Reading Practices to Cultivate Temperance
Before we, as members of reading communities, can engage together in particular reading practices, we must first focus our attention and read in the first place. This task is easier said than done. Of all the social ills we will address in this book, the one likely at the forefront of many readers’ minds is distraction. As any teacher (or parent, or pastor, or book study group leader) will tell you, getting anyone to devote their attention to a text without being constantly distracted by alerts from phones or smartwatches or browser windows feels like an insurmountable task. The temptation, conscious and not, to seek quick pleasure (and avoid difficulty) is part of the human condition, but that temptation is exacerbated by the ease with which twenty-first-century personal technology allows us continually to have another game level to play, another video to watch, or another meme to respond to. Indeed, this temptation is not even, primarily, the result of personal vice but is rather a deliberate effect baked into these technologies: distraction by design.1
Given these realities, it may seem to be out of touch to advocate for deep reading and the kind of singular, sustained focus it requires in a culture increasingly defined by what N. Katherine Hayes calls “hyper attention,” the result of a “shift in cognitive styles” away from “deep attention” and toward a form of engagement that is “characterized by switching focus rapidly among different tasks, preferring multiple information streams, seeking a high level of stimulation, and having a low tolerance for boredom.”2 Perhaps, one might argue, this is simply the way we are now, and to resist this shift in types of attention is to be naive, unrealistic, privileged, a Luddite, or even to give in to heresy. Hayes, for example, argues that “in an evolutionary context, hyper attention no doubt developed first; deep attention is a relative luxury”; to prize it enshrines the values of the privileged, who have “long been able to create the kind of environments conducive to deep attention.”3 In their book Following: Embodied Discipleship in a Digital Age, Jason Byassee and Andria Irwin equate “various rhetorical rejections of technology” with “a revival of the ancient Christian heresy of Manicheism” because such rejections characterize technology as essentially evil, but in a world fallen but created good and destined for holistic redemption, nothing is essentially evil.4 And indeed, our own experiences illustrate how foolish and unrealistic (if not quite heretical) it can be to lament the effects of distracting technology. For example, I (Ooms) recently gave a talk at a faculty conference devoted in part to practices that promote distraction.5 I referenced a list of best practices for making video lectures for online students, advice given to many faculty who moved to teaching online during the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the primary pieces of advice was to limit videos to six minutes or shorter in order to make it more likely that students would watch these videos all the way through. Such practices might deliver content, I argued, but they also shaped students’ attention so that they expected to need to focus for no longer than six minutes on any educational (or other) task. After I had finished my talk, one of my colleagues thanked me, even agreed with me, but when she asked me, “How do we do differently if this is the direction everything is going?” I was hard-pressed to answer her.
Many argue that the solution to such distraction, such disordered attentiveness, is discipline: if our attention is fragmented, this way of thinking goes, we need to take back control of how we spend our attention through individual acts of will. Such arguments are not necessarily wrong; the practices they promote can be profoundly helpful.6 But, as Alan Jacobs notes in The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, an emphasis on discipline can have a stultifying effect on the “intensely pleasurable” possibilities for the act of reading.7 There is a certain puritanical dutifulness in cultivating our capacity for deep reading without regard for the delights fostered by this kind of sustained attention. “It seems to me,” Jacobs continues, “that it is not so hard to absorb, and early in life, the idea that reading is so good for you, so loaded with vitamin-rich, high-fiber information and understanding, that it can’t possibly be pleasurable—that to read for the joy of it is fundamentally inappropriate.”8 Or, as Saint Thomas Aquinas puts it, quoting Gregory the Great in Disputed Questions on Evil, “The flesh when restrained more than right is often weakened even for the performance of good deeds, so that while hastening to stifle the forces of sin within, it does not have enough strength to pray or preach.”9 Wrestling with the vice of distraction as we read is thus not only a matter of discipline. It also must involve recognizing the delight that deep reading affords us.
Practices that subvert distraction are therefore best characterized as practices of temperance, the virtue Josef Pieper defines as “inner order” and “serenity of spirit.”10 Given that temperance is opposed to intemperance, or to excess, it is especially concerned with defending and preserving the serenity of which Pieper writes. He explains, “It preserves by defending . . . against all selfish perversion of the inner order.”11 Whereas digital distraction tempts us to spend our lives in disorderly, intemperate states, practicing temperance gives us defensive strategies to maintain our inner order. Expanding on the significance of temperance, Robert C. Roberts writes that certain “activities should be engaged in rationally, according to the ‘rule’ (thinking, logos) of a wise person, a person who understands the proper place of these activities in the much larger business of living a human life.”12 Temperance, thus, “involves concerned understanding” and “is expressed in actions and inactions,” as “both provide strategies for self-control.”13 In an age when our problem is almost never too little information or too few options for pleasure, reading deeply requires practices of attention that not only train us to discern what and how much information is good for us but also enable us to order properly—to temper—our desires for what is pleasurable with our need to focus on what is good.
Theological and Cultural Considerations
Designed to Distract
Distraction and the tendency to pursue—and later regret pursuing—empty pleasures are not only contemporary problems. See, for example, these words from Seneca in “On the Shortness of Life”: “Look back in memory and consider . . . how many have robbed you of life when you were not aware of what you were losing, how much was taken up in useless sorrow, in foolish joy, in greedy desire, in the allurements of society, how little of yourself was left to you; you will perceive that you are dying before your season!”14 Jenny Odell, who quotes this passage in her book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, notes that Seneca’s horror here sounds “all too much like someone waking from the stupor of an hour on Facebook.”15 But however perennial the problem of fragmented attention and its consequences may be, it is also true that recent advancements in information technology have exacerbated this problem, exponentially increasing our ability to access anything we might desire while simultaneously making us less able to temper our desires and focus our attention in meaningful ways.
Lest we be accused of focusing too much on the smartphones and social media of the past twenty years, we should note that the problem of having too much shallow access to whatever information we might want, with little incentive to temper our consumption or deepen our attention, is an old one: it can be traced, if not all the way back to Seneca, at least to the printing press and the telegraph. “We may think that the digital era introduces fundamentally new dynamics to the media ecosystem. In many ways, however, digital technologies have simply amplified the dynamics created by the industrial revolution: it was steam power, not binary code, that birthed . . . [a] dangerous abundance of news and entertainment,” writes Jeffrey Bilbro, describing the effects of the steam-powered printing press and the telegraph.16 A few decades earlier, Neil Postman also, and rather stridently, decried the telegraph, which he accused of bringing “into being a world of broken time and broken attention.”17 According to Postman, the telegraph and its descendent, the television, have had devastating effects on our ability to think and read deeply: “The telegraph is suited only to the flashing of messages, each to be quickly replaced by a more up-to-date message. Facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation.”18 Both Postman and Bilbro describe technologies that glut us with information not for us to remember or understand—indeed, there is too much of it for us to even attempt understanding—but for us to discard almost instantly. These technologies overwhelm our ability to pay close, evaluative, or careful attention to anything, let alone derive meaningful pleasure from it.
