In “Your Mind is Being Fracked” (May 31, 2024), Ezra Klein Interviews Princeton professor D. Graham Burnett. Their main topic is how companies manipulate our attention for profit–to our severe detriment.

Klein and Burnett also contrast two senses of “attention.” One is a focus on a practical task, leading to action. The other is an openness to experience or to another person that feels more like quiet waiting. These two forms of attention can conflict. The latter is especially at risk in a world of busy work-schedules and portable electronic devices.

At one point, Klein refers to the “debate that we’re having right now about smartphones and kids.” He acknowledges that there is an unresolved debate about the critique of smartphones that Jonathan Haidt and others are making; “the research is very complicated and you can fairly come to a view on either end of it.” But for Klein, the effects of heavy smartphone use are not really the point. He says,

If you convinced me that my kids scroll on their phones for four hours a day, had no outcome on their mental health at all — it did not make them more anxious — it did not make them more depressed — it would change my view on this not at all. I just think, as a way of living a good life, you shouldn’t be staring at your phone for four hours a day.

And yet, I also realize the language of society right now and parenting doesn’t have that much room for that. And I think we have a lot of trouble talking about just what we think a good life would be. Not a life that leads to a good job, not a life that leads to a high income, but just the idea, which I think we were more comfortable talking in terms of at other points in history, that it is better to read books than to not read books ….

As someone who spends about 3.5 hours a day on my smartphone and who reads somewhat fewer books than I once did, I agree that it is better to read books. Either my attention is being “fracked” (forcibly extracted for profit) or I am making unwise choices, or both.

I would define the benefits of reading much as Klein does later in the interview. A carefully constructed, lengthy written work affords us access to someone else’s thinking, thus allowing us to escape from our own limited selves. As my former colleague Maryanne Wolf said in a previous Klein podcast, “deep readers” display signs of absorption, empathy, and creativity. This mental state may have positive outcomes later, but that’s not really the point. Our life consists of time. What matters is the quality of it. Being absorbed, empathetic, and creative is good. Spending our time in a state of distraction and anxiety is not.

But here are some complications …

Klein is rightly concerned about a simplistic ideal of free choice that blocks us from asking whether some choices are better than others, either for ourselves or for our children. On the other hand, as Klein might acknowledge, choice is important. People differ, and we know things about our own needs and interests that others do not know. Also, we have the right to be the authors of our own lives. If someone forcibly took away my iPhone and ordered me into the library, I would have a good reason to be angry.

John Stuart Mill famously argued that individuals should have the liberty to allocate their time, yet if they are exposed to the higher things, they will freely choose them. If Mill was right, then excellence does not conflict with freedom. Liberal education liberates us by giving us the opportunity to choose higher things.

Mill’s predecessor, Jeremy Bentham, had said that poetry was just as valuable as the folk game of “push-pin” (illustrated above by James Gillray). But Mill responded that people who have the opportunity to learn poetry will not want to waste their time on such trivial table games.

Mill may not be right. I was given an expensive and extensive education, yet I am addicted–noticeably, although not overwhelmingly or irretrievably–to my phone. Sure, I sometimes use it for worthy purposes, including episodes of deep reading on its small screen, but I also play Stormbound enough to compete in the Platinum League. Actually, Stormbound has the same basic logic as push-pin–I try to get my tokens over the other player’s baseline, much like the Duke of Queensberry in Gillray’s cartoon.

In short, offering everyone experiences with higher things may not work. Look at me, with my Oxford doctorate in literae humaniores–I spend my day playing Stormbound.

But we should be open-minded and thoughtful when we make value-judgments. The game of push-pin actually doesn’t sound so bad. It was a safe contest of skill between human competitors–maybe a way to sustain relationships.

Meanwhile, Bentham was suspicious of poetry. He saw poets as prone to lies and exaggeration. If we think that Bentham was wrong–poetry is better than push-pin–we owe an account of its value. What is so good about poetry and so bad about games? And is all poetry really worth our time?

I think I can address these questions. Poetry is language that is especially carefully constructed, with particular attention to its formal qualities. As such, it is particularly well suited to promote absorption, assuming that you really attend to it and learn how to analyze it. Reading poetry requires experience, particularly because poems tend to refer to previous poems, and it’s only by reading many of them that you can really begin to see how they operate. Therefore, it is advanced reading that is worthy, not just any reading. As Wallace Stevens says, “Poetry is one of the enlargements of life.”

