We keep saying: “This generation doesn’t focus.”
But what if the problem is not discipline - but design?
From Marshall McLuhan’s warning about media as environments to Bernard Stiegler’s idea of outsourced memory, this blog explores a deeper crisis:
We are not just using screens.
Screens are reshaping how we think, feel, and learn.
This is not a mere generation gap.
This is a cognitive rupture.
(for readers from the academic world)
When Focus Fades, Something Deeper Is Shifting
Let us begin with a familiar complaint.
“They don’t focus anymore.”
“They are always on their phones.”
“They don’t think deeply.”
These statements circulate in staff rooms, seminar halls, and everyday conversations about students - especially Gen Z.
But what if these are not explanations, but symptoms?
What if the problem is not them - but the world we have collectively built around them?
What if we are not witnessing a failure of discipline, but a transformation in the very conditions of thinking, feeling, and being human?
We Thought Technology Was a Tool. It Became an Environment.
We like to believe we use technology.
That we control it.
That it sits quietly in our hands, waiting to be switched on and off.
But as Marshall McLuhan warned long ago, this is an illusion. Technologies, especially in the world of media, are not tools - they are environments. They reshape how we see, feel, and understand the world.
He offers a striking image:
The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics. If the operations are needed, the inevitability of infecting the whole system during the operation has to be considered. (McLuhan, 1964).
This is not simply technological change.
It is neurological, sensory, and social reconfiguration.
Print culture trained us to:
read slowly
think linearly
wait
Digital culture trains us to:
jump
skim
react
And yet, according to McLuhan, the most dangerous part of this transformation is that we do not even notice it:
I call this peculiar form of self-hypnosis Narcissus narcosis, a syndrome whereby man remains as unaware of the psychic and social effects of his new technology as a fish of the water it swims in. As a result, precisely at the point where a new media-induced environment becomes all pervasive and transmogrifies our sensory balance, it also becomes invisible. (The Playboy Interview)
We are not just using screens.
We are living inside them.
When Thinking Left the Body
Bernard Stiegler reminds us that humans have always used tools to extend their minds:
When a pre-historic man is producing flint stones, thereby exteriorizing his experience, he is in fact transforming his brain, his psyche (Stiegler, 1998).
But something radical has changed.
We have moved from supporting thought to replacing it.
Memory is no longer something we cultivate.
It is something we outsource.
Stiegler calls this a loss - a quiet but profound one:
We call proletarianization the process through which an individual or collective knowledge, being formalized through a technique, a machine, or an apparatus, can escape the individual - who thus loses this knowledge which was until then his knowledge. (Stiegler, 2014)
We do not remember anymore.
We search.
We do not dwell on ideas.
We scroll past them.
From Meaning to Flow
There was a time when understanding meant pausing.
The Humanities, for instance, were built on what scholars call hermeneutics - the slow, careful act of interpretation:
Traced back to their earliest known root words in Greek, the origins of the modern words ‘hermeneutics’ and ‘hermeneutical’ suggest the process of ‘bringing to understanding,’ especially as this process involves language, since language is the medium par excellence in the process. (Palmer, 1969)
But digital culture has quietly replaced meaning with movement.
As Friedrich Kittler reminds us, media determine what can be said — and how. ““Media determine our situation” (Kittler, 1999).
Today:
ideas become posts
arguments become clips
narratives become feeds
We are no longer asking:
What does this mean?
We are asking:
What’s next?
The Marketplace of Attention
In 1971, Herbert A. Simon saw this coming:
The obverse of a population problem is a scarcity problem… What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance. (Simon, 1971)
Later, Michael H. Goldhaber made it even clearer:
It sets up an unending scramble… for what is increasingly scarce, which is of course attention. (Goldhaber, 1997)
Today, attention is no longer ours.
As Shoshana Zuboff explains:
I define surveillance capitalism as the unilateral claiming of private human experience as free raw material… sold into behavioral futures markets… (Zuboff, 2019)
We are not just users.
We are:
data sources
attention reservoirs
predictable subjects
We Don’t Just Think Anymore - We Feel First
Something else has shifted.
We no longer process the world primarily through thought - but through feeling.
Sara Ahmed captures this beautifully:
Forming an impression also depends on how objects impress upon us… We need to remember the “press” in an impression… an affect that leaves its mark or trace. (Ahmed, 2004)
Digital spaces are designed for this:
outrage spreads
anxiety circulates
desire intensifies
We do not think and then feel.
We feel - and only sometimes think.
When Reality Became a Feed
Jean Baudrillard once warned:
simulating is not pretending…simulation threatens the difference between the "true" and the "false," the "real" and the "imaginary” (Baudrillard, 1994).
Today, that warning feels less like theory and more like description.
We do not encounter the world.
We encounter:
curated realities
filtered lives
algorithmic truths
The screen no longer reflects reality.
It produces it.
The End of Waiting - and the End of Thinking
Thinking takes time.
But time has disappeared.
Research now confirms what many teachers intuitively feel:
Long-term exposure to the rapid, fragmented nature of digital content interferes with the brain’s capacity… excessive digital exposure shrinks the ability to invest in… deep thinking, reflection… (Yousaf et al., 2025)
And:
constant exposure to algorithm-driven content flows… reduces individuals’ ability to engage with meaningful information… (Özbay, 2026)
Without pause, thought cannot settle.