Technologies that shape our minds in ways that actively discourage us from the type of deep reading discussed throughout this book are, thus, not new developments (or, at least, not limited to the technologies introduced in the past twenty years).19 However, as we noted above, contemporary technologies such as social media and the smartphone exacerbate these attention-fragmenting effects to a degree that unnerves even their designers. “To dismiss such claims [about the effects of our digital ecology] as merely being old-fashioned, technophobic, or Luddite is to ignore the growing number of distress signals sent by the very digerati who we uphold as the visionaries on the cutting edge of our digital futures,” writes Felicia Wu Song in Restless Devices.20 Foremost among these “digerati” is probably Tristan Harris, formerly a Google design ethicist, now the president of the Center for Humane Technology (CHT), which he cofounded in 2018 to “align technology with humanity’s best interests.”21 The CHT’s website contains, among other resources, a page called the “ledger of harms,” listing a series of recognized costs that have come with the “race for human attention” created by various tech platforms. Among them are effects on attention and cognition. The lede of this particular section reads: “Technology’s constant interruptions and precisely-targeted distractions are taking a toll on our ability to think, to focus, to solve problems, and to be present with each other.”22 The CHT identifies the attention economy as one of the primary drivers of distraction by design. Platforms like Google, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and so on “have been strategically designed to compel us to engage, based on our human instincts. These platforms, now even more powerful with artificial intelligence (AI), are created with the intention of maximizing our engagement and increasing their profit.”23 Harris, his coactivists, and the CHT are hardly the first to warn about the dangers of technologies designed to squander our attention for profit. One such person, dubbed “the Cassandra of the Internet age” by a New York Times profiler, is Michael Goldhaber, who recognized in the early 1990s that “as we’ve begun to live our lives increasingly online, [attention is] now the currency. Any discussion of power is now, ultimately, a conversation about attention and how we extract it, wield it, waste it, abuse it, sell it, lose it and profit from it.”24 Rather than leaving unchallenged these practices that leverage attention for power, we as readers should explore practices that shape and temper attention, allowing us to give attention to what is good, just, beautiful, and even pleasurable.
Doing so means navigating between a Scylla and Charybdis. Scylla here is easy to identify and will be addressed later: the easy, empty pleasures afforded by attention-trapping technologies and how they affect our ability to read deeply. Charybdis is perhaps less obvious. Song hints at it when she notes that Silicon Valley insiders “have seen the unintended consequences of addictive behaviors and imbalances of power between tech companies and users unfold and are deeply unsettled. They have each taken stark measures to abandon, block, or limit their personal access to the very platforms they helped make a success.”25 These “stark measures” may seem necessary for tempering our attention, but they can sacrifice virtue for a bland efficiency that ignores the flavorful middle way of temperance.
Flavorless Techniques
Temperance is a sort of discipline, surely, but it would be a grave mistake to equate this virtue with the maximization of efficiency characterized by technique. The term “technique” as we use it here was defined by French sociologist Jacques Ellul as “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency . . . in every field of human activity” as their ultimate goal.26 If we become convinced that distracting technologies fragment our attention and cause us to waste time pursuing empty pleasures instead of focusing our attention and reading deeply, we may attempt to solve this problem through various time-management hacks or self-monitoring apps that promise to help us become not temperate but economical. We may come to believe, then, that we are engaging in temperance-fostering practices when we are really employing various techniques designed to combat distraction not by cultivating virtue but by maximizing efficiency. And this is easy to do because, as Alan Noble writes in You Are Not Your Own, technique is everywhere in our society, overshadowing all other goods with the good of efficiency, prompting us to think first of a new self-optimizing strategy if an aspect of our lives becomes difficult: “Perhaps . . . [you consider] a journaling method that promises to bring order to your chaotic life. . . . Or a new Bible reading plan. Or a self-care regimen. Or an app that designs a workout based on your interests, weight, height, age, sex, and available time. . . . And you say, ‘I just need to follow this advice, then I won’t have all these problems.’”27 If we apply this principle to techniques disguised as reading practices, we might say, “Perhaps if I maintain my GoodReads profile. Or follow this plan promoted by BookTok influencers. Or install this series of apps on my computer or smartphone designed to limit internet access, then I will read more effectively.” None of these techniques are necessarily wrong or even bad things to adopt—they can all be very beneficial—but if they contribute to a mindset that elevates efficiency as the highest good, they may blind us to the other, even higher goods we are pursuing when we read deeply. Robert C. Roberts argues, “The desires and pleasures associated with the activities should be shaped and governed by a wise logos.”28 Technique may help us to accomplish tasks and work efficiently, but it will not provide us with the “inner order,” the manifestation of temperance, of which Pieper writes.
This technique-focused way of thinking is, like our distractedness, not particularly new, though the explosion of efficiency-maximizing apps and content available to us in the past decade has certainly and exponentially increased the pressure to conform to it. For example, consider Benjamin Franklin’s “bold and arduous Project of arriving at moral Perfection,” detailed in his Autobiography.29 Franklin’s plan for self-optimization involves a list of thirteen virtues he means to methodically cultivate in himself,30 and while he makes some use of religious language, he is mostly concerned, as Alasdair MacIntyre notes, with the “utilitarian” ends of his project.31 He writes, “It will be remark’d that, tho’ my Scheme was not wholly without Religion there was in it no Mark of any of the distinguishing Tenets of any particular Sect. I had purposefully avoided them; for being fully persuaded of the Utility and Excellency of my Method . . . I would not have anything in it that should prejudice anyone of any Sect against it.”32 Franklin’s emphasis on utility is, Jacobs notes, a particularly American one that bleeds into how we think about reading: “This self-help, self-improvement model of reading seems deeply embedded in American cultural life.”33 We will expand upon the importance of reading for leisure and rest, as opposed to for productivity, in chapter 6. Here, however, we emphasize how to properly train our attention and how some practices that seem to help us do so might actually do more harm than good. Claiming to help us attend to what is good, they instead are less interested in the good and more interested in what is useful—or in what will make us more useful, more efficient. Such techniques prescribe us intellectual foods that might be composed of the necessary nutrients but that are in the end flavorless: a reading diet of unsauced vegetables and dutiful drudgery.
Disordered Tastes
Having observed Charybdis’s uncanny ability to convince us that we are better ordering our lives and embracing discipline when we are really being sucked into technique, we return to Scylla and the ways that fragmented attention can disorder how we experience pleasure as we read deeply. Two examples of this disordered way of attending to texts (though neither involves written texts), ostensibly for the purposes of enjoyment, help illustrate this point. The first is anecdotal: I (Ooms) ask my composition classes to write their research paper on a particular piece of media; they make an argument about whether or not that piece of media deserves their attention and, if so, how much and why. Often students choose television shows or films, and a surprising number of students have written papers about the 1990s–2000s show Friends. More than once, students have argued that Friends is worth one’s attention because one can turn it on and leave it on in the background while one does other things. In other words, Friends is worth paying attention to because the viewer doesn’t have to pay attention to it. Although we would not necessarily argue that it would be a great tragedy for a viewer not to pay attention to this particular sitcom, this idea—that enjoying a story can be easily equated with “This piece of media does not require much of me as a viewer”—is an interesting and unsettling one.
