Thoreau's Axe

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When did the age of distraction begin? While it may seem a modern issue linked to digital addictions, concerns about distraction have existed in American culture for over two hundred years. As the industrial market economy developed, observers noted workers wasting time and the public's attention being overstimulated by new media and consumer trends. In response, social reformers created innovative moral training systems, religious leaders organized widespread revivals, and spiritual seekers like Henry David Thoreau explored simplified living and transcendental mysticism. From the solitary confinement of early penitentiaries to Walden Pond, disciplines of attention emerged as spiritual exercises for a distracted age. Through twenty-eight short passages on reform, religion, and literature from the nineteenth-century attention revival, Caleb Smith analyzes the interplay of language and power. He argues that disciplines of attention often reinforce a morally conservative social order, yet exercising control over our attention can distance us from the consumer marketplace and the manipulations of the online attention economy. Smith discusses the history of coercion alongside the hopeful practices of attention, including the benefits of attentive reading and the darker aspects of enforced attention in prisons and reformatories, framing distraction as a moral, political, and economic issue with a rich history.