The Eighteen-Minute Lie
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About This Book
You have heard that the human attention span has fallen below a goldfish's, eight seconds against the fish's nine. The figure rides through TED talks and tenth-grade classrooms, newspaper trend pieces and the pitch decks of the companies selling the cure for the affliction they just named. It carries one defect its champions rarely raise. There was never a study, and there was never a goldfish. The number was invented, and a century took it as a verdict on itself. The Eighteen-Minute Lie is the biography of that lie, and it opens with a confession, because in 2008 the author was one of the writers who spread it.
David Boles tracks a fabricated figure from its murky origin to its grip on the culture, and presses the question its sellers were careful never to ask: who gets rich when a civilization is persuaded it has lost its mind? The trail runs through the survey mills that manufacture certainty by the pound, through the attention merchants who auction a single human glance in the time it takes to blink, and through the long line of people who actually studied how the mind attends, from William James to Herbert Simon to Gloria Mark, none of whom ever found the collapse being sold in their names. Along the way the panic turns out to be ancient. Twenty-four centuries ago Socrates feared that the alphabet would wreck human memory, and every generation since has staged the same funeral and been wrong every time.
The book is hard on the forgery and harder on what the forgery licenses. A sourceless number is no harmless parlor trick, and the author shows what he once did with his, swinging it at children with attention disorders, a cruelty the book stops to name and to answer. What surfaces is a portrait of how a useful falsehood outruns the truth, why a frightened public buys the diagnosis along with the remedy, and how the panic over attention became one of the most profitable products of the modern age. It ends with the only proof that matters, the reader who reached the final page and, in doing so, did the thing the panic swears can no longer be done.
A Number With No Papers
Chase the eight-second goldfish to its source and the trail gives out. The figure points to a report, the report points to an unnamed study, the study points to a research firm, and the firm, when asked, has nothing to hand over, no method, no sample, no fish. A claim had felt true the moment it could be found, and findability had quietly replaced verification while no one announced the swap. The number wore the costume of science with no body underneath the clothes. Someone wrote a sentence, the sentence proved useful, and useful sentences breed, which is the whole mechanism of a meme and the reason a forged statistic can outrun a true one for a hundred years.
The Same Funeral, Held Again
None of the panic is new, which is the detail that ought to embarrass us most. In Plato's Phaedrus, written twenty-four centuries ago, Socrates warns that the new technology of writing will ruin human memory and leave us with the conceit of wisdom where wisdom used to sit. He was describing the book. Every generation since has gathered at the same graveside to bury the same corpse, attention, struck down this time by the newspaper, the telephone, the television, the feed. The mourners are sincere and the obituary is always early. The eulogies are moving, the casket is lowered, and the body keeps climbing out of the box to read tomorrow's papers.
Who Got Rich
A forged number became one of the most profitable instruments of the age, which is the part the keynote speakers leave out. A wealth of information, Herbert Simon wrote in 1971, creates a poverty of attention. He meant it as economics, and an industry heard a business plan. If attention is scarce, attention can be sold, and the surest way to sell a person the cure is to first persuade that person of the disease. The same engineers who auction your glance in the time it takes to blink will rent you the app that promises to hand it back. The goldfish was an invoice in a lab coat, and the book follows the money from the survey mill to the marketplace in your pocket.
Table of Contents
Front Matter: Copyright · Dedication · Epigraphs · Contents
Prologue. The Number I Sold You
Chapter One. The Goldfish on Trial
Chapter Two. The Eighteen-Minute Lie
Chapter Three. The Survey Mill
Chapter Four. The Span That Never Was
Chapter Five. Gloria Mark's Stopwatch
Chapter Six. The Benefit of the Doubt
Chapter Seven. Socrates Against the Alphabet
Chapter Eight. The Same Funeral
Chapter Nine. Herbert Simon's Rabbits
Chapter Ten. The Merchants of Notice
Chapter Eleven. The Auction in Your Pocket
Chapter Twelve. The Eye That Reads the Room
Chapter Thirteen. Short-Attention-Span Theatre
Chapter Fourteen. The Two-Body Book
Chapter Fifteen. The Citizen Who Cannot Sit Still
Coda. What Attention Is For
End Matter: A Note as This Book Goes to Press · Acknowledgements · Notes on Sources · Bibliography · About the Author · Also by David Boles
The Epigraphs
“Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.”
William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890).
“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
Herbert A. Simon, Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World (1971).
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
Simone Weil, letter to Joë Bousquet (1942).
A Note on the Free PDF
A book about a number nobody checked should make its own sums easy to check, so the full text is free to read. The reading edition is a formatted PDF with embedded fonts and a clickable, page-numbered table of contents, two hundred ninety pages of US Letter, set for screen reading, home printing, or the archive. The complete book is here, prologue through bibliography. Download it, read it, and weigh the argument against the sources it names.
Dedication
For Janna Sweenie,
in whose language attention is the first word.
Author Interview
Further Reading
The Goldfish Never Said That (Boles Blogs) · My Language Is Not English: A Deaf Educator Answers JB Mitchell (Boles Blogs) · The Golden Age of Deafness: 1991, Tanya Towers, and the Long Erosion After (Boles Blogs) · About David Boles