This idea leads us to the second example: these students were voicing a trend that is hardly limited to Friends or to their own experiences. In a late 2020 New Yorker article, Kyle Chayka describes and defines the phenomenon of “ambient television,” a genre as “ignorable as it is interesting.”34 Writing about the Netflix show Emily in Paris, Chayka describes the experience of attending to such media: “The purpose of ‘Emily in Paris’ is to provide sympathetic background for staring at your phone. . . . The episodic plots are too thin to ever be confusing; when you glance back up at the television, chances are that you’ll find tracking shots of the Seine or cobblestoned alleyways, lovely but meaningless. . . . Eventually, sensing that you’ve played two episodes straight without pausing or skipping, Netflix will ask if you’re still really watching. Shamed, I clicked the Yes button, and Emily continued being in Paris.” Chayka traces ambient television back to the rise of the soap opera in the mid-twentieth century, which “evoked the banality of domestic labor that the programs distracted from, providing welcome background noise.”35 As we have noted above, our contemporary problems with attention are not unique to the past few decades of human life as experienced in wealthy, technologically advanced societies. The particular ills that our students and the viewers of Emily in Paris are trying to address are also perennial: they feel stressed and want a distraction from the things, whether mundane (looming assignment due dates) or extraordinary (global pandemics), that cause such stress. But the effects of these ills are exacerbated by the ways in which much contemporary technology makes paying attention a deeply stressful experience in and of itself and therefore reduces actual entertainment to checked-out escape rather than engagement in something good. The students who appreciated Friends for its ignorability have perhaps lost the ability to attend even to what is pleasing because of the sheer amount of media they all experience rushing at them daily.
In fact, many users of modern technology employ the accurately named “doomscrolling”—scrolling through a seemingly endless Instagram feed or repeatedly refreshing Twitter even if all the news seems bad and everyone is toxic—to such an extent that having to focus on anything, good or bad, might feel stress-inducing. Equating doomscrolling with gluttonous pursuit of pleasure might seem contradictory, but the two are very much related. A large part of this connection comes from the design of our technologies, as noted above, and the novelty of even bad news can be attractive. Social media in particular, along with the devices on which we access it, is designed to capture our attention, and part of the way it accomplishes this task is through sparking dopamine hits in our brains (in response to likes, comments, and other notifications) on a variable reward schedule that resembles that of a slot machine, balancing negative and positive feedback to keep the user engaged.36
Having our attention so captured results in a way of thinking that bears little resemblance to the ways reading—even not particularly deep reading—trains us to focus our attention and structure our thoughts. Nicholas Carr describes it this way: “Calm, focused, undistracted, the linear mind is being pushed aside by a new kind of mind that wants and needs to take in and dole out information in short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts—the faster, the better.”37 Book people, Carr argues, practice “sustained, unbroken attention” that requires “readers to place themselves at what T. S. Eliot, in Four Quartets, would call ‘the still point of the turning world.’”38 Such readers must “train their brains . . . to resist the urge to let their focus skip from one sensory cue to another,” training that has always been arduous.39 The more our readerly hungers are shaped by disjointed bursts, the less we are able to sit at a still point and focus; the more disordered our intellectual desires become, the less we are able to seek the deeper pleasures only made available to us by sustained attention. “Gluttony’s excessive pursuit of the pleasures of the table eventually dulls our appreciation for the food we eat, and the God who created what we eat and gave us the ability to take pleasure in it,” writes Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung of how our experience of food’s pleasure can be disordered.40 We might say, to paraphrase DeYoung, that the excessive pursuit of the quick pleasures offered to us by various media dulls our appreciation for the riches offered by deep reading and the sustained attention it requires.
Disembodied Attention
Disordered tastes do more than just shatter our abilities of sustained focus. They also keep us from being able to discern meaningful information from the rest of the din, which in turn prevents us from acting in meaningful ways in the world around us. Postman argues that “the situation created by telegraphy, and then later exacerbated by later technologies, made the relationship between information and action both abstract and remote.” He then asks the reader a series of questions to help them discern what this means, and when I (Ooms) teach Postman’s book, my students always point to this passage as one of particular resonance for them as well: “What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? . . . I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them. . . . Thus, we have here a great loop of impotence: the news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.”41 Postman’s point is echoed by Bilbro, who emphasizes how “improvements in communications technology have increased the temptation to sympathize with distant events and ignore ones nearby.”42
We may, rightly, be angered and grieved by news of another school shooting, or by a video of the murder of an unarmed Black man by police, or by an image of wartime travesty in Ukraine, and we may in response be inspired to post and share and communicate righteous outrage. Perhaps, at best, we will be moved to pray. But often, we are too removed from these events to give them our attention in any way beyond outrage or voyeurism. We might want to empathize; we express solidarity and a desire for change. But we do not know or even live near those we feel compelled to help; hashtags and images flash at us across distances our bodies are not also crossing. “By flooding us with information to which we can have no meaningful [or embodied] response,” Bilbro writes, “these technologies threaten to malform our attentive sensibilities. The goal of a properly attentive life is right love and right action, and this goal is not served when we are caught up in distant dramas.”43 Or, as Augustine writes, though we are charged to love all people equally, “you cannot do good to all people equally, so you should take particular thought for those who, as if by lot, happen to be particularly close to you in terms of place, time, or any other circumstances.”44 Our technologies are very good at convincing us that we can do good beyond these limits—that, in fact, our goal should be to have the widest reach possible. However, such practices only dilute our attention, dissolving even our best intentions into a sea of well-meaning but ultimately useless “activism.”
Consider the types of activism and solidarity that sweep across social media, perhaps evoking a shared feeling in users, but that result in no real action—in other words, no embodied attention—in the world outside of the screen. One good example is the #BlackoutTuesday hashtag that spread across Instagram in mid-2020 during the protests over the police murder of George Floyd. This hashtag in this context accompanied the posting of a black square, and both together were supposed to draw attention to the protests and to express an Instagram user’s solidarity with them.45 However, the gesture, though well intentioned, was ultimately counterproductive. The act of posting on Instagram is meaningless if not accompanied by actual acts of solidarity with suffering neighbors. Brooke Marine writes to those who want to contribute meaningfully to racial justice: “Imagine someone who’s not familiar with this trend or hashtag. . . . They click the hashtag #blackouttuesday, and what do they see? There’s likely not going to be a lot of information there on what this hashtag means and why it’s being used, just an endless loop of the same thing.”46 Ironically, this posting practice, designed to draw Instagram users’ attention toward active engagement with antiracism, ended up fragmenting that attention; users were instead caught in an “endless loop of the same thing,” so much so that, as Marine points out later, even the most active user who sought real information was driven away, because the black squares designed to express solidarity were clogging up the works, overwhelming that real information with an endless sea of blank, disembodied expressions of alleged allyship.47
It is tempting to believe that such “endless loop[s] of the same thing” occur simply because of user error. Our technological marvels should, after all, be able to achieve the utopic—connect people across vast distances, introduce people to ways of being human they hadn’t encountered before, provide those without access to traditional avenues of power and speech with a way to make themselves heard. And they can do these things.48 But often, these positive-but-virtual outcomes do not bring people together in body and on real ground. Instead, they allow us to put or maintain distance between our own bodies and those of the others whom we seek to help and understand. This distance allows us to retreat into the belief that a social media post alone counts as meaningful action. Actual, living, embodied forms of attention to others are, like the attention deep reading demands, extraordinarily taxing and costly. Instead of simply posting a black square, using a hashtag, or earnestly expressing solidarity in a Tweet or Instagram story, one would have to get up, join other people in one’s neighborhood, introduce oneself to strangers, and give of one’s time or money to serve in a homeless shelter, run for school board, attend local government meetings, or stock a food pantry. Having an easier option is incredibly appealing.
