Tonight I was waiting for the Scout meeting to end and inching through a chapter of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. The author would not approve of what I just did there. That's an affiliate link to the Kindle version, which is (a) tempting you to click away instead of reading the words I am writing for your consideration and (b) suggesting that you purchase an e-book instead of a nice old-fashioned book-book and (c) monetizing your descent into a state of being "distracted by distraction from distraction." (That quote is from the Four Quartets, but it seems prescient, no?) Nicholas Carr says the links in online text turn reading into a constant exercise in decision-making. Do I click this one? how about this one? maybe this one? Carr says the reason we're all more impatient with long-form articles than we used to be is that reading has become more cognitively strenuous for us.
Yikes.
In some ways the book seems dated. It was published in 2011, which is practically, like, the Pleistocene Era in internet terms. He's still talking about the Blackberry, and I'm pretty sure one of those guys in a Lascaux cave painting used his Blackberry to email his wife: "Hunt successful! Butchering now. Liver y/n?" But in some ways it seems like a warning we have failed to heed. Today I was in a waiting room at the doctor's office next to a grown man, in his 50s, playing a pew-pew-pew video game on his phone with the sound on. It's no longer unusual for everyone at an intersection to wait while the person closest to the just-turned-green stoplight pulls his head out of his inbox and returns his attention to the task of driving his car. People have heard the message that combining phone use and driving is dangerous, and in surprisingly large numbers they have concluded that they do not care.
At the tail end of the Scout meeting I was talking to a pal from church who is trying to persuade a relative to attend our fall women's retreat. The biggest barrier? The retreats are no-phone zones. The relative manages a pharmacy, and she has to be available by phone at all times. "When we go on vacation," said my friend, "she's always on her phone. If something happens at the pharmacy she has to be able to address it right away." But...it's a chain pharmacy. There are two of them right here in Gladlyville. What are they going to do if she needs surgery? When did constant contact with an employee turn into a reasonable expectation?
The retreat program we were involved with as grad students asked retreatants to surrender their watches for the weekend. It's got to be a harder sell these days, asking college students to lay down their phones for 48 hours.
I am on day 29 of Cal Newport's 30-day social media fast. I haven't peeked at Facebook or Twitter or Ravelry, and it's mostly been a good thing. (Anyone who has been sending me Twitter DMs might have a different view of the situation, though.) I don't know that it has really made a difference in my capacity to sit down and FOCUS on DEEP THOUGHTS. I don't know what happens on day 31, either. But I am troubled by the erosion of my capacity to think hard about hard things, and I am going to see what I can do to shore it up again.
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