You’ve heard that John Mayer has decided to do a digital detox with no Twitter, Facebook, or any other social networking site, no text messages and no entertainment or gossip sites, for an entire week. He likens the digital cleanse to defragmenting a hard drive, which is a pretty good analogy. You know what it also is? It’s a laughable underestimation of the power of the digital zeitgeist in which we find ourselves. It’s each of us trying to regain some individual control over where we spend our attention, as individuals, and it underscores our decaying ability to do so.
I don’t fault Mayer or anyone else taking part, at all, but the question is: what is everybody going to do after the week is up? If giving up our default immersion in various sorts of media for a week is such a big deal, something worth publicizing and encouraging others to take part in, maybe a closer examination of what exactly all this media is doing to our lives and available attention, is warranted.
I’d like to take a break from programming tips today and point you to this article by Jim Stogdill over at O’Reilly Radar, that articulated very well a lot of the mixed feelings that I know I’ve been having not only about social media, but the effects of it ALL– the information overload by which I am voluntarily included and increasingly overwhelmed. Well so too apparently is John Mayer, if that’s any comfort. This is a seminal article, tapping into a zeitgeist which is unmistakably digital and that has to be seen as utterly, breathtakingly, increasingly pervasive if you dare, and are able, to take a step back from the six-to-ten things competing for your attention right now.
I am perfectly informed…and I’m utterly distracted… I wish my brain wasn’t being trained to need these constant microburst’s of stimulation.
Stogdill isn’t shy about detailing his descent into perpetual distraction. The article is wry, but I challenge any geek or person of above-average bandwidth not to find some of himself in the dead-serious kernel of Stogdill’s ambivalence and bafflement:
For the last couple of years I’ve jacked in to this increasing bit rate of downloadable intellectual breadth and I’ve traded away the slow conscious depth of my previous life. And you know what? Now I’m losing my self. I used to be a free standing independent cerebral cortex. My own self. But not any more. Now I’m a dumb node in some uber-net’s basal ganglia.
Stogdill offer no solutions for his/our predicament, and this is what makes the article so fascinating- it’s an honest account of someone at a crossroads who does not yet have a rational answer for his dilemma as to which way to continue going, but is somehow compelled to continue on anyway.
I simply don’t know how to proceed in a way that will keep the information flow going but in a manner that doesn’t damage my ability to produce work of my own.
And as to implications:
The very technology that makes our collective integration possible also distracts us from advancing it. In equilibrium, distraction and ambition square off at the singular point of failed progress.
To the extent that our attention, maybe even our consciousness, seems to be subordinated increasingly to indiscriminate attraction to endless information, you have to wonder at some point: just who the hell is driving the bus?
It is nothing you can point to, and the digital zeitgeist, faceted into infinity as it is, is also far too comprehensive to be controlled by any one entity, sinister or otherwise (I think). But if our attention is driven less than it used to be by our own decisions and preferences, are we seeing the beginnings of a true collective consciousness? Is it melodramatic to even suggest? The last four paragraphs are quite breathtaking–read the article, and finish it, if you can.
(Forgive me this tangent, and it’s probably crazy: we always assumed that eventually we would create machines that would be hardly distinguishable from ourselves. But maybe we will become so affected by our -machines- and the environments that they now constitute, that our own transformation into something new becomes the real story.