But the tradeoffs involved if we adopt this distanced posture are far more costly, because the kind of people our attention-hungry technologies are turning us into are not people at all. In his book The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is, philosopher Justin E. H. Smith paints a bleak picture of what we become when we allow our technologies free rein to shape us. In an attention economy whose major players perceive human beings as sets of data points, “eventually it is inevitable that this perception cycles back and becomes the self-perception of human subjects,” so that we come to see ourselves as “attention-grabbing sets of data points” instead.49 Pieper anticipates Smith’s claim about the damage of technology on human nature when he refers to intemperance as an “infantile disorder” that “not only destroys beauty” but also “makes [us] cowardly” and “unwilling to ‘take heart’ against the wounding power of evil in the world.”50 Such a cowardly shift in self-perception compromises, as Smith writes, “our ability to use our faculty of attention in ways conducive to thriving” as we condense everything that matters to us into the space occupied by a smartphone screen, “transform our human identity . . . [into] an algorithmically plottable profile,” and ultimately “imitate a bot.”51 Bots are by definition disembodied. They can give an imitation of attention but nothing real, and if we imitate them, as Smith argues our technologies inevitably shape us to do, we become less and less inclined to engage in practices that have real impacts on the nonvirtual existences of our neighbors—or even on our own souls.
Attention, after all, Smith argues, is “not only a mental faculty, but also, irreducibly, a moral state.” A loved one who texts, a baby who cries, a student who knocks tentatively on the office door is making a moral plea: “I am worthy of care; pay attention to me!”52 This moral dimension should be of particular interest to Christians, for whom truly attending to each other is part of how we honor the image of God in each other, and for whom deeply reading the Bible is a cornerstone of our faith and religious practices.53 Our technologies work against these aspects of our faith, instead “narrow[ly] channeling . . . our cognitive and emotional investment down pathways that are structurally guaranteed to limit or prevent personal transformation.”54 This consequence is, we must again note, not necessarily new. Postman, for example, makes a similar argument about how television warps religion by transforming it into entertainment that can make few mental or moral demands of us: “There is no great religious leader . . . who offered people what they want. Only what they need. But television is not well suited to offering people what they need. . . . I believe I am not mistaken in saying that Christianity is a demanding and serious religion. When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether.”55 Paraphrasing Postman, we offer the following observation: when religion, when relationships, when reading and learning are presented in forms that demand little of us except brief bursts of attention, they become very different sorts of things indeed.
Reading to Become Temperate
One might think that, after all we have discussed above, our primary recommendation for subverting distraction will be to discard our devices completely and to return to very low-tech lives.56 We recognize, however, that it is nearly impossible to do so, for better and for worse. Indeed, to return to our gastrological metaphors, to recommend that we get rid of our devices as a solution to the distempered attentional habits they cultivate in us would be like recommending that a person eat only Soylent meal-replacement shakes or some other depressing, pleasureless, fuel-only “food” if he or she struggled with gluttonous eating. Social media and the smartphone are part of our daily lives, and we must learn how to live with them while also defending ourselves from the distraction they promote. Robert C. Roberts has argued that temperance involves both “actions and inactions,” which is particularly relevant for those of us striving to become and continue to be deep readers in our intemperate, distracted age.57 We need to be proactive about developing our attention spans while learning how to refrain from activities that damage them. Since I (Griffis) obtained a smartphone at the age of thirty, I have experienced cycles in which I am harried and stressed and have not given my full attention to a book for even fifteen minutes without interruption. After existing in this state for certain periods of time, I have consistently relied on a simple routine of “action and inaction” to build back my ability to focus on a book and read for at least an hour without switching tasks. The action is to sit in a room with a clock and read for a set amount of time (usually thirty minutes or an hour) while the inaction is to leave my phone in another room so that I am training myself not to check it constantly. I repeat this routine several times a week until I feel that I have a semblance of what Pieper calls “inner order” or “serenity” back in my life. I find that I am less prone to check my phone, even when I am not intentionally limiting my use of it; what I desire to give my attention to is more aligned with what matters most in my life; and I am less apt to succumb to distractions. The practices we will explore in the second half of this chapter, then, are reading practices that promote temperance, not abstinence, in order to subvert distraction. Our technologies might be designed to “[degrade] us into being pleasure seekers,”58 but when our tastes are properly ordered and disciplined so that we do not “careen from one extreme to another” but instead incline toward what is good, we are free to attend virtuously to our work, our loved ones, and God.59
Cultivating Temperate Attentiveness: Practices and Examples
Lectio Divina
As we wrote above regarding temperance in food consumption, one cannot control the vicious impulses of gluttony by simply refusing to eat. By this logic, we must discern how to temper our attention because we must read. Even if our reading is not done as part of a class assignment or book club, Christians are necessarily readers because our practices and our beliefs are grounded in the Word, and in a text. The first practice we discuss here, an adaptation of the ancient Benedictine practice of lectio divina, takes the necessity of reading into consideration. As Marilyn McEntyre writes in Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, “Good reading is not possible without investment of the whole self,” and thus any practice designed to subvert distraction will help us develop this wholistic investment, entering into the text “with all our faculties—mind, heart, and gut.”60 In Eat This Book, Eugene Peterson, writing of Scripture reading in particular, pushes further, asking that we allow our reading “to discipline us . . . into appropriate ways of understanding and receiving this text so that it is formative for the way we live our lives, not merely making an impression on our minds or feelings.”61
We discussed above—at length—how our technologies are undoubtedly formative, often shaping us not into deep readers but rather into distracted, robotic processors of content whose powers of attention are often too limited to respond in ways beyond bursts of rage or numbness. Lectio divina, when applied to Scripture, does precisely the opposite because it recognizes the living nature of the text before the reader as well as that of the reader him- or herself. “Lectio divina is the deliberate and intentional practice of making the transition from a kind of reading that treats and handles, however reverently, Jesus dead to a way of reading that frequents the company of friends who are listening to, accompanying, and following Jesus alive,” Peterson writes. Readers of Scripture whose attention is rightly tempered, in other words, recognize that they are not robotic processors or gluttonous consumers of content but rather living souls whose reading involves an encounter with another living soul (in this case, “Jesus alive”).62 But even if we are not reading sacred texts, and though our encounters are metaphorical rather than wrapped in the mystery of meeting the Word as we read the Word, we can still gather from the lectio divina this important posture and understand that every act of reading involves encountering another person. As McEntyre writes, “To read well is to enter into living relationship with another whole self. . . . As we read, we do well to remember the ‘who’ behind the ‘what.’”63
Thus, lectio divina helps us cultivate temperance and subvert distraction both by reminding us that we must read and by helping us recognize that reading is a relational act—the very opposite of the kind of disembodied, distracted content consumption our technologies shape us to practice. When applied to the reading of Scripture, lectio divina has four parts; Peterson describes them as “lectio (we read the text), meditatio (we meditate the text), oratio (we pray the text), and contemplatio (we live the text)” and emphasizes that these are not a “linear act” but a “looping spiral” in which these elements repeat, intermingle with each other, and ultimately transform our reading into an encounter with a “personally speaking God” rather than reducing the Bible to a useful but inert tool.64 Some of the language of the lectio divina is inappropriate outside of Scripture reading (we wonder what, for example, asking a student or a book club to “pray the text” of a selection of Freud’s writing or a Flannery O’Connor short story would involve). However, the overall purpose of the lectio divina—the encounter with a “personally speaking” Author that Peterson describes—is incredibly applicable. We ask ourselves, then, what kinds of reading practices can help us, our students, and our neighbors experience reading not as the absorption of useful, inert content but as an encounter with another person, be that person the text’s author, its characters, or both.
