Hayles, has a more complex—perhaps a more confused—view: in her recent work she argues, quite plausibly, that our educational models have traditionally valued what she calls “deep attention,” while today’s students are proficient in mobile, flexible, fast-twitch “hyper attention.” Deep attention she identifies as “the cognitive style traditionally associated with the humanities” and defines it as “characterized by concentrating on a single object for long periods (say, a novel by Dickens), ignoring outside stimuli while so engaged, preferring a single information stream, and having a high
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