My desktop, riddled with distractions

Sometimes I find myself popping open a browser window with no purpose in mind, just as a dumb reflex. This worries me. Even though I’m a happy participant in today’s strange new world of 140-character dispatches, status updates, and data feeds, it’s wrecking hell on my attention span. Every technology demands a toll and these days I’m finding it difficult to write beyond 500 words or read more than a half-hour at a stretch. This is not good.

Every generation wrestles with its inventions. As the 20th century opened, there were fears that the wireless telegraph would destroy the notion of solitude and private space. In the 1920s, people complained that a morning and evening edition of the newspaper would tax the public’s attention and mark the end of thoughtful journalism. Maybe they were right. As Daniel Boorstin pointed out in his landmark 1961 book The Image, every new space for content must be replenished on a weekly, daily, sometimes hourly basis.

First written over fifty years ago, these words from a cranky British lawyer named C.G.L. Du Cann still strike a nerve:

The Environment of Period. “To some extent if you live a busy social life you can hardly escape your period. The telephone, the motor-car, the radio, the television set, the talking three-dimensional film, the Comet air-liner, and the rest, will inevitably impinge upon your attention. But the important thing, of course, is to take full advantage of these advantages so far as you may.

Nor can you escape the note of your period.

For instance, this is an age of speed and haste. You may resolve that you dislike hurry, scurry, and flurry (an excellent mental attitude). But only to a certain extent can you move in modern London life with slow dignity. The rushing omnibuses will not wait . . . devices in offices and factories speed up the tempo of existence. Doubtless a good deal of the speed is of more apparent than real value, and though work is done faster less is done. For instance, the modern writer has shorthand, typewriting, and even planatyping perhaps, as well as the dictaphone, to help him to increase output. Yet where is the modern playwright or novelist whose life-output exceeds the enormous number of words turned out with a hand-driven quill-pen by Shakespeare, Scott, Dickens, or Trollope?

Possibly this is a period of distraction, as well as of speed. We do not concentrate upon one thing for long periods as our fathers did. Life has far too many complications. There are more and more varied activities, capable of pursuing us wherever we are, home, restaurant, place of work, street, and so on.

‘Never run after a bus or a woman, there’ll be another along in a minute’ may be a cynicism, but it has its lesson Pace can kill. Distraction can be so constant as to drive one distracted, and prevent the doing or thinking of anything worth while.

So, while you are a child of your age, do not forget that there are tendencies in it that, in their exaggerated form, require to be resisted, just as in their advantageous form they require to be accepted.”

— C.G.L. Du Cann. Teach Yourself to Live, 1955

 
Moving to Brooklyn in 1984, the family electro act responsible for “Jam On It” sensed the same thing and recorded a chilling counter-argument to the growing fascination with the personal computer that was best expressed in Kraftwerk’s Computer World.

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Newcleus – Computer Age (Push the Button)
from Computer Age 7″. Disques Vogue, 1984.

Although alarmist, these lyrics deserve a proper citation. Keep in mind that they were written 25 years ago:

Push the button
(Are we under their control, or are they under our control, or what?)
Computer age is now
Everyone must have a machine
They say it’s gonna make life easier,
well, I can’t stand it….

They say we should put them in control
Well, maybe next we’ll give them a soul
I guess we must now think that we’re gods,
While we’re less men than ever

I know the Lord cannot be too glad
In fact, I’m sure he must be quite mad
To see us take His role from our lives 
And give it to computers

For here we sit in our easy chairs
As our machines decide how we’ll fare
Who will suffer, who will survive?
It’s up to the computers

Push the button!
(Are we under their control, or are they under our control, or what?)

Perhaps this is preamble for my own concerns as I reconsider the purpose of this humble blog. I’ve been carrying on in this space for nearly five years now and it’s become an odd mixture of techno music, design efforts, snippets from America, and personal and political rants. Maybe I’ll keep doing more of the same. Or perhaps it’s time to retool things. Just a heads up that KinoSport might get erratic.