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ReynaldoWilsonSecondEssay 3 - 14 Feb 2025 - Main.ReynaldoWilson
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We Can No Longer Read Books

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-- By ReynaldoWilson - 13 Dec 2024
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-- By ReynaldoWilson - 14 Jan 2025
 

Introduction

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The Atlantic reports: The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books. Students at Columbia University in the City of New York, and similarly situated elite, selective universities lack the ability to read. Well, that is what a cursory glance at one of the latest headlines from The Atlantic would have you believe. Yes, college students can read. The claim is a bit more specific, however. It is that college students cannot read books cover to cover. The author of the article interviews college professors at elite universities who complain that students have demanded to do less and less reading that they find it difficult to assign more than two or three books over an entire semester. It it hard to tell how much so-called baby boomers are attempting the proverbial and trite “back in my day”…ism or does the lack or reading books cover to cover reveal an issue with the way modern technology has affected the way people consume information?
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The Atlantic reports: The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books. Students at Columbia University in the City of New York, and similarly situated elite, selective universities lack the ability to read full books cover to cover. In reflecting on my own lived experience, as a kid, I used to read full books both on my own and in my English classes throughout school. I noticed a change even during my four years at my undergraduate institution where professors assigned shorter and shorter articles and excerpts instead of full-length studies and grand sociological works. It feels like my attention span was getting shorter and shorter. This essay will discuss some of the philosophical reasons of shorter attention spans from a neoMarxist vantage point and underline the contemporary consequences of shorter attention spans in the first days of the Trump Administration.
 

The Culture Industry

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The critical theorists of the Frankfurt School contemplated many issues of social and political domination. In view of this essay, a piece within a larger work titled Dialectics of the Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote about what they called The Culture Industry. The two authors published the piece in New York after fleeing Nazi occupied Germany. In giving more credence to the ideological superstructure of capitalism, Frankfurt scholars’ writings largely focused on an attempt to understand why the proletarian revolution had not come about. While the many different Frankfurt theorists cover various areas of social life, many of their answers revolve around what they see as capitalism’s re-entrenchment through culture and mass media.
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In The Culture Industry, Adorno and Horkheimer point to Walt Disney as the most dangerous man in the United States. To summarize an incredibly dense work, the theorists posit standardized and unoriginal mass media products that Disney and similarly situated media giants put out at enormous volume are designed to pacify otherwise angry, alienated, and overworked proletarians by creating a false sense of satisfaction and stifling critical thinking/class consciousness. It follows, then, that the more one engages with ‘false’ mass-produced art, the more pacified an individual will become.

While quality artistic expression takes time, the ‘owners’ of mass culture like Disney are uninterested in meaningful art as it hurts their revenue. Over-production, on the other hand, is very much within their interest. This overproduction of serialized and lazy yearly installments of the same film and music has led to far more than the theorists of the Culture Industry were able to predict. More than a pacification of the proletariat, near complete mental domination by Disney and the purveyors of mass culture like Google and Meta has colonized our most basic cognitive processes: our ability to direct our mind to our pursuits and our attention spans.

In the times of Adorno and Horkheimer, the proletarian had to travel…leave their house to go to a cinema and watch a motion picture made by Walt Disney. If you want to hear music, one will have to purchase a record deliberately and play it on a record player. Those days are no longer. With the pervasive grip of modern technology, the deluge of mass media is constantly being constantly beamed to phones and computers constantly distracting us from our other pursuits. It is to the (relatively) new capitalists' advantage to keep the proletarian consistently engaged as people themselves become the commodity.

 
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In The Culture Industry, Adorno and Horkheimer point to Walt Disney as the most dangerous man in the United States. To summarize an incredibly dense work, the theorists posit standardized and unoriginal mass media products that Disney and similarly situated media giants put out are designed to pacify otherwise angry, alienated, and overworked proletarians by creating a false sense of satisfaction and stifling critical thinking/class consciousness. It follows, then, that the more one engages with ‘false’ mass produced art, the more pacified an individual will become. If scholars writing back in the mid 20th century had such power observations about The Culture Industry, capitalism, and ideological control, it should stand to reason that these forces have changed in contemporary times.
 

