Aristotle’s (Indirect) Answer to the Question of Shortened Attention Spans*

(*This blog is from page 42 of my textbook, Pretexts for Writing, 2nd edition, pictured here in the side panel and just released last month)

The argument has circulated for some time that too much TV viewing reduces viewers’ attention spans. By taking in programming interrupted every ten minutes for advertising, or so the argument goes, we have become habituated to resting our minds after little effort. We can’t pay attention for very long. This state of affairs has affected the way we are able to take in information. Perhaps most sadly, some suspect, TV viewing has resulted in impoverished political discourse. When viewers can’t handle complexity, politicians don’t have to explain themselves very clearly. They can get away with not having to talk about their policies and instead run negative political campaigns in which they portray their opponents as “socialists,” “right-wingers,” “cowboys,” “friends of terrorists,” or whatever current “devil terms” are enjoying cultural currency.

In the 4^th century, BCE, Aristotle noted something similar about attention spans. When attending to a speech—though TV was nowhere to be seen—most people were not trained in concentration. It was Aristotle’s view that people could only listen to so much in a speech and still follow it. For this reason, he noticed, the most effective public speakers tended to rely on shortened syllogisms, or chains of reasoning, which drew on what he referred to as commonplaces and opinions, sources of reason where groups of people found agreement and shared assumptions (42). These commonplaces might or might not have much reasonable support, but they were found by most members of a culture to be persuasive and intuitively correct.

One example of a commonplace found today, certainly, is this notion that watching television shortens one’s attention span. Again, this is a statement that may or may not be true, and it may or may not be supported by evidence. The important part of it is that it is recognizable as an intuitively correct possibility, which then encourages social assent. And, of course, it can be either confirmed or contested. That is, it can itself be debated.

Work Cited

Aristotle. On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse. Trans. George A. Kennedy. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.