Sustained reading is experienced as boring by students wired to constant stimulus gratification.

Evidence

Ask students to read for more than a couple of sentences and many – and these are A-level students mind you – will protest that they can’t do it. The most frequent complaint teachers hear is that it’s boring. It is not so much the content of the written material that is at issue here; it is the act of reading itself that is deemed to be ‘boring’. What we are facing here is not just time–honored teenage torpor, but the mismatch between a post-literate ‘New Flesh’ that is ‘too wired to concentrate’ and the confining, concentrational logics of decaying disciplinary systems. To be bored simply means to be removed from the communicative sensation-stimulus matrix of texting, YouTube and fast food; to be denied, for a moment, the constant flow of sugary gratification on demand. Some students want Nietzsche in the same way that they want a hamburger; they fail to grasp – and the logic of the consumer system encourages this misapprehension – that the indigestibility, the difficulty is Nietzsche. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 51

Categorization

• SEED: The closing aphorism — students want Nietzsche like a hamburger, not grasping the difficulty is the point — could anchor a piece on attention, deep reading, and what education is even for.
• CANDY: The ‘students want Nietzsche the way they want a hamburger; the indigestibility is the point’ line is a memorable, tweetable aphorism.
• BMF: ”Too wired to concentrate’ New Flesh’ evokes the blip-culture generation — no direct match. But the idea of a generation whose time is cut into ‘pure and unrelated presents’ with no historical narrative thread resonates with nothing in We where time is regimented and recorded linearly, so actually an inversion.
• XREF: connects to: A generation born into digital micro-sliced media experiences time as disconnected presents. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 53

Related

• Falling reading attention reflects stimulus-addiction, not laziness (similarity 0.83)