JOLLY DAYS

The Distracted Mind

[via Denis Dutton]

In a way this article about the distracted character of modern life seems obvious — obviously true.

…a chronic distractee like the rest of us, noticed that he was finding it increasingly difficult to immerse himself in a book or a long article – “The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”

Instead he now Googles his way though life, scanning and skimming, not pausing to think, to absorb. He feels himself being hollowed out by “the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self – evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the ‘instantly available’”.

How could we not be all devolving into a shallower state derived from our own volition? We buy the stuff that later distracts us and feel affection for all the features which often amounts to additional forms of distraction. TS Eliot is quoted in the article: “Distracted from distraction by distraction”.

How can you compare with earlier times? What another time was like — if there were more emotional or intellectual depth, more continuity of thought? Surely people seem to read and write the more they use the internet. I do wonder about the level of that writing and thinking though. There is a common tendency to seek agreement rather than reach deeper for the ambiguities and the web and Google make it easier to find those who agree accreting into the extremes of crowd behavior — the dumbest among them driving the lead, most evident in politics.

You could say that Rauschenberg's work with its woven images made evident the changes in modern consciousness early on. Or go back to Abstract Expressionism to make a similar point. Picasso's fractured cubist images might also tell us something about the previous century, where that which was broken wasn't attention but continuity of belief. Freud, Einstein, Marx, all questioned what were thought to be verities — they did more than question; they forever loosed conceptual certainty from the shore. With it our peace of mind drifted ceaselessly out to sea.

But hasn't the contemporary distracted mind an additional etiology? Isn't it the decades of commercials and advertisements that truncate thought and sense, often offending by their occurrence after emotionally trying dramatic moments in the shows they are slicing into? Aren't they responsible for what might indeed be a dumbing down, but most assuredly is a deadening — a dissociation. Virtual reality might not be all it is cracked up to be.