Distractions: the preview

Stories about distraction

1. So I was beginning to write about distraction and remembered the night, several weeks ago, when I was sitting on a friend's porch smoking cigars after a bottle of wine (something wants me to write "each" here) and I started to tell a story about distraction. And my neighbor Dirk interrupted me, and when I went back to the conversational topic, I, ummm, couldn't remember it.

Kevin looked at me, big old Cuban in his fist, and didn't say anything for a few beats.

2. Then there's the film Up!, which has worked its way into our local lore:

Beta: Chocolate, I smell chocolate!
Gamma: I'm getting prunes and denture cream! Who are they?
Beta: Oh, man, Master will not be pleased. We better tell him someone took the bird. Right, Alpha?
Alpha: [in a squeaky voice] No. Soon enough the bird will be ours yet again. Find the scent, my compadres, and you too shall have much rewardings from Master for the toil factor you wage.
Beta: Hey Alpha, I think there's something wrong with your collar. You must have bumped it.
Gamma: Yeah, your voice sounds funny!
[they both laugh]
Alpha: Beta! Gamma!
[they both stop laughing]
Alpha: Mayhaps you desire to - SQUIRREL!
[all of them turn their attention to a nearby tree; slight pause, Gamma whimpers]

We now use this for moments when one of us gets distracted, as in:

me: telling a long involved story

them: a brief comment on my story

them and/or me: noticing anything else in our immediate environment

them and/or me: forgetting the point of previously mentioned yet apparently important story

me or them: "SQUIRREL"

3. I began thinking about writing about distraction. The first thing that came to mind was Bruce Sterling's novel Distraction, which conveniently includes both the word distraction and a main character who is a cyborg. So I began trying to remember what the book was about, and then I got a phone call about skiing this weekend. I was at a cafe and hadn't ordered yet, so I took the phone up to the barista, and ordered a traditional cap with the Verve coffee, went outside, discussed sleeping conditions at the ski place and who would make which dinners. Then I went back in, signed off the phone as I picked up the cappuccino, talked with the barista for a few minutes on what a deal the costa rican shade grown fair trade beans were, went back to my table and began thinking about distraction again, until I overheard the conversation next to me between two college guys regarding the speed up feeling of a quarter system when you've been on the semester system, and since I had been on the semester system when I hit Stanford's speedupy quarter system...

You get the picture. In some ways distraction is simply attending to the environment, and being willing to shift attention. For some of us, this is what we do all day. For others, this is not what is done. Instead there exists a space of not-distraction, when focused work gets done. In the cult film Office Space, Peter admits to the efficiency experts interviewing him that really, most of his day is simply distraction (he has three bosses with endless memos and micromanagement; his job is utterly boring and repetitive; to survive he comes in late, fools around a lot, takes long lunches...). The conversation goes like this:

Bob Slydell: You see, what we're actually trying to do here is, we're trying to get a feel for how people spend their day at work... so, if you would, would you walk us through a typical day, for you?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah.
Bob Slydell: Great.
Peter Gibbons: Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door - that way Lumbergh can't see me, heh heh - and, uh, after that I just sorta space out for about an hour.
Bob Porter: Da-uh? Space out?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah, I just stare at my desk; but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.

At the end of the film, Peter is working construction, which turns out to have a big plus side: you actually do something that seems to produce something. Working hard, as opposed to hardly working, turns out to trump distraction, that nagging feeling that you don't want to look too closely at what you are doing at the moment.

4. So back to the Sterling novel. This is how Corey Doctorow sees it:

"Distraction is the story of an America on the skids: economy in tatters, dollar collapsed, unemployment spiked, population on the move in great, restless herds bound together with networks and bootleg phones. The action revolves around Oscar Valparaiso, a one-of-a-kind political operator who has just put his man -- a billionaire sustainable architecture freak -- into the Senate and is looking for some downtime. But a funny thing happens on the way to the R&R: Oscar and his "krewe" (the feudal entourage who trail after him, looking after his clothes, research, security, systems and so on) end up embroiled in a complex piece of political theater, a media war between the rogue governor of the drowned state of Louisiana, the Air Force, the newly elected president, and a weird, pork-barrel science park in its own glassed-in dome."

I know this because I began googling distraction, first the novel (hey it comes up first when I search "distraction" on my local library database! and in Amazon!) and then the word itself (hey! Wikipedia has a sucky entry! I could rewrite it! But first I ought to revise that minimal entry I read last night on Jose Delgado, the mind control "scientist" I discuss in my dissertation). Then I started copying and pasting popular books on distraction (and, it turns out, its opposite: overcoming distraction, focusing, etc).

