if it’s important to cultivate both forms of attention, and Hayles “can’t get [her] students to read whole books anymore,” doesn’t that suggest a manifest failure of cultivation? Doesn’t that indicate that the quest to maintain or preserve or simply teach deep attention is, in her classrooms anyway, a failure? I think it does, and I think we cannot reasonably expect anything else. And here I am going to make what I believe to be one of the most important arguments in this book, even though it may amount to an undermining of my own profession.