The Age of Survalience Capitalism

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Shashona Zuboff’s in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism is, similar to theorists at the Frankfurt school in that Zuboff is trying to explain a further re-engineering of the capitalism Marx wrote about and adapt the theory to contemporary times. For Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism refers to the status quo of domination by the hands of giant tech firms like Google and Facebook. Specifically, she argues that our interface with these ‘free’ technologies produces behavioral surplus (information on our behavior) which is refined and commodified to be sold in behavioral futures markets. In other words, Tech giants are amassing wealth by converting human experience into data and using that data to predict and control users at a massive scale. It should stand to reason that companies benefit from improving their advanced algorithms for each individual user. If the user is constantly presented with personalized videos, advertisements, media ect. They will use the platform more and create more data to be commodified by tech giants and sold to advertising firms.
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Shashona Zuboff’s in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism is, similar to theorists at the Frankfurt school in that Zuboff is trying to explain a further re-engineering of the capitalism Marx wrote about and adapt the theory to contemporary times. For Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism refers to the status quo of domination by the hands of giant tech firms like Google and Facebook. Specifically, she argues that our interface with these ‘free’ technologies produces behavioral surplus (information on our behavior) which is refined and commodified to be sold in behavioral futures markets. In other words, Tech giants are amassing wealth by converting human experience into data and using that data to predict and control users at a massive scale.

In many ways, the tech capitalists have it better than traditional owners of labor. While going to work producing commodities for a world over and above oneself, to use Marx’s language, labor seemed to engage with capitalists out of necessity (make money to buy food, raise a family, etc.). Now, we generate data for a world over and above ourselves willingly and to our detriment. The massive behavioral data exhaust renders no individual byte of information tech capitalists gather about us inconsequential. We voluntarily surrender personal details to, say, Meta, like picture of ourselves and our families, who we associate with, and which cultural spaces we occupy. These tech giants use data collected to predict and proscribe behavior.

The issues with mass culture and modern technology are fundamentally intertwined as if mass culture and modern technology alone do not cause issues in our society in their respective vacuums. It is at the intersection of mass culture and modern technology which we find our decreasing attention span. Mass culture’s overproduction of pacifying, distracting shlock has permeated our very ontology by brute force. Tech capitalists require this ideological domination because our subconscious brains provide the necessarily immense data exhaust that drives their instrumentation/authoritarian power. The deteiments of a shorter attention span are more than just our own to bear. The pervasive intersection of mass culture, authoritarian power, and politics was on full display before the American people on January 20th, 2025.

 
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So Why Can't Students Read Full Books

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Contemporary Impact of a Shortening Attention Span

 
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It seems that the answer for the question brought to the forefront of educational discourse by the article in The Atlantic draws on both of these aforementioned theories about capitalism, technology, and mass media. From the culture industry, mass media products have been serving to collectively and systematically neuter our attention spans and propensity for creative/critical thinking. If anything, people’s attention to mass produced media seems to have steadily gotten worse as the audience for non-A lister-created music, indie film projects, and genuine artistic expression pails in comparison to the audiences for Disney movie remakes and repetitive pop songs.
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As unsafe, frigid temperatures rolled through Washington D.C. before the inauguration, the executive decision was made to move the previously open-air and public ceremony to the incredibly small rotunda inside the United States Capitol building. Seating in the room generally and on the stage with the President specifically was extremely limited and highly sought after. Overflow rooms for the ceremony were spread around Washington for the immense amount of foreign dignitaries, state governors and federal officials which were invited to the event. Amongst all the scarcity and the litany of important government officials, Elon Musk (Twitter/Tesla), Mark Zuckerburg (Meta/Facebook), Sundar Pichai (Google), and Shou Zi Chew (TikTok? ) took the stage behind the Presidnet.
 
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In the times of Adorno and Horkheimer, the proletarian had to travel…leave their house to go to a cinema and watch a motion picture made by Walt Disney. If you wanted to hear music, one would have to purchase a record deliberately and play it on a record player. Those days are no longer. As a cause and result of the forces Zuboff points out, an individual’s ability to produce behavioral data is important to the new super capitalists at Google and Meta. To produce the behavioral data Google needs to be successful, their software and other software like it stimulate, predict, and profit from continual input. People browsing on TikTok? and Instagram reels are not, to Adorno and Horkheimer’s dismay, browsing opera, learning methods of classical artistic expression, and completing their positions in relation to capital with grand philosophical works. Instead, kids finally making it to the hallowed halls of the Ivy League have grown up ingesting brain rot tik-toks and mass cultural effects. It should come as no surprise why kids are not readling full books. An entire network spearheaded by surveillance capitalists has pacified young adults of our time which has resulted in tremendous profits for them at the cost of a more free society.
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While the issues with an authoritarian President obviously aligning with authoritarian profit driven mega capitalists could fill a treatise, it should suffice to say here that there is an interesting interest convergence in decreasing our attention span. Donald Trump has blitzkrieged the United States with more executive orders in the first month than any president has in their first 100 days, and he has shown no sign of slowing down, handing out orders biweekly. It seems the news media charged with reporting updates directly to our phones at dizzying paces cannot even keep up with the Trump administration. What hope do we have as our attention spans continue to be neutered disrupting our ability to resist both Trump and the surveillance capitalists.
 