For example, when I (Ooms) teach the Aeneid and Beowulf to my world literature students, before we begin our discussions of the texts themselves, I ask my students to close their eyes and contemplate a question or scenario. When we begin the Aeneid, I ask my students to think about what words, images, and feelings spring to mind when they think of “home.” They spend a few moments jotting words and phrases down before we make a list. I’ve done this exercise for several semesters now, and each class’s list tends to bring up “safety,” “security,” “a place I can be myself,” “family,” and similar ideas. I then use this list to segue into our discussion of the first books of the Aeneid. Looked at through one lens, the Aeneid is a seminal and extraordinarily influential work of Western literature, read and reread for centuries by other significant Western writers (such as Augustine, Dante, and Seamus Heaney), worth reading because of this pedigree and level of influence. Looked at through another lens, the Aeneid is a very old, difficult-to-read book that is hopelessly outdated and irrelevant to almost all readers’ day-to-day lives.65 What is missing from both perspectives is any sense of the writer and characters of the Aeneid as persons, any idea that reading this text would involve an encounter with something alive rather than a transfer of content that would make the reader either more intellectual or more useful. By asking my students to consider what “home” means to them, I invite them into the text from a third perspective: one that reads the Aeneid as a refugee story, helmed by a character who has experienced the devastating loss of his home after the fall of Troy and who now has the responsibility to find and build a new home.
I (Ooms) do something similar when teaching Beowulf, asking students to imagine living in a world without electric light, where the setting of the sun means they will begin hearing the screams of nameless terrors in the darkness of the night. After they’ve imagined this, I ask them to imagine a mead hall like Heorot instead: a place full of friends and allies, of warmth and light. I then ask them to imagine what an attack on the mead hall would mean. This exercise helps them experience the world of Beowulf and the threat of its monsters in a more personal way; they immediately understand that Grendel is not doing the eleventh-century equivalent of robbing a Starbucks but that he poses an existential threat to the Danes. Such habits help readers practice giving the kind of attention that we owe to other human beings by helping them to encounter the worlds and concerns of these characters, characters who populate works they might otherwise treat with the same distracted, incomplete attention as the Friends-watching students mentioned above.
Field Trips as Embodied Experiences
Visiting places that deepen our understanding of a text helps us to pay attention to the places that shaped that text. During my years as a professor at a college in Kansas, I (Griffis) designed a course on Native American literature, in part because the location of my college was well suited for incorporating several field trips into the class. I wanted to take students on field trips in order to show them that their presence in a community matters and that simply showing up and paying attention is a gift they can offer both the place itself and the people who live there. Two places we visited as part of this course were particularly helpful in reinforcing the communal values that I wanted to embed in my class and highlight to enrich my students’ understanding of the texts we were reading. The first was the Land Institute, a farm and organization located in Salina, Kansas, that is committed to ecological flourishing. Several of the texts we read in the course deal with environmental concerns, asking questions about what it means to care for one’s home and place. Visiting the Land Institute consequently gave my students a tangible and compelling example regarding how to care for rural Kansas. The second trip was to Maxwell Wildlife Refuge, which contains a herd of bison. This trip was focused specifically on bringing to life N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain, a text that memorializes the height of Kiowa culture on the Great Plains, of which the bison were an integral part. At this place, students can see stunning views of the Kansas prairie as well as experience the temperament and formidable presence of the bison.66 Although I believe that visiting local places and paying attention to them is a worthy end itself, I incorporate written responses into the activity that draw my students into deeper reflection regarding the relationship between a text and place.
For those who would like to include embodied experiences with texts into their reading groups or classes, we recommend looking for texts that have connections to local places.67 Keep in mind that the connection can be loose if your desire is to cultivate attention, community, and conversation among your group through the experience. Alternatively, one might look for events and places that reflect what the group is reading. For example, a book group exploring the topic of neighborliness could attend an open mic night at a coffee shop together, an activity that might not have a direct connection to the book they are reading. Yet supporting a local celebration of the arts is an act of neighborliness that a community can embody together. Although an in-person, corporeal experience is preferable to a virtual one, instructors can model embodiment to their students if a trip is not possible. I (Griffis) left Kansas for my home state of Michigan, but I continue to incorporate the Kansas prairie and bison into my lessons on The Way to Rainy Mountain by showing my students pictures and videos I took myself. In this way, I strive to model for my students the communal value of traveling to a place and paying attention to it.
Attention through Material Reading
Readers can also temper the distractions of the digital age through judicious experimentation with historical reading practices and an overall focus on materiality.68 For instance, I (Roberts) have incorporated a small “History of the Book” unit into one of my English classes (classes in history or religion would also be a good fit for such activities). There is a rich well of resources and ideas available for bringing book history to life in a material way—everything from visiting rare book rooms to making paper to writing with quill pens.69 Being new to the study and not well supplied with resources, I kept things simple and held short lessons on aspects of book history such as manuscript production, the early printing press, and the modern field of digital humanities.70 While I made liberal use of online videos and resources, I also included some simple hands-on lessons, to which students responded with enthusiasm. For instance, when talking about manuscripts, we spent ten minutes copying out a Bible passage by hand (with our regular pens and paper); students were astonished at how slow and painstaking the work was, and we reflected on how much labor it would take to produce a single book. For another lesson, I brought large sheets of paper to class, one for each student, and we folded them to demonstrate folio, quarto, and octavo book assembly.71 I also brought a “book knife” to class and let each student “open”—that is, cut—the gathered pages where they remained folded at quarto or octavo size.72 The students universally enjoyed the materiality of tearing the pages (they stayed after class to finish opening all of their pages) and commented on how having to cut open each page might change the way one approached reading a book.
