Look Over There!

What I read: We’ve always been distracted by Joe Stadolnik. Published February 2, 2023.

My readers who watch RuPaul’s Drag Race will probably recognize the title of this post. It’s the iconic line Jaida Essence Hall said during the competition to humorously distract the judges. Throughout our lives, we’re encouraged to look over there with there being anywhere else but what’s in front of us that perhaps needs our attention more.

Despite an abundance of books, articles, and productivity gurus proclaiming we’re now monumentally distracted when in the past we weren’t, the truth is we’ve always been distracted.

Joe Stadolnik recounts how during the 1st century CE ancient Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger was worried that the “multitude of books” was a distraction. Yes, books. Nowadays, we’d consider someone with their nose regularly pressed into a book for hours at a time to be intensely focused and anything but distracted.

In the 12th century, Chinese philosopher Zhu Xi thought the technology of printing was a distraction. In the 14th century, a well-known Italian scholar and poet had similar complaints about the growing number of books.

For those who might not think of books or printing as “technologies,”, they most definitely were cutting edge technologies at the time of their emergence.

Throughout the centuries many people have proclaimed that whatever newfangled information technology emerged was a damaging distraction. Writing. Printing. Books. Radio. Television. Fast forward to today and digital technologies are being blamed on an escalating crisis of distraction.

When I read the next section, it made me think of a book I’m currently reading, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential, by Tiago Forte, that tells the reader how to offload information, ideas, insights, and other tidbits that occupy our brain so that the brain isn’t burdened with attempting to retain it all. It eliminates the unnecessary distraction of attempting to retain the onslaught of information and ideas that constantly pop into our brains. This is something I’ve done intuitively for years. The book is quite good.

For as long as technologies of writing and reading have been extending the mind, writers have offered strategies for managing that interaction and given advice for thinking properly in media environments that appeared hostile to ‘proper’ thought. It’s not hard to find past theories of the ways that technologies, such as printed books or writing, shaped thought in past millennia.

The various ways we adapt our thinking to modern technologies and realities are forms of brain hacks. These are clever approaches to thinking and remembering better when presented with new ways information is communicated, stored, retrieved, and utilized.

Historian Ayelet Even-Ezra alludes to writing (and diagraming) as a tool that fosters robust thinking and deeper reflection.

Even-Ezra makes the branching diagram a crucial device of an extended medieval mind, specific to its moment: it was a tool for thinking that could reconcile ‘complexity and simplicity, order and creativity, simultaneously’. Through it, the mind could be unburdened.

Diagraming along with writing and other such technologies reshaped cognition. We quite literally think differently because of them. Their use becomes a mechanism to extend and organize the brain.

There is a long history of the rise of new information technologies and how we use them being of concern to contemporaries. Even the reading of novels, now considered a virtuous practice, was considered by some a pathology. Yes, pathology.

The ‘voracious reader’ presents as the mind of that intellectually malnourished, overstimulated junkie diagnosed by Petrarch, strung out on a diet of flimsy texts: ‘frenzied by so many matters, this mind can no longer taste anything’. Don Quixote characterised the pathological reader, so enthralled by his fictitious books of romance that his mind forgets reality. In Jane Austen’s England, around the turn of the 18th century, as more women and a growing middle class began to read novels, warnings were issued against their unhealthy effects. Concerned observers in the early 1800s wrote that a ‘passion for novel reading’ was ‘one of the great causes of nervous disorders’ and a threat to the ‘female mind’. Watch out, one wrote in 1806, for ‘the excess of stimulus on the mind from the interesting and melting tales, that are peculiar to novels’.

Perhaps it’s the human condition to blame technological developments for modern social ills. But blaming technology whether it’s printed books, the internet, or smartphones for all of our supposed distraction problems seems myopic.

Perhaps we’re so concerned with focus because we forget that life isn’t meant to be a long series of incredibly focused moments. Might our success- and wealth-driven culture add to our concern about distraction since non-productive downtime is practically a sin in some circles. Does advertising give us debilitating and distracting fomo that we’re missing out on being super cool or doing the next cool thing? Maybe we need to think about how we adapt to the new technological realities rather than bemoan their existence and engage in the folly that we can somehow eliminate them from our lives. No, we can’t. They’re here to stay.

I’m all for focus. I get that it’s important. But I don’t think eliminating distractions is realistic. If anything, we’re likely to continue to be more distracted by technologies, increasing amounts of information, and a world that grows in complexity each day.

At best, each of us must craft our unique ways we focus when we want to attend to something without the default assumption that the best way to do that is to chuck technology entirely aside. I mean, per this article, books are an information technology. Are we ready to cast books aside?

Modern technologies offer an abundance of new information storage, processing, and retrieval options. They’re not a distraction. They’re tools. At least that’s how I see it.

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