Distraction part 1

I have been writing on cyborgs, and on mundane cyborgs in particular. This led me to cell phones as prosthetics, and back to a theme of the Unintended Consequences of technology (as noted so eloquently by Edward Tenner among many others).

Tonight I had an idea: what if the second cyborg book was in some major way about the effect that technology has on our abilities to concentrate and focus our attention? That is, on distraction as a kind of ur-story of contemporary technologies?

There are a lot of pieces that could be included here:

1. First off, an app for the iPhone (and Droid and others) that would keep track of how many times people check their phones; how many calls they get; how many times they use a feature such as text or camera. This app would consciously be a part of this larger project of gathering data; people could opt to have the information sent to a website that then compiled the data and controlled for age gender etc.

2. The novel Distraction by Sterling is a cyborg novel, a novel of (among other things) brain "augmentation" and control and destruction. It has enough themes to make an interesting set of examples for a chapter on distraction technologies.

3. The notion of continuous partial attention, as developed by Linda Stone and then others, seems relevant here. This could be bundled with research on attention, in particular the way web users "attend" differently as so much comes there way. (btw Linda Stone's website is wonderfully productive for me: check it out at http://lindastone.net/).

4. ADD. And of course weighing in on this as a parent for me of an ADD kind of kid (though I thought and still think that we'll come to see ADD in the same way we see the 19th century notions of "nerves" and "hysteria" as explanatory categories of behavior.

5. Back to Linda Stone, the idea of cyborg approaches to mind and attitude. Why not talk more in schools and other areas of learning about attendtion and mind as things to explore, develop, enjoy, etc? The cyborg approach imagines a wide range of activities and prosthetics involved in exploring the mind, and the powers of attention. Here is Linda Stone:

Attention is the most powerful tool of the human spirit. We can enhance or augment our attention with practices like meditation and exercise, diffuse it with technologies like email and Blackberries, or alter it with phamaceuticals. In the end, though, we are fully responsible for how we choose to use this extraordinary tool.

She also writes on October 20, 2010:

With a musical instrument, it’s awkward at first. All thumbs. Uncomfortable. Noise. With practice, instrument and musician become as one. Co-creating music. So it will be with personal technology. Now, a prosthetic of mind, it will become a prosthetic of being. A violinist with a violin. Us with our gadgets, embodied, attending as we choose.

This is fantastic. The cyborg model: our brains are flexible, are instruments, are capable of the most wonderful and also disturbing explorations of/with personal technologies as prosthetics. What will cell phone and iPad 2.0 and 3.0 look like? And will we develop ways to compensate for some of the shadow sides of these personal technologies, their performance inhibiting qualities?

Gotta go. GGLY. But I'm on this app for phones, seriously. I want data. My friend told me he thinks I look at my phone like a tic, maybe 80 times in an hour while we were roaming a disc golf course. And I've developed phantom ring, the sensation that one's phone is vibrating along one's leg, only to find...it wasn't. Instead, the body is vibrating, or the mind is picking up body signals that mimic the phone's (now important) small vibratory signal.