spans. We are enjoined to unplug, descend from the shallows and engage in “deep work.” After all, the creator of every great work of culture has been able–at minimum–to pay attention, and that ability is under threat.
I believe that we in the media can be part of the solution by resisting certain common devices that make our work “digestible”. It’s never wrong to be readable or clear, and there are ways in which we can write to scaffold the reader’s attention, helping them to hold more ideas in mind than they could without the text. But there are some techniques that buoy a reader’s mind at the surface and make it very difficult to immerse themselves in long-form pieces. I wrote about them here.
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