These examples of hand-copying passages or folding paper, especially if accompanied by some light research or reading about the historical practices they represent, could easily be practiced outside the classroom, whether by small groups or by individual readers. Even such relatively simple activities, needing only some everyday supplies, can be a powerful way to ground readers in the materiality of books, the pleasures of embodiment (the sound of opening pages was a particular hit with my students), and the ways in which our text shapes our reading practices.
Practicing textual criticism is another way we can refocus our attention and recognize the rich materiality—the groundedness in human thinking and labor—of everything we read. At its core, textual criticism is the practice of establishing an authoritative or “authentic” version of a text, often involving combing through different versions of a manuscript.73 Few contemporary readers (who don’t work within the world of publishing) consider what is involved in creating the anthology, novel, essay collection, or Bible that we hold in our hands and read.74 When I (Ooms) teach literary theory, I give my students the task of the textual critic for a day. I supply them with three different versions of one of Hamlet’s soliloquies (the famous “To be or not to be” speech), one of which (helpfully for them) is from the rather appropriately nicknamed “bad quarto,” and ask them to identify similarities and differences across the three versions. I also ask them to produce, as a class, an authoritative edition of the soliloquy. At the end of the class period, I give them a second handout: a copy of the soliloquy from a respected contemporary edition of Shakespeare’s plays.75 By the end of the exercise, my students have gained a deep, embodied understanding of the careful attention required not only of editors but of careful readers of any text.
Considering how the existence of any text is the result of many hands and minds is helpful beyond the classroom setting. Indeed, it is likely familiar to anyone who has attended a Bible study. In my (Ooms’s) small group at church, for example, we recently spent several months reading through the Sermon on the Mount, and each time we met, we would make a point of reading the text in at least two translations (most commonly the ESV and NIV, but others also made appearances).76 This practice helped us recognize how translation, as well as the production of any edition of a text, is a human act, not a robotic one, and that this is actually a good thing, despite the ways in which translations can and do promulgate the prejudices of their makers.77 Reading biblical texts in multiple translations draws our attention to the many hands, minds, and hearts that were involved to give us the words we’re striving to read deeply. Further, this practice reminds us of the earthiness, the embodiedness, of the very process of divine inspiration. Unlike the content we consume with our technologies, which comes to us from disembodied sources (some of them not human at all) and often exists less to nourish our connections to other people and more to starve our powers of empathy while glutting us with dopamine, the Bible comes to us by way of different people from different times and places, people with histories, distinct voices, and particular cultural backgrounds. Considering multiple translations and acknowledging the deep, prayerful communal work of bringing the Bible to lay Christians subverts our tendencies toward distraction by helping us pay attention both to the words of Scripture and to the people inspired to pen them.
Diving Deep
One of the challenges of constructing a syllabus, planning a book club, leading a small group Bible study, or building one’s personal to-be-read pile is the pressure to prioritize reading more—more poems, more pages, more verses—as though glutting ourselves weren’t counterproductive if we also want to read deeply. Often, particularly if we are teachers beholden to accrediting bodies and state standards, we have little control over how much reading we require of our students. And the sheer volume of reading possibilities available to us is so staggering that narrowing our attention to smaller chunks of text might seem unambitious (at least) or a grim reminder of our own inevitable deaths (at most). In The Common Rule, Justin Earley describes the experience of standing in awe inside a jam-packed bookstore and realizing, after some quick mental math, that at his current reading rate, he had enough years left to read 1,500 more books in his lifetime, give or take.78 “That’s when I had a realization of my mortality. My desire outpaced reality. I simply didn’t have the life to read what I wanted to read,” Earley concludes.79 To further our gastrological metaphor here: Earley’s eyes were bigger than his stomach. And most of us know the overstuffed feeling of having eaten more than we could comfortably digest: instead of nourished and energized, we feel sick and sluggish.
Being confronted by our own mortality is hardly a comfortable position to be in, either, and few of us want to confront it at all, let alone as we read a syllabus or eye the stack of books on our nightstand. As discussed above, our technologies often provide a false antidote for the reality of our limitedness. In allowing us a seemingly unbounded reach across space and an unfathomable amount of content for our consumption, these technologies lead us to think that our minds, like an AI chatbot consuming digital reams of written material in order to “learn,” can “take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles” that transform us from “a scuba diver” plunging deeply into a “sea of words” into a jet skier “zip[ping] along the surface.”80 Or, as Sven Birkerts describes in The Gutenberg Elegies, when we are “awed and intimidated by the availability of texts, faced with the all but impossible task of discriminating among them,” we “tend to move across surfaces, skimming, hastening from one site to the next without allowing the words to resonate inwardly.”81 But we are not machines, and we do not have a limitless capacity to shallowly and speedily consume texts—nor should we desire such a capacity. Instead, what we want to cultivate is a capacity to savor smaller bites so that they “resonate inwardly” and truly nourish us.
To that end, we recommend spending at least a handful of class days, club meetings, or personal reading hours on smaller chunks of text, such as single poems, a handful of verses, or one piece of a scholar’s argument. For example, in an American Literature class, my students and I (Ooms) spend a whole class period discussing a handful of Emily Dickinson poems. Before our class meeting, I ask my students to choose three Dickinson poems from our anthology that they want to discuss. During our class meeting, students share their choices, and we usually end up focusing our class meeting on three or four poems. Memorably, one semester, we spent twenty minutes discussing a four-line poem:
“Faith” is a fine invention
For Gentlemen who see!
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency!82
These brief lines had caught more than one of my students’ attention and held it. One student said it reminded her of some of the arguments she had heard during the pandemic, particularly religious ones that protested mask mandates and vaccinations. Her point led to a discussion of the hostility with which some religious people may view science (and, we also pointed out, the dismissiveness with which some scientists may treat religion). Part of our discussion focused on Dickinson’s humor here, which comes across clearly even in only four lines. We discussed ways of interpreting the italicized word “see” as well as Dickinson’s capitalization choices. These twenty minutes were rich; we very much savored this poem and the handful of others we discussed during this class period. Diving deep into this poem rather than skimming across the surface of many Dickinson poems helped my students temper their powers of attention and allow the poem to resonate within and among them.
