The irony of a 7-page article on our collective attention-span going down the tubes with our meds and artificial sweeteners is not lost on me. Nevertheless. I honestly and truly read this whole article, straight through, without ever checking twitter, FB, email, or randomly glancing at my phone. And i’m damn proud of myself! (now, the authoring of this blog post is another story entirely…)
I’d say the time + attention was worth it, “In Defense of Distraction” from the New York Magazine is a thoughtful, and fun 7-page distraction from whatever else it was i was doing before i stumbled upon the article. The piece positions our cultural poverty of attention as one of our times greatest societal ills. The author then paints a flip-side, in which the distraction engine that is the internet, and its corresponding info-glut are maybe good things? First, a delicious quote:
Adopting the Internet as the hub of our work, play, and commerce has been the intellectual equivalent of adopting corn syrup as the center of our national diet, and we’ve all become mentally obese.
This is the stance of pundits and naysayers who willfully ignore the power and privilege of us as individuals to selectively focus. If i don’t jump every time a new tweet arrives, or every time my phone rings, or every time google notifier intones the arrival of a new email, then i am exerting what psychologists (and everyone else) refers to as self-control. And with a little bit of that stuff, our auteur suggests, our distracted reality might in fact be a necesarry and beneficial adjunct to this info-tastic new world that we’ve built for ourselves. The oft-quotable Merlin Mann figures prominently in this article as the author veers into “lifehacking” as a means for distraction-management:
“Where you allow your attention to go ultimately says more about you as a human being than anything that you put in your mission statement,” he continues. “It’s an indisputable receipt for your existence.”
Word Mann. Then, through the invocation of Marcel Proust, and ADHD pharmy research, we are shown that it is through the mental diddlings of distraction that we often find purpose. Meaning. 5 minutes of distraction may yeild a lifetime of focused attention and labor.
So reign it in people. A little self control can go a long way! Ha!
I’ll leave you with a pearl from the article that was actually dropped by Merlin Mann’s wife:
“You have all the information you need to do something right now.”
via lifehacker