Such sensational stories-the “you won’t believe what happened next” of their day-were meant to sell papers, but the Sun’s costs weren’t covered by the newsstand price. While there have always been grand “claimants to attention,” Wu notes-organized religion being one-he dates the emergence of “industrialized” attention to Benjamin Day’s tabloid newspaper the New York Sun, which launched on Septemwith, among other things, a story of a suicide by laudanum. Wu is a law professor at Columbia University, and in his 2010 book, The Master Switch, he chronicled how fledgling communications networks, from radio to the internet, went from heady, freewheeling hobbyist playgrounds to entities corralled by mercantilist and governmental control. THE ATTENTION MERCHANTS by Tim Wu Alfred A. But how do we shake off the village when we carry the world in our pocket?
And yet Thoreau, in an age long before digital detox, was getting at something that is very much on our minds, when those minds have time for such reflection: the task of paying attention. Thoreau was surely being dogmatic: Must one only think arboreal thoughts on a tree-lined path? Kierkegaard said we walk ourselves into our best thoughts, but one doesn’t need to stroll down library stacks teeming with philosophy tomes to think philosophically.
With a gentle lashing of self-reproach, he asks: “What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?” “I am alarmed,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in “ Walking,” his 1862 essay, “when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit.” The point of his saunter had been to “forget all my morning occupations, and my obligations to society.” Alas: “It sometimes happens I cannot easily shake off the village.” His thoughts were elsewhere.
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