5. First, I found Damon Young’s book Distraction. He’s a youngish Australian philosopher, not a self help dude, so I was curious and clicked onto his site, which offered the following description in a font called Futura, which in itself is worth a visit to the site:

About Distraction

Most of us struggle with distraction every day: the familiar feeling that our attention is not quite where it should be.

But what is distraction?

In his lucid, timely book, Damon Young shows that distraction is more than too many stimuli, or too little attention. It is actually a matter of value – to be distracted is to be torn away from what is worthwhile in life. And for Young, what is most worthwhile is freedom: not simply rights or legal liberties, but the capacity to patiently, creatively craft one’s own life.

Exploring the lives of such luminaries as Henri Matisse, Karl Marx, Seneca and Henry James, Young exposes distraction in work, technology, art, politics and intimacy. With warmth and wit, he reveals what is most valuable, and what is best avoided, in the pursuit of a life of one’s own.

Click here to read about distraction on the BBC news. Click here to read an extract in Australia's Age newspaper.

So of course I clicked here to find out about distraction on BBC. And I clicked the other here to read an excerpt.

And all of this clicking and moving around and reading around before I'd even proceeded to the second book I'd decided to check out. I even read the comments at the end of the BBC Magazine article, which is another form of reading altogether. (Once I went to a TED site on prosthetics forwarded to me by my good friend Kevin, and proceeded to read for an hour or so the many many comments written first on the talk, and then on other comments, and then back to earlier comments or to the actual talk itself. Did I learn anything from this distracted reading? Hell yeah! In fact, it felt like the kind of search and deconstruct operation that I love the Net for.

6. I liked the gist of Young's argument, which is both oh so familiar (I am after all writing on the same topic and using many of the same rhetorical moves) and, well, deliciously distracting and entertaining. Here is a bit of his writing, reflecting on that moment when, on vacation in Greece, he interrupts his reverie and presence in beauty to take a cell phone call from his mum:

To recover from the distractions of the technological age, what's required is a more ambitious relationship to our tools - one that promotes our liberty instead of weakening it. If we can't escape technology, we can certainly enforce its limits, and our own. We can defer to the comforting noise of iPods, or we can seek moments of quiet attention and reflection. We can accept the stress of 24-hour availability, or we can reclaim our own rhythms. (I can answer the mobile phone, or savour Ithaca's salt and cyclamen.)

At the heart of these choices is a concern for what's humanly valuable: what encourages vitality, creativity, liberty, and perhaps even happiness. There are no simple tricks for achieving this; no quick fixes. We have to step back from urgency and familiar habit, and reconsider what we want from life, and why. We have to give up on the easy necessities of technology, and forge some of our own. We must be what the unthinking machines can never be: the custodians of ourselves.

There is a lot to like in his analysis, including the notion that there is a rhythm to our current machine-heavy lives, and there are other rhythms that are possible, and that we haven't quite gotten control over the music of our cyborg lives yet.

But this process of moving through a series of very fast searches, reads, clicks, and leaps is part of that rhythm, one I like and which maddens me. And this is the distracted cyborg in me, the one that loves that I can cover so much ground in so few minutes (as opposed to reading one sustained argument or book for an hour or two). I like hopping around things (you may have noticed my name is cybunny, and most friends call me Rabbit), and I like speed, and I also like the opposites of these things: the beauty of sustained observation or long periods of reading; the way things like sports creates a disciplined body that is focused and achieves moments of excellence; the slowing down of the organism, at a slow cooked and slowly enjoyed meal, or walking down a trail and noticing the pace of walking as opposed to driving or biking.

This is what he means by being the custodians of ourselves. Unintentionally, he might also be referring to the custodians who clean up after messes are made, which can also happen with loss of focus, trying to do too many things at once, and so screwing up on all of them.

7. And so I went back to the earlier list, and found these two compelling titles:

Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winired Gallagher

Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age by Maggie Jackson

And I stopped myself from going and finding out what others may have said about these books and arguments. Instead, I prepared to go upstairs and find my 15 year old and see if he is indeed reading after a night of distracted (and ADDish) listening to parts of at least 30 songs, watching Family Guy, and sitting with me at our (slow cooked and delicious home made chicken soup) dinner for at least eight minutes.

But I'd be lying if I didn't say that part of me was wandering back to what sounded like a familiar topic: the downsides of technology, the way technology itself now gets in the way of thinking technology use through, and the always already nostalgic dream of focus, attention, rapture that comes from living in sustained and reflective moments, strung together like pearls.

As they say in Firefly (another wonderful distraction): shiny.

I gotta go.