For all the wonders of the web, it “threatens habits of deeper inquiry,” Ian Leslie argues in “Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It.” This book is among a growing number exploring what might be lost as we “lean on search engines and offload our memories to cloud storage,” to quote a review of four contributions to the topic last year by Jacob Silverman in The New York Times.

Among them, the one that seems most pertinent to my field, classical music, is Michael Harris’s “The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection.” The book considers whether the Internet is eroding our attention spans. And you can’t listen to a 20-minute Haydn string quartet, let alone an 80-minute Mahler symphony, without having a pretty good attention span.

That live classical music requires concertgoers to listen and focus, often for lengthy stretches, has long seemed off-putting to many potential aficionados. I’m talking especially about orchestra and chamber ensemble programs. Though it’s interesting to watch performers in action, visual stimulation is not the point of a symphonic program. Opera, on the other hand, is theater. As with plays and musicals, operas have stories, characters, costumes and spectacle. Still, being confined midrow for a long one, even a classic like Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” demands considerable focus.

In the current era of constant connectivity, however, could this supposed downside of classical music become a selling point? Could the idea of the concert hall as a web-free zone, a chance to disconnect, catch on? I think so.