Submitted by Jim Aune on November 6, 2007 - 8:18pm
We know that our students' (and our own) attention spans are much shorter than they used to be (compare the 60 second commercials from the 1960's with 15 second ones now, for a simple example). Do we know anything about what audiences "felt" like during a lengthy Puritan sermon, or during, say, Everett's long speech at Gettysburg that preceded Lincoln's (apparently disappointingly) brief address? What about Cubans listening to Castro's long speeches? Were they as bored as we would be? Are Eastern or Oriental Orthodox church services--or the agonizing long Jewish services on Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah--as long as they are because they have a pre-modern sense of temporality?
Judge Richard Posner makes the argument in The Economics of Justice that rhetoric is dependent on relative costs of information. Rhetoric, in the traditional sense, is more important in societies that lack many competing sources of information (audiences have more incentive to listen, because they have few other messages to attend to), while the modern glut of sources of information makes rhetoric less relevant (Posner lacks a sense of rhetorical invention here, but I think he's dead-on right that changing senses of rhetorical time are dependent upon changes in technology and other sources of information that reduce information costs).
I have read audience accounts of Patrick Henry's and Jonathan Edwards' speaking in which they are said to have fixed their eye contact on a single spot in the back of the room. What I am not familiar with are any historical accounts of the length of speeches/sermons, and the (surely?) boredom that ensued. Anyone know?
Reading about the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which were marathons, one finds an almost carnivalesque/spectacular atmosphere. Though the two men undoubtedly had each other's undivided attention, other listeners came and went as they pleased. Children and dogs played among the crowd. Food vendors provided refreshments. Hence a rhetorical event that, by our current understanding, would have signalled the deepest disrespect for the rhetors.
Accustomed to much shorter utterances, wherein our rapt attention is expected, we naturally assume that rhetors of another time and place would have commanded the same rapt attention, and we are amazed at their mental focus and discipline. Not so. The speakers just kept talking and talking and talking--whether anyone was really listening or not.
Actually, we do have a modern analogue: CSPAN.
This is also the way music performances used to be - we weren't always sitting in chairs (or, at an indie rock show, standing with arms folded) and listening intently (as people do at Symphony performances). I'm thinking mostly of Murray Schafer's discussion of music performances in The Soundscape but also of Jacques Attali's discussion in Noise.
Music/rhetorical events were like sporting events. Yes, people were watching and paying attention, but they had no problem with turning to the person next to them (or buying food from a vendor...)
In Richard Weaver's essay, "The Spaciousness of Old Rhetoric," he talks about the length and seeming repetitiveness of antebellum oratory in terms of "roughage" in food (odd metaphor, that); I wonder if it also took into account periodic lapses of attention.
And I guess my example of long Eastern Orthodox or Jewish religious services neglected the fact that people walked in and out of the church or shul for the favorite part, and, for Jews especially, there was a lot of yakking in the congregation during the less solemn parts (hence the Reform obsession with "decorum" in their services).
But do these examples indicate that attention spans are fixed, or do they shift profoundly with new technologies of attention?
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