By Rod Benson
Using a smartphone to scroll through social media is one of the characteristic practices of contemporary life for billions of people. We reach for our phones while waiting for a train, sitting in a café, watching television, lying in bed or during pauses in conversation. The practice satisfies several popular human appetites: curiosity, sociability, amusement, gossip, indignation, reassurance, novelty, fear of missing out, and the desire to know what others are doing. In that sense, social-media scrolling is not entirely new. Every period has developed characteristic ways of filling idle moments with information and diversion.
Yet the smartphone represents more than another stage in the history of distraction. It gathers many older practices within a technological environment that is portable, continuous, personalised, sensory and interactive.
In the fifteenth century, the nearest functional equivalent to scrolling through a social feed was participation in the flow of information circulating through marketplaces, churchyards, inns and public gatherings. Before print became widely available, much everyday news travelled orally through travellers, merchants, clergy, officials and neighbours. Public spaces could therefore carry a changing mixture of useful information, rumour, entertainment and scandal. A person lingering in a marketplace might move between conversations, announcements and spectacles. The comparison should not be pressed too far: information moved vastly more slowly and remained geographically constrained. Yet the underlying appetite is familiar. Human beings have long gravitated toward places where they might discover what has happened, what others are saying and what might happen next.
The sixteenth century transformed this information environment through the rapid expansion of print. Pamphlets, broadsides, ballads and controversial religious literature could circulate arguments and stories beyond the communities in which they originated. The Protestant Reformation was inseparable from this newly expanded print culture, through which religious arguments, polemics and vernacular texts could reach much wider publics. Short printed forms were particularly suited to topical controversy. In functional terms, they anticipated one characteristic of contemporary digital media: information could increasingly be encountered in discrete, provocative and relatively inexpensive pieces rather than only through sustained oral encounters or substantial books. The resemblance remains partial, but print accelerated both the circulation of ideas and the expectation that ordinary people might participate in public argument.
During the seventeenth century, coffeehouses, taverns, newsletters and emerging newspapers created more regular centres of information exchange. English coffeehouses in particular became important places for conversation, commercial intelligence and political news, often developing associations with particular occupations or interests. Printed material could be read, discussed and transmitted onwards. Periodical publication also gradually altered expectations about news. Information increasingly arrived not merely when an extraordinary event demanded attention but according to regular publication cycles. The deceptively simple question, “What is new?” began to acquire an institutional answer. Soon, another issue would appear requiring attention and response. And so on.
The eighteenth century developed this aspect of consumer culture through the proliferation of newspapers, pamphlets, journals and literary periodicals. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s original Spectator, first published in 1711, is an important example. Its essays deliberately brought commentary on manners, literature, religion and public life into the social world of clubs, tea tables and coffeehouses. The periodical essay became closely connected with the emerging culture of urban sociability. Readers were therefore consuming more than information. They encountered recurring interpretations of society and participated imaginatively in communities of taste, conviction and argument. Media consumption increasingly helped individuals situate themselves within a wider public culture.
The nineteenth century greatly expanded this process. Steam-powered printing dramatically increased newspaper production, while cheaper mass-circulation papers broadened readership. The London Times introduced steam-powered printing in 1814, and the American penny press of the 1830s demonstrated the commercial potential of inexpensive newspapers aimed beyond affluent elites. New York’s Sun, launched in 1833, combined low price with local news, crime, sport, scandal and sensational stories and quickly achieved very large circulation. Newspapers and illustrated periodicals increasingly became habitual companions of urban life. Yet even the most enthusiastic reader encountered an important limit: eventually the newspaper ended. The supply of novelty was abundant but finite.
The twentieth century shifted much popular media consumption from print toward electronic communication. Radio brought voices, news and entertainment directly into the home, while television added compelling moving images. The remote control eventually made rapid movement between channels effortless, particularly as cable and satellite systems expanded the number of choices. By the 1980s, widespread infrared remotes and expanding channel choice helped establish “channel surfing” as a familiar habit. The resemblance to social-media scrolling is significant. The viewer could inspect a programme briefly, reject it and move almost instantly to another source of stimulation.
Television nevertheless retained constraints that now seem striking. Programmes followed schedules, broadcasters determined what was available, and the screen generally remained in a particular room. Viewers could move between channels, but they could not normally summon an effectively limitless personalised stream. If nothing appealing was being transmitted, the available choices were exhausted. The medium offered growing abundance, but that abundance was still largely produced for mass audiences rather than dynamically assembled for individual viewers.
The internet swiftly removed many of these constraints. During the 1990s and early 2000s, “surfing the web” became an apt description of moving from one digital destination to another. Email checking, forums, blogs, portals and search engines encouraged more frequent interaction with information. Social-network platforms then brought personal relationships, public commentary and media consumption into the same environment. The critical transformation was from visiting individual destinations to inhabiting continuously updating feeds.
The smartphone completed the transition by making the feed portable. Social interaction, news, entertainment, photography, shopping, banking, navigation, work and public commentary could now coexist within a device carried throughout the day. The historical sequence might therefore be summarised as marketplace gossip, pamphlet browsing, coffeehouse conversation, newspaper reading, channel surfing, web surfing and social-media scrolling. These are analogies rather than exact equivalents, but they reveal persistent human appetites for novelty, social knowledge, diversion and connection.
Across these centuries we can observe a progressive weakening of certain constraints. The marketplace requires physical presence. The pamphlet must be obtained. The newspaper runs out of pages. The television programme ends or the available channels disappoint. Websites initially had discernible destinations and boundaries. Contemporary social feeds, by contrast, can generate an effectively continuous succession of material. The user no longer needs to search actively for another source of novelty; another item usually appears with a swipe.
This continuity should guard against nostalgia. Previous generations were not naturally more contemplative, rational or disciplined than our own. They were vulnerable to gossip, sensationalism, propaganda and distraction, and almost every significant communications technology generated anxieties about its social consequences. Some fears were justified; others reflected familiar suspicions of novelty. It would be historically implausible to claim that smartphones invented distraction, superficiality or misinformation. They merely capitalised on weak and enduring aspects of human nature.
Yet continuity should not conceal technological discontinuity. The smartphone does not merely give us more things to read. It combines portability, electronic illumination, moving images, personal communication, near-constant connectivity and increasingly sophisticated systems of recommendation. Some platforms can observe patterns of behaviour and use those patterns to influence what appears next. What has changed is therefore not simply the quantity of distraction, but the architecture within which attention is invited, measured and retained.
Earlier media competed for attention. Contemporary digital systems can increasingly observe that attention, learn what retains it and immediately offer another stimulus. To understand the smartphone and its significance in shaping human destiny, we need to examine not only what appears on the screen but the technological environment behind it. The next article in the series addresses this topic.
Rev Dr Rod Benson is General Secretary of the NSW Ecumenical Council and a minister of the Uniting Church in Australia serving at North Rocks Community Church in Sydney.
Image source: Northwestern Medill
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