Chewing on the Text
Unless we read aloud to children, we are likely used to reading being a silent, solitary activity, embodied by a person curled up in an armchair in a corner. From personal experience, we can attest that this type of reading is quite wonderful. Moreover, the sustained, focused attention a silent reader pays to a text is very different from the fragmented attention of the app-hopping doomscroller, though their physical postures may look the same. However, given our technologies’ tendencies to divert our attention away from our embodied reality and that of those around us, practices that help us literally chew on the text and experience reading as “much less phantasmagoric and much more [of a] carnal activity” can help us tune our attention—as well as our ears—to what we read.83
I (Ooms) have found reading aloud to be very helpful particularly when studying poetry and texts from oral traditions with my students.84 For example, in the same class studying Beowulf that I mentioned above, I read a passage aloud after I’ve introduced students to a key feature of Anglo-Saxon poetry: that it is highly alliterative. Reading passages silently doesn’t communicate the full sense of the rhythm and muscularity of the lines, but reading aloud allows me and my students to understand them “by moving to their beat” and “recapturing their rhythm.”85 Try reading the following lines aloud, as I (Ooms) do with my students, noticing and emphasizing the repeated consonant sounds as you go:
Then a powerful demon, a prowler through the dark,
nursed a hard grievance. It harrowed him
to hear the din of the loud banquet
every day in the hall, the harp being struck
and the clear song of a skilled poet
telling with mastery of man’s beginnings,
how the Almighty had made the waters;
in His splendor He set the sun and the moon
to be earth’s lamplight, lanterns for men,
and filled the broad lap of the world
with branches and leaves; and quickened life
in every other thing that moved.86
My students, whether they read silently or aloud, often tend to read poetry as though each line is one thought rather than reading according to how the text is punctuated; I’ve noticed this tendency in many readers outside of the classroom setting too. Hearing the words read aloud helps readers make better sense of the rhythm of the lines and where different thoughts stop and start. And though I usually try not to make students read aloud in front of classmates if they don’t want to, the ones who volunteer to read aloud are often able to communicate their interpretations of the text more clearly than those who only read silently.87
Hearing a translated text read aloud in its original language can also help us understand the world of the text better than we may have before. For example, I (Ooms) play my students some of Benjamin Bagby’s performance of Beowulf in the original Old English (and accompanied by Anglo-Saxon lute), which they find fascinating.88 And despite their inability to understand the words being spoken, seeing the text being performed aloud in a way resembling how its first hearers would have experienced it helps direct their attention to the carnality of the text: that it is not a piece of disembodied content in a textbook or even a purely cerebral reading exercise, but a window into a culture full of people as real as themselves.
Readers can also encounter texts for the first time as they read them aloud together. I (Roberts) have found this practice most successful in longer class meetings. For a seventy-five-minute class period, I usually confine introducing a new text to a short poem (I call it the “Poem of the Day”). For longer classes (for instance, a three-hour summer session), I have experimented with bringing longer texts, both poetry and prose. I use a combination of reading aloud myself and asking students to read aloud; I also incorporate at least some time for asking questions about the text and discussing it together with students. Reading new texts aloud is not my personally preferred method of encountering them, and it may not be yours either, but it is no bad thing for us all to stretch outside our comfort zones.
Outside of the classroom setting, other types of reading groups can also gather together to read texts aloud. For example, when my (Ooms’s) church small group studied the Sermon on the Mount (as mentioned above), we began each of our discussions by reading a portion of the text aloud. Part of why we did this was to refamiliarize all of us with the reading we’d prepared for that week’s discussion, but it also helped us inhabit the text together in a way we would not have if we had simply plunged right into discussion or spent time rereading the text silently to ourselves. Thus, we became attuned not only to the rhythm of the words spoken aloud but also to each other.
Concluding Reflection on Paying Attention
Distraction has always kept us, ultimately, from savoring what is pleasurable and loving what is good. And though our contemporary technologies, particularly smartphones and the types of rapid-fire, constantly updating media they enable us to access, may convince us that distraction is a contemporary problem, fragmented attention is a perennial human one, and the technologies that increasingly distract us are older than our particular historical moment. Many of us might be tempted by techniques that promise to help us better manage our time and maximize our productivity, equating attention with efficiency, but such strategies, however useful, will not help us better attend to what is good. Instead, we must discover—and rediscover—practices that help us attend to what we read the way we want to attend to our friends and neighbors: with the kind of attention that humanizes, that empathizes, that looks like love.
SUMMARY of SUGGESTED PRACTICES
REFLECTION and DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. The 2020 Netflix docudrama The Social Dilemma, directed by Jeff Orlowski, for example, explores the attention-warping effects of both devices and social media through a series of disquieting interviews with several designers of those very devices and media, many of whom state quite baldly that, among other things, they severely limit their children’s access to these technologies for their own good.
2. Hayes, “Hyper and Deep Attention,” 187.
3. Hayes, “Hyper and Deep Attention,” 188.
4. Byassee and Irwin, Following, 7.
5. This talk was later printed in Missouri Baptist University’s faith and learning journal. See Ooms, “Teaching to Transform.”
6. See, for example, Earley, Common Rule.
7. Jacobs, Pleasures of Reading, 10.
8. Jacobs, Pleasures of Reading, 17.
9. Aquinas, Disputed Questions on Evil 14.1 ad. 6 (trans. Regan, p. 408).
10. Pieper, Four Cardinal Virtues, 147.
11. Pieper, Four Cardinal Virtues, 150.
12. Roberts, “Temperance,” 97. The specific activities Roberts uses as his examples are eating, drinking, and sex.
13. Roberts, “Temperance,” 107.
14. Seneca, “On the Shortness of Life,” 142.
15. Odell, How to Do Nothing, x. See also Armstrong, Mindfulness in the Classroom, 28, who describes a neuroscience concept called the “default mode network,” which “is associated with mind wandering, daydreaming, planning for the future, remembering the past, and constructing stories about the self. It activates when the brain is not specifically involved in a task (hence, it is the ‘default’ state).” Sometimes the distraction may be coming from within our own brains.
16. Bilbro, Reading the Times, 12. Looking a little earlier in history on this issue is Stallybrass, who in “Books and Scrolls,” 46, argues that the adoption of the codex rather than the scroll created an environment suited to “discontinuous reading.”
17. Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 69.
18. Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 70.
19. Worth noting also is the fact that many contemporary guides to disciplining one’s (and one’s family’s) attention and use of technology are not focused on smartphones and social media alone but also on the relatively older entertainment technology of television; see, for example, Crouch, Tech-Wise Family, and Earley, Common Rule. Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death is, of course, also about television.
20. Song, Restless Devices, 7.
21. Center for Humane Technology, “About Us,” accessed August 30, 2023, https://www.human etech.com/.
22. Center for Humane Technology, “Ledger of Harms,” accessed August 30, 2023, https://www.humanetech.com/.
23. Center for Humane Technology, “Attention & Mental Health,” accessed August 30, 2023, https://www.humanetech.com/attention-mental-health.
24. Warzel, “I Talked to the Cassandra.”
25. Song, Restless Devices, 78.
26. Ellul, Technological Society, xxv.
27. Noble, You Are Not Your Own, 53–54.
28. Roberts, “Temperance,” 97.
29. Franklin, Autobiography, 522.
30. I (Ooms) should note here that my students, upon viewing the handful of charts Franklin made to track his personal virtue development score, mentioned that the charts strongly resembled a bullet journal, a method of habit tracking that many people use today to make sure they are maximizing their efficiency. The two are very much connected; googling “Ben Franklin bullet journal” returns thousands of results, including physical notebooks branded with Franklin quotes.
31. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 185.
32. Franklin, Autobiography, 529.
33. Jacobs, Pleasures of Reading, 11.
34. Chayka, “‘Emily in Paris.’”
35. Chayka, “‘Emily in Paris.’”
36. Nicholas Carr writes in The Shallows, 233: “The seemingly innocuous features we now take for granted on social media—the ‘like’ and ‘heart’ buttons that signal appreciation and affection, the swipe gestures that refresh the screen with new information, the ‘streak’ counts that tally exchanges with friends, the infinite scrolls of stuff—are variations on psychological-conditioning techniques pioneered by slot machine makers.” See also Haynes, “Dopamine, Smartphones and You.”
37. Carr, Shallows, 10.
38. Carr, Shallows, 64. See also Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text, 53, who describes the “courage, fortitudo” necessary for “meditative reading.”
39. Carr, Shallows, 64. Like Hayes, Carr also argues that the sustained attention that deep reading requires of us developed with human culture over time and has often been tied to privilege and status.
40. DeYoung, Glittering Vices, 141.
41. Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 69.
42. Bilbro, Reading the Times, 29.
43. Bilbro, Reading the Times, 30. See also Song, Restless Devices, 101.
44. Augustine, On Christian Teaching, 1.29 (trans. Shaw, p. 21).
45. See Marine, “Why You Should Think Twice.”
46. Marine, “Why You Should Think Twice.”
47. “If you’re sharing something on social media right now, and you think that posting the virtue signal instead of broadcasting resources on how to protest, donate, or vote is an act of solidarity, then that’s a willfully ignorant position to take,” Marine writes in “Why You Should Think Twice.”
48. In chapter 2, we explore several practices that implement various technologies to subvert distraction and help students, including neurodiverse students, to access texts and grow as deep readers.
49. J. E. H. Smith, Internet Is Not What You Think It Is, 20.
50. Pieper, Four Cardinal Virtues, 203.
51. J. E. H. Smith, Internet Is Not What You Think It Is, 20–21.
52. J. E. H. Smith, Internet Is Not What You Think It Is, 21.
53. See also Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use,” 57, where Weil writes that “prayer consists of attention.”
54. J. E. H. Smith, Internet Is Not What You Think It Is, 38.
55. Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 121.
56. Indeed, we have tried. For example, I (Ooms) used to bring a plastic tub to class meetings and offer students extra credit if they chose to keep their smartphones in this tub during every class meeting over the course of the semester. Many took me up on it. And it did help with student attentiveness. My ability to pay enough attention to keep track of each student’s adherence to the policy (particularly when accounting for absences) was less acute, however.
57. Roberts, “Temperance,” 107.
58. DeYoung, Glittering Vices, 141.
59. Prior, On Reading Well, 53.
60. McEntyre, Caring for Words, 68.
61. Peterson, Eat This Book, 81.
62. Peterson, Eat This Book, 85.
63. McEntyre, Caring for Words, 68.
64. Peterson, Eat This Book, 91–92.
65. To be fair, Augustine himself was also a reluctant reader of the Aeneid. See Augustine, Confessions, 1.14 (trans. Chadwick, p. 14).
66. Paying attention to texts’ relationships with physical spaces and the natural is also encouraged in (secular) mindfulness practices in ways that helpfully dovetail with our discussion here. For example, Armstrong, “Mindfulness in the Classroom,” 86–88, suggests pairing a reading or writing experience with nature as a practice, such as reading a passage from Walden and following it with a walk outdoors or taking a class on a walk and then asking students to write impressions.
67. On a larger scale, literary pilgrimages have become a kind of business. Vanessa Zoltan, author of Praying with Jane Eyre: Reflections on Reading as a Sacred Practice, offers embodied experiences with texts such as Harry Potter and Jane Eyre through her organization, Common Ground. More information can be found at www.readingandwalkingwith.com.
68. See also Brubaker, “Reading Digitally,” 111, who calls reading an essentially “analog” practice—“slow, continuous, idiosyncratic, and difficult.” Reaching back to historical and material practices may offer a way to reconnect with the analog nature of reading—even reading digital texts.
69. One excellent resource for exploring such ideas is the journal Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching, found here: https://www.wichita.edu/academics/fairmount_college_of_liberal_arts_and_sciences/smart/index.php. See also Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text, 54, who describes the differences between how medieval readers embodied their task and how modern readers do so.
70. A recommendation for exploring the possibilities of digital humanities is the Virtual John Donne Project, which uses digital modeling, both visual and audio, to re-create worship services at the seventeenth-century St. Paul’s Cathedral in London: https://virtualdonne.chass.ncsu.edu/.
71. I (Roberts) used blank paper, but the Folger Shakespeare Library has some printable files with the folds already marked: “DIY Quarto,” https://www.folger.edu/publishing-shakespeare/diy-quarto.
72. I (Roberts) own a vintage book knife, but a letter opener or sturdy butter knife would work just as well.
73. The definition we use here is from Guerin et al., Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature, 21.
74. Emerging AI technologies such as ChatGPT exacerbate this tendency (among other things), turning the complexity of the human thinking and writing process (not to mention translation and other important elements of textual scholarship) into bot-generated content on a scale we have not before experienced.
75. I (Ooms) used Bevington, Complete Works of Shakespeare.
76. Most often, we looked at multiple translations using web sources like Bible Gateway. Resources like these are very helpful and can be fruitful uses of the same technology that often causes fragmented attention. However, we would be remiss if we did not note that these kinds of resources (in contrast to physical or ebook Bibles) exacerbate some problematic ways of reading Scripture (such as considering one version or chapter of a biblical book in isolation from its broader context) and can tie Scripture reading to participation in the attention economy in potentially harmful and counterproductive ways (for example, a reader would see a passage of Scripture displayed in a browser window also populated with ads, so that their devotional practices were difficult to separate from their consumer habits).
77. Translations, of course, are not neutral; for one discussion of this issue, see Barr, Making of Biblical Womanhood, especially 129–50. We also discuss the issue of translation further in chapter 2.
78. Earley, Common Rule, 112.
79. Earley, Common Rule, 112.
80. Carr, Shallows, 7.
81. Birkerts, Gutenberg Elegies, 72.
82. Dickinson, “202.”
83. Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text, 54.
84. For further discussion of the relationship between reading methods and texts from oral traditions, see chapter 2 of this book.
85. Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text, 54.
86. Beowulf, lines 86–98 (trans. Heaney, p. 842). I (Ooms) note here that this is the anthology our department uses to teach world literature classes and that my medievalist colleague fully supports any Beowulf scholars who would scoff at our use of Heaney’s translation.
87. I’ve noticed this in both their spoken comments and in written ones, so this connection isn’t limited only to students who are as willing to volunteer to read aloud as they are to offer other thoughts aloud.
88. “Beowulf (2006) Authentic – Sung in Old English – Benjamin Bagby,” Internet Archive, August 16, 2020, archive.org/details/beowulf-bagby.