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Works Cited
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Works Cited & Further Reading

 Horkheimer, Max, Theodor W. Adorno, and Gunzelin Noeri. Dialectic of enlightenment. Stanford University Press, 2002.

Zuboff, Shoshana. "The age of surveillance capitalism." Social theory re-wired. Routledge, 2023. 203-213.

Horowitch, Rose. “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” The Atlantic. 2024.

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Moglen, Eben. "The dotcommunist manifesto." In Copyright Law, pp. 553-559. Routledge, 2017.
 
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This draft isn't really very effective in discussion of its subject because it uses almost all its space to summarize two books. There is a culture industry, and there is surveillance capitalism. For the purposes of this essay, fifty or a hundred words each and two citations will establish these points. The Horowitch article was assigned reading, so it requires no summarizing. Attention span is shortening. (There is good literature about this as a long- and medium-term phenomenon that you do not refer to, but which would help.) We should be able to establish all this in 250 words. The mirage of the "post-print university" and the effects of the oligopolization of academic publishing (which the present draft does not mention) are crucial also. That brings us, let us day, to 500 words. Now for the thinking.

But the bot-like writing of the present draft, long on abstract vocabulary, short on specifics, doesn't leave room for the thinking. Why not begin from a place you can be sure of: your own reading patterns. What books did you read this last academic year? How many were you reading for the first time; how many were rereading? How many of these book were read for pleasure, how many in order to meet an academic commitment? How did you choose them? With whom did you discuss them? Given that the law library was essentially closed (a topic you might have been expected to touch upon but didn't) how many physical visits did you make to another of the university libraries? From the information you compile about your own reading you should be able to draw some inferences that will inform an improved next draft.

 
You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable.

ReynaldoWilsonSecondEssay 2 - 12 Jan 2025 - Main.EbenMoglen
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META TOPICPARENT name="SecondEssay"
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It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted.
 

We Can No Longer Read Books

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 Horowitch, Rose. “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” The Atlantic. 2024.
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This draft isn't really very effective in discussion of its subject because it uses almost all its space to summarize two books. There is a culture industry, and there is surveillance capitalism. For the purposes of this essay, fifty or a hundred words each and two citations will establish these points. The Horowitch article was assigned reading, so it requires no summarizing. Attention span is shortening. (There is good literature about this as a long- and medium-term phenomenon that you do not refer to, but which would help.) We should be able to establish all this in 250 words. The mirage of the "post-print university" and the effects of the oligopolization of academic publishing (which the present draft does not mention) are crucial also. That brings us, let us day, to 500 words. Now for the thinking.

But the bot-like writing of the present draft, long on abstract vocabulary, short on specifics, doesn't leave room for the thinking. Why not begin from a place you can be sure of: your own reading patterns. What books did you read this last academic year? How many were you reading for the first time; how many were rereading? How many of these book were read for pleasure, how many in order to meet an academic commitment? How did you choose them? With whom did you discuss them? Given that the law library was essentially closed (a topic you might have been expected to touch upon but didn't) how many physical visits did you make to another of the university libraries? From the information you compile about your own reading you should be able to draw some inferences that will inform an improved next draft.

 
You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:

ReynaldoWilsonSecondEssay 1 - 13 Dec 2024 - Main.ReynaldoWilson
Line: 1 to 1
Added:
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META TOPICPARENT name="SecondEssay"
It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted.

We Can No Longer Read Books

-- By ReynaldoWilson - 13 Dec 2024

Introduction

The Atlantic reports: The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books. Students at Columbia University in the City of New York, and similarly situated elite, selective universities lack the ability to read. Well, that is what a cursory glance at one of the latest headlines from The Atlantic would have you believe. Yes, college students can read. The claim is a bit more specific, however. It is that college students cannot read books cover to cover. The author of the article interviews college professors at elite universities who complain that students have demanded to do less and less reading that they find it difficult to assign more than two or three books over an entire semester. It it hard to tell how much so-called baby boomers are attempting the proverbial and trite “back in my day”…ism or does the lack or reading books cover to cover reveal an issue with the way modern technology has affected the way people consume information?

