would say the first thing is

something some of your listeners may be thinking about because this is something people wonder.

Folks who've done some kind of reading are aware, historically, that lots of new technologies have brought with them moments of collective moral panic.

Right.

You know, Socrates worried that writing itself was going to sort of make people forgetful.

And Emerson worried that the closed stove was going to bring conversation around the fire in New England to an end.

And, you know, radio and TV all were accompanied by different moments of social anxiety about changing cultural forms.

Do you think that is an impediment for recognize something is really amiss and breaking away?

And Graham, can I kind of center that question a little bit and say, is there one event or one moment of historical reckoning that you see as one that kind of tilted us in this direction?

Oh, yeah.

I mean, so I teach on the history of attention at Princeton, and a lot of my passion for this work comes out of my archival historical work on the history of the scientific study of attention, because I'm a historian of science in the 20th century.

So the answer to your question, like, is there a key thing where this changes? The answer is definitely yes.

And it's so amazing that I want your listeners to hear it because it has authentically transformative importance.

So we live in this world now where we, as Alyssa said, think all the time about our attention span or where, as Peter said, we have this kind of machinic relationship to our attention.

And part of what my academic history of science work has just shown so dramatically is that that way of understanding attention is totally contingent, happens.

meaning