There’s also a moral element to all this attention-span fearmongering. How long can we, as a people, actually care about an atrocity? How does the relative length of our haunting reflect our collective moral strengths and weaknesses?
In that earlier column on Kirk, I asked what Kent State would look like in 2025. A single photograph from the day, in 1970, that four students there were killed by the Ohio National Guard is so powerful that, whenever I hear any mention of Kent State—its basketball team or its engineering program—the picture flashes in my mind. I’m sure I’m not alone. Can the public still cohere around a single image of a catastrophe in that way? Or, today, would we all see hundreds of chaotic pictures taken with cellphone cameras by people on the scene and uploaded directly into their feeds? Kent State was reduced to a single photo because the press was far more centralized at the time, and had the power and the influence to edit, curate, and promote a particular version of an event.
The media still makes an effort to direct our attention in this way. When the war in Gaza reached the end of its first year, multiple major news outlets published collections of images that seemed to them representative of the tragedy so far. More were published at the two-year mark. I am guessing that you did not notice these compilations, and I am almost certain that you have little idea which specific photos were assembled.
What are the images of the war in Gaza that you will never forget? A photograph of six dead children tucked under a sheet? Footage of a father stumbling around, apparently carrying the headless body of his baby? Pictures of the bloody aftermath in the kibbutz kitchens? Do you know which images I’m referencing? Do you have your own list of images that I’ll need to Google? And, even if we are both horrified by the carnage, does the fact that we all have our own personalized horror reel mean that we will forget what we have seen more quickly, because our memories won’t be refreshed by the repetition of a singular image? Will we trust our memories less, because we are no longer confident that the photos and even the videos that we see are real?
I am not concerned about the attention spans of my children. But I do worry about what happens when every image becomes a site of contestation; when the rare sights we all see together, whether joyous or devastating, quickly fray into thousands, even millions, of threads, each with their own grip on reality. When historians look back at our era, they will find atrocities that have been documented in fuller detail than at any other time in history; they will see thousands of dead bodies; and they will find millions of hours of commentary. What they will not find is a coherent narrative that described those images as they took place. Consensus on why and how things happened, of course, can be used to exert terrible will, and so perhaps there might be some potential good to be had in all this chaos. But how do you build a community when nobody can hold any vision, or even interpretation, of what happened in common?
To complete the thought, Kent State might not be remembered without the anchor of that one photograph. When we say the public can’t remember anything anymore due to its shortened attention span or whatever else, what we’re really describing, at least in large part, is the lack of collective memory, shaped by iconic images that bind us. It is a lament from the lonely: those who understand that some unctuous new consciousness is being born—one that shapes the way their children regard the suffering world—but cannot make out what it looks like. ♦