The Culture Industry

The critical theorists of the Frankfurt School contemplated many issues of social and political domination. In view of this essay, a piece within a larger work titled Dialectics of the Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote about what they called The Culture Industry. The two authors published the piece in New York after fleeing Nazi occupied Germany. In giving more credence to the ideological superstructure of capitalism, Frankfurt scholars’ writings largely focused on an attempt to understand why the proletarian revolution had not come about. While the many different Frankfurt theorists cover various areas of social life, many of their answers revolve around what they see as capitalism’s re-entrenchment through culture and mass media.

In The Culture Industry, Adorno and Horkheimer point to Walt Disney as the most dangerous man in the United States. To summarize an incredibly dense work, the theorists posit standardized and unoriginal mass media products that Disney and similarly situated media giants put out are designed to pacify otherwise angry, alienated, and overworked proletarians by creating a false sense of satisfaction and stifling critical thinking/class consciousness. It follows, then, that the more one engages with ‘false’ mass produced art, the more pacified an individual will become. If scholars writing back in the mid 20th century had such power observations about The Culture Industry, capitalism, and ideological control, it should stand to reason that these forces have changed in contemporary times.

The Age of Survalience Capitalism

Shashona Zuboff’s in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism is, similar to theorists at the Frankfurt school in that Zuboff is trying to explain a further re-engineering of the capitalism Marx wrote about and adapt the theory to contemporary times. For Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism refers to the status quo of domination by the hands of giant tech firms like Google and Facebook. Specifically, she argues that our interface with these ‘free’ technologies produces behavioral surplus (information on our behavior) which is refined and commodified to be sold in behavioral futures markets. In other words, Tech giants are amassing wealth by converting human experience into data and using that data to predict and control users at a massive scale. It should stand to reason that companies benefit from improving their advanced algorithms for each individual user. If the user is constantly presented with personalized videos, advertisements, media ect. They will use the platform more and create more data to be commodified by tech giants and sold to advertising firms.

So Why Can't Students Read Full Books

It seems that the answer for the question brought to the forefront of educational discourse by the article in The Atlantic draws on both of these aforementioned theories about capitalism, technology, and mass media. From the culture industry, mass media products have been serving to collectively and systematically neuter our attention spans and propensity for creative/critical thinking. If anything, people’s attention to mass produced media seems to have steadily gotten worse as the audience for non-A lister-created music, indie film projects, and genuine artistic expression pails in comparison to the audiences for Disney movie remakes and repetitive pop songs.

In the times of Adorno and Horkheimer, the proletarian had to travel…leave their house to go to a cinema and watch a motion picture made by Walt Disney. If you wanted to hear music, one would have to purchase a record deliberately and play it on a record player. Those days are no longer. As a cause and result of the forces Zuboff points out, an individual’s ability to produce behavioral data is important to the new super capitalists at Google and Meta. To produce the behavioral data Google needs to be successful, their software and other software like it stimulate, predict, and profit from continual input. People browsing on TikTok? and Instagram reels are not, to Adorno and Horkheimer’s dismay, browsing opera, learning methods of classical artistic expression, and completing their positions in relation to capital with grand philosophical works. Instead, kids finally making it to the hallowed halls of the Ivy League have grown up ingesting brain rot tik-toks and mass cultural effects. It should come as no surprise why kids are not readling full books. An entire network spearheaded by surveillance capitalists has pacified young adults of our time which has resulted in tremendous profits for them at the cost of a more free society.

Works Cited Horkheimer, Max, Theodor W. Adorno, and Gunzelin Noeri. Dialectic of enlightenment. Stanford University Press, 2002.

Zuboff, Shoshana. "The age of surveillance capitalism." Social theory re-wired. Routledge, 2023. 203-213.

Horowitch, Rose. “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” The Atlantic. 2024.


You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:

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Revision 3r3 - 14 Feb 2025 - 22:07:07 - ReynaldoWilson
Revision 2r2 - 12 Jan 2025 - 14:56:56 - EbenMoglen
Revision 1r1 - 13 Dec 2024 - 22:04:22 - ReynaldoWilson
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