New media, young audiences and discourses of attention: from Sesame Street to ‘snack culture’

One need not look far to find claims in popular American discourse that today’s attention spans are short. Central causes of shortened attention are typically assumed to include media technologies and forms of media content, especially those characterized by brevity and fragmentation, such as television commercials and web videos. The putative victims of this supposed condition are often children or members of younger generations whose entire lives have been suffused with electronic media. Some of this discourse might aim merely to be descriptive, but on the whole it indicates negative implications and forecasts undesirable consequences. Attention span and advanced intelligence are often correlated in popular discourse as in educational contexts, and the medicalizing of attention deficit in the diagnosis and treatment of ADHD further creates a negative association with the inability to pay sustained attention. In the popular imagination, stupidity and pathology often characterize this condition, and colloquial usage dehumanizes its victims, however humorously, through figurative language like ‘the attention span of a fly’ or ‘of a gnat’ or ‘of a rock’. The linkage of attention deficit with emergent forms of media functions as a technophobic discourse of media effects, pathologizing a civilization too eager to adopt new tools of communication. If the attention span is imperiled, this can hardly bode well for society. The idea of a connection between a culture’s media and its collective habits and patterns of paying attention has been appealing to a number of influential thinkers, including Walter Benjamin (1968), Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer (Adorno, 1974; Adorno and Horkheimer, 2002), and Marshall McLuhan (2004). It is especially pertinent when critics and intellectuals ponder