As an educator, I can agree with most of what Falcon has written. I teach both students and future teachers, so I see both sides of the coin. Television and the internet most definitely have cut very deeply into what was already a shrinking American attention span. The other variable is the dissolution of the family, which used to provide support and assurance that children came to school ready to learn. The school systems, under political and legal pressure, have adjusted their expectations accordingly.
While this trend has been particularly acute over the last twenty years, it actually began after the First World War. This is the period when mass marketing and the advertising industry as we know it today began. During the 1920's, the onset of radio, color magazines, automobiles, telephones, mass-produced toys and other marvels of the industrial age began to capture the attention of the public. People began to develop product loyality and became increasingly susceptible to media manipulation. This continued during the thirties, even when the general public did not always have disposable income, as airplanes, comic books, talking movies and other elements of pop culture became American mainstays.
People worried about the quality of pulp comic books and the effect it would have on the attention spans of young readers, to say nothing of the quality of childrens' literature. In the fifties, concerns began to be expessed about the level of decency in the illustrations. (One has only to sample science fiction pulp covers of the period, to see the revealing, skimpy costumes worn by the various damsels in distress. Even by today's standards they are noticeable.) All of these developments from the 1920's--a period of great prosperity--onward, have layered, one on top of another, to form the fickle nature of today's readers. Remote controlled TV and the internet are the icing at the top of a multilayer cake.
To illustrate this, I share a finding I made when I analyzed children's literature during my graduate program. I compared an early volume of the famous Bobbsey Twins series with the same story republished years later, but both editions were long before the current generation. The original story was published in 1914 and the republished edition was in 1947.
1947 was when television was just beginning and had not yet made its big splash onto the American scene. It was in the immediate post-WWII era, and that war and its aftermath were still the predominating elements of American society.
Though the 1947 edition told the exact same story, with the exact same text, as did that of the 1914 edition, there were, even in 1947, noticeable disparities when compared to 1914. Some of the differences were merely vocabulary changes to reflect the times (sofa replaced davenport, restroom replaced w.c., etc.) while others were industrial (automobiles replaced carriages, etc.). But in describing various events of the story, even major ones, entire sentences and paragraphs were omitted. Sentence structures were shorter and simple clauses replaced complex ones. There was far less descriptive language, and chapters were broken up into shorter segments. In short, the attention span of readers was already weakening, even in the 1940's. Perhaps the occurrence of two world wars during the intervening years had some impact on all of this. Certainly the appearance of radio did, as many stories that would have been read were instead listened to on the radio.
One might speculate that periods of economic prosperity seem to generate distractions from reading--distractions from which not all segments of society always recover. One sees this during the greatest periods of American abundance, viz., the 1920's, 1950's, and 1980's through the present day. I am not posting this as a theory per se, as I never did empirical research on it, but is is food for thought. Sorry for the lengthy post.