Games are also worthwhile, particularly when they involve people who know each other and are in physical proximity, so that the players can learn and care about one another and exercise their bodies as well as their minds. I’m for push-pin! In contrast, my smartphone games pit me against the AI or against completely anonymous human opponents, and as such, they offer no human interaction. Besides, they are carefully designed to pull me back in for another round. In these respects, they are worse than poetry. (Yet I sometimes find my mind wandering into worthy topics while I play, so maybe that isn’t so bad.)

The main point here is that our evaluation of various activities should be nuanced and critical, not prejudiced by assumptions about what count as the higher pursuits.

For me at least, the epitome of an absorbing experience that takes me out of my own mind is a classic novel. Because of its length and careful construction, it retains attention. Because it is fictional, it is truly the product of someone else’s thought. Because it is mere text on paper, it requires and promotes imagination. And because I am not a literary critic, I don’t get anything concrete from reading a novel; its value is intrinsic.

Thus we might want to pursue activities that are as much as possible like reading classic novels. However, from his unorthodox Marxist perspective in the 1930s, the great critic Walter Benjamin disparaged novels in favor of “stories.” By the latter word, he meant folktales and other oral narratives that emerge from the masses. Benjamin preferred stories because they are communal and they elicit responses from their listeners, including impromptu additions. In contrast, novels are constructed by solo authors who control the whole narrative, including its end. The relationship between the novelist and the reader is private and consumeristic: I buy the experience that James Joyce manufactured.

If we applied Benjamin’s argument to the present day, it would offer no justification for playing Stormbound. But it might justify spending time interacting with other people on a social network (ignoring, for a moment, the problem of corporate ownership, which Benjamin would decry). Benjamin would see the attention demanded by a novel as individualistic and consumerist.

Here is a different take on somewhat similar issues. In one of the oldest of all Buddhist texts, “The Fruit of Contemplative Life” from the Pali Canon, the Buddha tries to teach a very bad king, Ajatasattu–who is troubled by guilt for having murdered his own father and usurped the throne–to follow a monk’s contemplative path. One recommendation is “sense restraint”:

And how does a mendicant guard the sense doors? When [monks see] a sight with their eyes, they don’t get caught up in the features and details. If the faculty of sight were left unrestrained, bad unskillful qualities of covetousness and displeasure would become overwhelming. For this reason, they practice restraint, protecting the faculty of sight, and achieving its restraint. When they hear a sound with their ears … When they smell an odor with their nose … When they taste a flavor with their tongue … When they feel a touch with their body … When they know an idea with their mind, they don’t get caught up in the features and details. If the faculty of mind were left unrestrained, bad unskillful qualities of covetousness and displeasure would become overwhelming. For this reason, they practice restraint, protecting the faculty of mind, and achieving its restraint. When they have this noble sense restraint, they experience an unsullied bliss inside themselves. That’s how a mendicant guards the sense doors.

DN 2, translated by Bhikkhu Sujato, on suttacentral.net

This passage surprises me a little because I would have thought that “getting caught up in … features and details” is how we achieve attention. Our task, when we read a poem by Wallace Stevens, is precisely to analyze its features and details. I suppose there’s a difference between “getting caught up” in something–so that you drift into “covetousness and displeasure”–versus attending to it with openness and equanimity. But the question remains whether complicated things like poems and novels are appropriate objects of attention or whether we would be better off with bare walls and our breath.

Speaking of the Pali Canon: I struggle to attend to it because the narration is very repetitive. Before King Ajatasattu finds his way to the Buddha, he first meets eight misguided sages, and each of those episodes is narrated with precisely the same text, except that each guru’s name and a sentence about his mistaken doctrine is substituted at a key point.

These discourses emerged as stories, not as novels. The medium was oral, meant for memorization and communal experience, not literature constructed for an individual reader. However, I happen to be an individual reader who sometimes opens translations of the Pali Canon–as well as many other kinds of texts–on my smartphone. “Unskillful qualities of covetousness and displeasure” arise rather quickly in my mind, not because I dislike the text but because I am unable to concentrate on it.

We are not going back to oral recitations or baskets of palm leaves with handwritten text, nor should we want to. However, the technologies of the present have costs as well as benefits, and we are just beginning to learn how to deal with them.

See also: Kieran Setiya on midlife: reviving philosophy as a way of life; are we forgetting how to read?; some basics