Alpha Meets Millennial: Do People Still Eat at the Dinner Table?

Hayles’ article was written before the arrival of Generation Alpha, children born into and existing in an age where hyper-attention is at its peak. I would really love to see an article that continues that conversation. I am a mom of two Alphas, and Lord help me with the daily policies and struggles with technology. My ten-year-old son was moving around the house like someone died when we made a no-laptop decision a few weeks ago after a naughty situation. Addiction to TV and laptops refuses to subside, thanks to the constantly available internet.

Back to removing the log in my eye before I exhaust all my complaints on the speck in my kids’, I sincerely miss and really want to go back to the days when I used to read novels all through the year. To read a novel is to be in a space of sanity and decorum. As I recall and long daily for this long-lost practice, I think of the similarities that exist between deep attention and Odell’s deep listening as nothingness. These days, one is constantly mentally exhausted from having to pay hyper-attention to things that can’t wait. Hyper-attention is a product of technological urgency and constant updating. Someone was talking about how they ate dinner with their family in class the other day, and another responded, “People still eat at the dinner table?” (hahahaha). My kids are the only ones made to eat at the dining table; we, the adults in the house, are always practicing hyper-attention with our meals in one hand and technology on the other. To do one thing is boring. (270). [TO-17]

[Hayles, 2007; Odell, 2019]