Last year, I made a case for “reading as rebellion,” a way of clawing back attention from the corporations and platforms seeking to colonize our minds. The response was encouraging. Many people, young and old, want to rebel by reading more.
But the follow-up question is practical: How? Wanting to read more is one thing. Becoming a reader, in a world designed to prevent the kind of deep focus reading requires, is another.
The Problem Isn’t Just You
A recent essay by Carlo Iacono, a university librarian writing in Aeon, prompted me to reflect more on the practical side of this question.
Iacono’s article challenges the usual hand-wringing about the death of reading. Anxiety over new media is nothing new. In the late 19th century, more than a million boys’ periodicals were sold weekly in Britain—the “penny dreadfuls,” tales of sensational crime and horror. Victorian commentators worried about the degradation of youth and the demise of serious thought. Before that, novel-reading itself was the existential threat, described as a “fever,” “insidious contagion,” or “reading mania.”
The problem today, Iacono insists, isn’t screens but design. Treating “screen culture” as a unified phenomenon is, in his words, a category error. The same device that delivers algorithmically curated outrage also contains the complete works of Shakespeare. The problem isn’t the technology but its design.
Iacono points to research from Gloria Mark, a professor at UC Irvine, who has tracked attention spans on screens for two decades. In 2004, people averaged two and a half minutes on any screen before switching tasks. By 2016, that had dropped to 47 seconds. The common conclusion is that screens must be destroying our ability to focus. But Iacono points out how the fragmentation correlates not with screens in general but with specific design patterns: notification systems, variable reward schedules, the infinite scroll. These aren’t properties of the medium. They’re choices made by specific companies for specific economic reasons.
The evidence is right in front of us, Iacono says. That’s why the young man who can’t get through a novel can watch a three-hour video essay on the decline of the Ottoman Empire. The teenager who struggles with a short attention span can spend hours in a complex video game, coordinating teammates while adapting strategy in real time. Millions of people listen regularly to audiobooks or enjoy long-form podcasts that teach history, theology, or philosophy.
The younger generation can concentrate when the environment invites it. But social media platforms exploit the same psychological mechanisms that make gambling addictive, and the unpredictability of what you’ll find keeps you checking.
Why does this matter? Because it helps us consider a more appropriate response. If the problem is screens, full stop, then the solution is retreat. Summon the willpower to put down the device and pick up the book. But if the problem is design, then the solution involves your environment. As Iacono puts it, “Your inability to focus isn’t a moral failing. It’s a design problem. You’re trying to think in environments built to prevent thinking.”
Build Different Spaces
Iacono’s most useful concept is what he calls “containers for attention”—bounded spaces and practices where different modes of engagement become possible. He observes that the people who engage in the life of the mind aren’t necessarily more disciplined.
Some people have learned to watch documentaries with a notebook, listen to podcasts during walks when their minds can wander productively, read physical books in deliberately quiet spaces with phones left behind. They’re not rejecting technology. They’re choreographing it.
Others haven’t learned this yet:
[They are] attempting sustained thought in environments engineered to prevent it. They sit with laptops open, seven tabs competing for attention, notifications sliding in from three different apps, phones vibrating every few minutes. They’re trying to read serious material while fighting a losing battle against behavioral psychology weaponized at scale. . . . They don’t realize they’re trying to think in a space optimized to prevent thinking.
If the solution isn’t discipline alone but also architecture, we’ll need to consider different defaults and create different spaces, with particular rhythms. This is an ancient Christian instinct. Long before the attention economy existed, the church understood that formation requires environment. You can’t just decide to become a certain kind of person; you arrange your life so that becoming that person is easier than not. Secular observers back up this insight, as James Clear’s Atomic Habits makes clear: The nudges in our environment matter.
For reading specifically, that means making small architectural decisions: a chair without a phone nearby, a set time, a physical book rather than a screen. It means treating areas of your home the way you treat the movie theater, as spaces where different rules apply, where the pull toward distraction is deliberately weakened.
Iacono contrasts feeds and focus. “One happens in an ecosystem designed for contemplation, the other in a casino designed for endless pull-to-refresh.” Reading worked for so long, he argues, not because text is magic but because books came with built-in boundaries. They end. Pages stay still. Libraries provide quiet. These weren’t features of literacy itself; they were features of the habitat where literacy lived. If we’re to cultivate the life of the mind today, we’ll need to imagine new habitats for focus.
Most Radical Container of All
Which brings me to the church.
A few years ago, I argued that the sanctuary should stand alongside the cinema as one of the last holdouts against the colonization of attention. The cinema works because it enforces a container. The expectation is that you’ll surrender your phone, devote two hours to a single story, and experience something at a level of intensity that multitasking would destroy. And if we can do that for a film, surely we can do it for the Word of God.
The church is for feeding, yes, but the food is God’s Word, not the junk food of our feeds. It’s a purpose-built habitat for orienting ourselves toward the One who most deserves our gaze. The rhythms of a worship service—gathering, confessing our faith, confession of sin, singing, hearing the Word of the Lord, feasting at his Table, being sent out—are an architectural structure. They’re designed to reorder us, to draw our attention upward before strengthening us for the Lord’s service.
Felicia Wu Song, in Restless Devices, describes the psychological cocktail of constant digital connection: pleasures, anxieties, felt expectations, all mixed together and poured into every moment of free time we have. The church, at its best, can be an antidote to that cocktail. Not as an escape from the real world but as an entry into a more real one. She describes the church as a “counterspace” where we’re confronted with time-tested truth and reminded of who we are.
To choose to leave your phone in the car when you’re at church is to make an architectural decision. It’s saying, For this hour, I’m building a container. I’m making depth easier than distraction. I’m giving my attention to the One who gave everything for me.
Smarter Rebellion
My earlier column urged reading as rebellion. I stand by that. But an insurgency requires strategy, not just resolve. It’s not a fair fight when we try to read in a space engineered to prevent reading, or try to worship in a space where the feed’s slot machine is pulling for our attention.
So build the container. Arrange your chair. Silence notifications. Find your library, your quiet room, your sanctuary. Reading as rebellion will happen not by summoning superhuman willpower but by making one small architectural decision at a time.
If you would like my future articles sent to your email, as well as a curated list of books, podcasts, and helpful links I find online, enter your address.