Everything becomes:
immediate
unstable
forgettable
We Have Become Scrolling Bodies
This transformation is not just mental.
It is physical.
We have become:
fingers that flick
eyes that dart
bodies that cannot sit still
The scroll is no longer an action.
It is a condition.
This Is Not a Mere Generation Gap. It Is a Rupture.
What we call a “generation gap” is something far more radical.
Gaston Bachelard describes such moments as epistemic breaks:
Critical moments… involve a total reorganisation of the system of knowledge… It changes species. (1938)
Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z -
they are not simply different.
They inhabit different cognitive worlds.
We Keep Asking the Wrong Question
We ask:
Why don’t they focus?
But this is the wrong question.
This is not about discipline.
It is about design.
When attention is constantly interrupted,
focus is not difficult—it is structurally undermined.
The real question is:
What kind of world makes thinking so hard?
Speed Has Become Violence
Speed was once progress.
Now, it is pressure.
As warned by Paulo Virilio, every technology invents its own accident. What arrives as progress also carries the blueprint of its failure - hidden within it, waiting for the right moment to surface and disrupt the very world it promised to improve.
Referring to Aristotle’s proposition that ‘the accident reveals the substance’, Virilio says:
To invent the sailing ship or steamer is to invent the shipwreck. To invent the train is to invent the rail accident of derailment. To get what is heavier than air to take off in the form of an aeroplane or dirigible is to invent the crash, the air disaster. (Virilio, 2007)
Today, the accident is this:
the collapse of thought.
The Quiet Death of Boredom
We have eliminated boredom.
But boredom was not always the enemy.
boredom can be a source of creativity and innovation in that when bored, brains are more likely to wander and explore new ideas or perspectives. Boredom can encourage one to seek novel experiences, discover new interests, or challenge oneself to learn and grow. (Ndetei, et. al, 2023)
It was the beginning of:
imagination
creativity
reflection
Without boredom, the mind never turns inward.
It remains trapped in constant stimulation.
imagination
creativity
reflection
The Classroom as a Site of Crisis
Today’s classroom is not just a place of learning.
It is a meeting point of different worlds.
Teachers trained in slowness meet students shaped by speed
The result?
frustration
misunderstanding
breakdown
The challenge is no longer just teaching content.
It is teaching attention.
Slowness as Resistance
We do not need to go back.
But we need to push back.
To slow down
to pause
to think
is no longer passive.
It is political.
The Radical Act of Doing Nothing
Perhaps the most difficult lesson today is this:
To sit without a screen.
To think without input.
To be.
In a world of constant noise,
silence is rebellion.
A Final Reflection
This is not a story of one generation failing another.
It is a story of a world that is slowly losing its ability to think.
And unless we recognize this,
we will continue to misdiagnose the crisis.
What Next?
In the next blog, we step into the classroom -
not to ask how we should teach better,
but to confront a deeper challenge:
How do Gen X and Millennials translate knowledge for Gen Z and Gen Alpha, when they no longer inhabit the same worlds of thinking?
References
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Bachelard, Gaston. 1938. The Formation of the Scientific Mind: A Contribution to a Psychoanalysis of Objective Knowledge. Clinamen Press, 2002.
Baudrillard J. (1994). Simulacra and simulation. The University of Michigan.
Goldhaber, M. H. (1997). “The attention economy and the Net.” First Monday, 2(4). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v2i4.519
Jenkins , H. 2006 . Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide , New York and London : New York University Press .
Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford UP, 1999.
McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore. The Medium Is the Massage. 1964. New York ; Toronto : Simon and Schuster, 1989.
Ndetei DM, Nyamai P, Mutiso V." Boredom-understanding the emotion and its impact on our lives: an African perspective." Front Sociol. 2023 Jun 29;8:1213190. doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2023.1213190. PMID: 37456271; PMCID: PMC10342197.
Özbay Ö. “'Brain Rot' Among University Students in the Digital Age: A Phenomenological Study.” Curr Psychiatry Rep. 2026 Feb 5;28(1):11. doi: 10.1007/s11920-025-01658-w. PMID: 41642385; PMCID: PMC12876105.
Palmer, Richard E. 1969. Hermeneutics; interpretation in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Simon, H. A. (1971). “Designing organizations for an information-rich world.” In M., Greenberger (Ed.), Computers, communication, and the public interest. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Stanford UP, 1998.
Stiegler, Bernard. The Re-Enchantment of the World: The Value of Spirit Against Industrial Populism. A&C Black, 2014.
“The Playboy Interview.” Next Nature Museum, nextnature.org/en/magazine/story/2009/the-playboy-interview-marshall-mcluhan.
Virilio, Paul. The Original Accident. Polity, 2007.
Yousef AMF, Alshamy A, Tlili A, Metwally AHS. “Demystifying the New Dilemma of Brain Rot in the Digital Era: A Review.” Brain Sci. 2025 Mar 7;15(3):283. doi: 10.3390/brainsci15030283. PMID: 40149804; PMCID: PMC11939997.
Zuboff, Shoshana. “ Interview with John Leidre: High Tech Is Watching You.” Harvard Gazette, 4 March 2019, news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/03/harvard-professor-says-surveillance-capitalism-is-undermining-democracy.
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