Early in the Civil War, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. announced in The Atlantic that the necessities of life had been reduced to two things: bread and the newspaper. Trying to keep up with what Holmes called the “excitements of the time,” civilians lived their days newspaper to newspaper, hanging on the latest reports. Reading anything else felt beside the point.
The newspaper was an inescapable force, Holmes wrote; it ruled by “divine right of its telegraphic dispatches.” Holmes didn’t think he was describing some permanent modern condition—information dependency as a way of life. The newspaper’s reign would end with the war, he thought. And when it did, he and others could return to more high-minded literary pursuits—such as the book by an “illustrious author” that he’d put down when hostilities broke out.
Nearly 40 years after Holmes wrote those words, newspapers were still on the march. Writing in 1900, Arthur Reed Kimball warned in The Atlantic of an “Invasion of Journalism,” as newspapers’ volume and influence grew only more intense. Their readers’ intellect, Kimball argued, had been diminished. Coarse language was corrupting speech and writing, and miscellaneous news was making miscellaneous minds. The newspaper-ification of the American mind was complete.
The rise of the cheap, daily newspaper in the 19th century created the first true attention economy—an endless churn of spectacle and sensation that remade how Americans engaged with the world. Although bound by the physical limits of print, early newspaper readers’ habits were our habits: People craved novelty, skimmed for the latest, let their attention dart from story to story. And with the onset of this new way of being came its first critics.
In our current moment, when readers need to be persuaded to read an article before they post about it online, 19th-century harrumphs over the risks of newspaper reading seem quaint. Each new technology since the newspaper—film, radio, television, computers, the internet, search engines, social media, artificial intelligence—has sparked the same anxieties about how our minds and souls will be changed. Mostly, we’ve endured. But these anxieties have always hinted at the possibility that one day, we’ll reach the endgame—the point at which words and the work of the mind will have become redundant.