We’ve got more content than ever. Why can’t we pay attention to it?

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Mark Kingwell is a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto whose latest book is Question Authority.

Do you like surtitles at the opera? You know, those little strings of words above the stage, telling you what the Italian or German lyrics mean. Or do you hate them? Maybe you just hate opera, that dull stuffy form so arrogant that its name simply means “works,” the plural of opus. If you didn’t know those Latin words, would it help to have a Star Trek-style simultaneous translation program or cartoon thought-bubbles popping over people’s heads?

I count myself among the surtitle haters, because I feel like letting the genius of Puccini or Verdi or Mozart just wash over me is part of opera’s appeal. Wagner called his version of the form the Gesamtkunstwerk – the total work of art, though it’s more fun to say in German. Some of my aesthetics colleagues, by contrast, recently told me they love the surtitles because you can’t really enjoy The Barber of Seville, say, without registering the libretto’s one-liner jokes in real time.

Well, maybe. The Metropolitan Opera in New York addresses the issue by having discreet translation screens, with multiple language options, at every seat. That feels a bit too much like looking at your phone instead of the stage. And of course another option is to render the issue moot the Donald Trump way, by forcing the Washington National Opera to abandon the Kennedy Center and then just shuttering the entire place for two years of “renovations.”

Opinion: The human process is the point

Mr. Trump is, as ever, a prominent avatar of a more general 21st-century tendency to solve problems by removing them. How do we parse the mounting volume of global data circulation that marks our daily existence? Translation used to be a relatively straightforward matter of interlinguistic exchange, with hard cases reserved for poets (or librettists). Learning non-native languages was an important life skill, marking out the cosmopolitan from the rube.

Nowadays your phone can do the basic lifting, and you can happily coast through life as an ignorant monolingual, especially if your first language is predatory English. The challenge of making sense remains, however. Depending on who you ask, we now occupy an age of unfiltered after-legacy sourcing, radical disintermediation, postliterate liberation, filter-free flow, democratized ultra-access, or digital orality – maybe all of these. We inhabit a constant tyranny of choice, the trust-collapsing plenitude a contemporary psychologist calls “the claustrophobia of abundance.” Everything everywhere, all at once.

Statistics are notoriously sketchy in this region, as in others, but basic trends are still startling. About 25 billion text messages are sent globally each day – more than 100,000 words for every one of us. That contributes to total annual data creation above 150 zettabytes, if that unit means anything to you. North Americans average 11 hours of daily media production and consumption, in some cases up to 100 gigabytes, including all streaming and scrolling. But only about 15 minutes of that time is devoted on average to “reading for personal interest.”

Reading is also drastically unequal in appeal. Some 40 per cent of Americans didn’t read any books last year, and another 27 per cent read between just one and four. Canadian numbers are similar: the percentage of readers who partook at least once a day rose in 2024 to 43 per cent. Daily reading is now reported more popular than exercise or working out, which is perhaps a low bar. Overall, there are more books, and more aggregate readers, but they are more often in search of bullet-point summaries and “actionable insights” than style, challenge, or wisdom. Indeed, reading entire difficult books of any length is on a steeply declining downslope. My undergraduate students tell me they often listen to audiobooks of their required “reading,” usually at 1.5x or even 2.0x speed – TL;DR, as the preferred logo of the moment. That might work for the neuroplastic elite, but meanwhile functional illiteracy is a national scourge as well as a personal tragedy, costing Canadians some $60-billion in lost productivity, according to some publishing insiders.

And yet, more self-published books, puffed-up Substacks, unsolicited e-newsletters, and (yes) vanity-press academic monographs are “published” every year by a host of what a Muriel Spark character derisively called “pisseurs de copie.” With scattered exceptions, this burgeoning overproduction must be acknowledged as mere typing, not writing in any deep sense. And now that large language models can add to the slop-flood, those stats – and the glut-plus-decline condition they track – will only grow more outlandish. Call the resulting situation Steno’s Paradox: the more written words there are, the less meaning they convey to anyone. Text is rendered meaningless bafflegab, like the impenetrable fintech jargon of those fast-talking ghouls who populate HBO’s Industry – which some viewers, notably, consume via subtitles even though the dialogue is spoken in (very plummy) English. On other shows, fleeting screenshots of text exchanges have replaced spoken dialogue, forcing viewers to squint their eyes or rewind constantly. Argh. Please stop it, lazy writers.

One must harbour misgivings about adding to this deluge. Full disclosure: My editors gave me 1,200 words for what you’re now reading. If it’s on your laptop or phone, there’s a warning, I mean a friendly notice, that it will take you some number of minutes to read it. You could probably skim it in less. Meanwhile, I’m here at the keyboard trying to slow you down, to make you pause and surrender some of your mental bandwidth.

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We speak blithely of an “attention economy,” as if we already knew what attention was: some fixed scarce good that can be harvested for profit. But even if we could precisely measure how much time you spend here, we misunderstand the idea of attention if we mean this scattering of monetized distraction and information-gathering. The communications theorist Andrey Mir, updating some insights from Marshall McLuhan, gives us a good diagnosis of our world awash in graphemes but with so little sense-making.

“With the proliferation of digital speech, communication reversed from information to affirmation,” he notes of our odd digital-oral mediascape. “We post to reaffirm our standing in the digital tribe. By enabling rapid status gain, digital media serve the highest need in [Abraham] Maslow’s hierarchy [of needs] – self-actualization. They create an affordance for physically and socially unlimited requests for affirmation. They even automate affirmative responses – through the button ‘like’ and the like.”

The Talking Heads advised us, way back in 1984, to “stop making sense.” That was a joyful artistic injunction against self-seriousness and logic. They might better have said, in foresight, “start affirming status.” (Not as catchy, I know.) We are no longer communicating in any traditional sense of exchanging information, We are, instead, feverishly transacting self-regard.

All goods in the media world are now positional. Everyone who sends a message is, like it or not, a would-be influencer. Render it in operatic terms. We are now all divas of our own show, constantly singing the one universal aria that needs no surtitle: “Me me me me me!” (Bonus: two me’s equals a meme.)

Media are extensions of twisted human desire. They shape us even as we shape them. It’s important to understand both the deficits and potential benefits from this shift. The claustrophobia of abundance you feel right now – that is, if you do – is real. It is the pain of transition, like getting the bends as you ascend too quickly from deep water. Some people are adjusting more quickly than others, and not always as a function of age. Our brains have neoplastic capacity, yes: We evolve to adapt to our environment. But we also lose capacity along the way, including the true meaning of attention.

The novelist Iris Murdoch, whose lengthy, involved, brilliant novels are probably the kind of thing most people don’t read any more, understood attention better than most. It is not mere facetime, or hits, still less likes and views. Invoking a fellow philosopher, Ms. Murdoch wrote, “I have used the word ‘attention’, which I borrow from Simone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality.” She added: “I believe this to be the characteristic and proper mark of the moral agent.”

The singular gaze of justice and love, bestowed upon a person or creature – or an idea or artwork – cannot be transacted. It also cannot be faked, off-loaded, or coded. Ms. Murdoch was quick to acknowledge the corollary point: To be just and loving is always to exhibit a matching willingness to be seen. Not the being-seen of selfies, or the Insta post, or anything else that lives by the screen. No: Put that black mirror down, friend, and give true attention to the marvels of the real.