In Madness, Rack, and Honey, Mary Ruefle writes that “distraction is distracting us from distraction.” That is, unproductive and perhaps even harmful “distractions” are keeping us from the necessary poetic work of being bored, of having time to look around. Tellingly, the lecture with this quote appears to date from the 1990s, when that most insidious enabler of distractions, the smart phone, had yet to enter every American pocket.
I was reminded of Manoush Zomorodi’s book, and, before that, podcast series, Bored and Brilliant, whose central premise is that our minds need downtime in order to forge connections. Without boredom, brilliance is harder, too. This is why we come up with great ideas in the shower or as we drift off to sleep. The natural breaks in a day that used to allow these gaps are increasingly fillable, and filled, with a never-ending stream of (mostly) inanity. We don’t even wait at red lights without checking our phones.
Arnold Bennett, rather smugly, told his late-Victorian readers to use their commute to meditate on the writings of Marcus Aurelius, rather than giving in to the lure of the newspaper. By 2001, David Allen’s Getting Things Done was suggesting that we use the time to get a head start on our office e-mail.
The difficulty is two-fold. Firstly, in a culture that fetishizes productivity without a clear sense of what that means as a holistic concept, our office jobs are increasingly difficult to corral into office hours. It was suggested by my boss that I link my work e-mail to my personal smart phone, despite the absolute non-urgency of any messages I receive. A high-powered female executive recently told me the story a of getting a call about a difficult accounting problem, while she was in the labor and delivery ward giving birth. Books and blogs now sometimes recommend not trying to answer every e-mail as soon as it comes in, as though this is is a secret and controversial wisdom.
The social is following suit. If having “nothing to do” is something of a sin (see, above, fetishization of productivity), having no place to talk about it, or, heaven forbid, no “likes”, is even worse. Facebook thrives on comments on every birthday and life event, even for casual acquaintances. Text messaging allows asynchronous and amorphous conversations that have neither beginning nor end.
The other expectation is perhaps more pernicious. That is, we expect, and desire, the jolt of connection that comes from social media, or even the illusion of importance that comes from “needing” to answer work e-mail at home. And, especially for social media, software and website developers are quick to exploit that need. Facebook, for an easy example, quite rapidly dispensed with the chronological news feed. You can no longer ever be sure that scrolling just a bit further won’t reveal something “important” that you almost missed. Just when you are, an automatic refresh scrambles everything again.
Being aware of the situation does not offer an apparent solution. Our most meaningful social interactions have been displaced onto electronic entities that want us to want them. It isn’t a healthy human behavior to opt out of meaningful social interaction, but it is increasingly harder to find that in an offline setting. In the sense of being in charge of our own time, of allowing space in our lives to think, instead of allowing a digital environment to curate our thinking on our behalf, a firm “no, thanks” makes the most sense. But part of the reason social media is so pervasive is that it is, truly, a medium that integrates perfectly with our geographically disparate modern condition.
That is, it is a site for both very real meaning and very disruptive non-meaning. What do borders around that look like, and how can we draw them?
Jessica Thinks 