A constant complaint in our unpredictable world is that we live in an age of distraction.
I am quick to label students who stare at their phones in my class distracted; politicians dismiss inconvenient questions by calling them a distraction; and when we find distraction in ourselves, we blame it on technology. In other words, we think of attention as a rare and valuable commodity, and we assume that distraction is a problem with an identifiable cause.
Consider for a moment, what would a medieval monk or a 17th-century preacher make of our complaints about modern distraction?
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