Being honest about...................

 

.................................self-chosen distractions.

Michael has been thinking about this subject for a long while.  To wit:

Snippets ....................

 

....................from Maggie Jackson's Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age:

Cyberspace, in science fiction writer William Gibson's words, is a "consensual hallucination."

The fear was that the Internet would turn us all into hermits, and maladjusted hermits at that.

"I don't think people know how to socialize anymore, to sit down and come together, because there are so many alternatives.  They like to be entertained, not socialize."

We become attentional wanderers, sated by the mirage.

As economist Jeremy Rifkin reminds us, "the great turning points in human history are often triggered by changing conception of space and time."

A culture of divided attention fuels more than perpetual searching for lost threads and loose ends.  It stokes a culture of forgetting, the marker of a dark age.

Without safety nets of trust or secure traditions, he says, relations crumble into obsession and compulsion.  Or revenge.

Can we Google our way to wisdom?

But what constitutes a distraction? Are we paying attention to the screen or are we distracted by it?  The answer is slippery, tantalizing, daunting, for distraction is in the eye of the beholder.

We can create a culture of attention, recover the ability to pause, focus, connect, judge, and enter deeply into a relationship or an idea, or we can slip into numb days of easy diffusion and detachment. . . . The choice is ours.

judge well.........................

 Attention is not always within our control.  The unexpected, the changeable, the novel, even the habitual in life abduct our focus, intrude upon our awareness, and pull us off course for a time.  Attention is like a second skin, a meeting ground for our ever-present grappling with external and internal worlds.  Yet well used and nurtured carefully, our networks of attention are our foremost means to shaping our lives.  These networks give us extraordinary ways to master ourselves and our environment, offering the key to growth, connection, happiness.  Accepting a culture of eroding attention relinquishes this potential for sculpting our individual and collective futures.  To paraphrase Walter Mischel's caveat on will, we don't always want to exercise our highest powers of attention, yet if we cannot focus, observe, or judge well, the choice is lost.  Will we slip into a dark age of distraction?  At journey's end, I searched for final clues in contrasting realms of art and science where attention is nonetheless similarly dissected, rekindled, and venerated.  To reverse a darkening time, we must understand, strengthen, and lastly value attention.

-Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age

my research librarian..................

      Another skill is the recall of names and facts.  By the time you are fifty, your brain is as crowded with information as the New York Public Library.  Meanwhile, your personal research librarian is creaky, slow, and easily distracted.  When you send him to get some information you need—say, someone's name—he takes a minute to stand up, stops for coffee, talks to an old friend in the periodicals, and then forgets where he was going in the first place.  Meanwhile, you are kicking yourself for forgetting something you have known for years.  When the librarian finally shows back up and says, "That guy's name is Mike," Mike is long gone and you are doing something else.

-Arthur C. Brooks,  From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life

the end of the "in the background" posts?.....

      In middle age, the prefrontal cortex degrades in effectiveness, and this has several implications.  The first is that rapid analysis and creative innovation will suffer—just what we would expect when looking at the evidence on decline.  The second is that some specific, once-easy skills become devilishly hard, like multi-tasking.  Older people are much more easily distracted than younger people.  If you have—or had—teenage kids, you might have found yourself telling them they can't study effectively while listening to music and texting their friends.  Actually, it is you who can't do that.  If fact, older adults can enhance their cognitive effectiveness precisely by taking their own advice: turn off the phone and music and go someplace completely quiet to think and work.

-Arthur C. Brooks, From Strength to Strength

a raggedy coherence (sort of like this blog?).....

      Now most of us are information-age workers, doers and planners both.   No men stand over us with stopwatches.  We are our own efficiency experts, relentlessly driving ourselves to do more, ever faster.  This relentless quest for productivity drives the nascent but rapidly burgeoning field of "interruption science," which involves the study of the pivot point of multitasking. For multitasking is essentially the juggling of interruptions, the moment when we choose to or are driven to switch from one task to another.  And so to dissect and map these moments of broken time is to shed light on how we live today.  That emerges, in the jargon of leading interruption scientist Gloria Mark, is a portrait of "work fragmentation."  We spend a great deal of our days trying to piece our thoughts and our projects back together, and the result is often an accumulation of broken pieces with a raggedy coherence all its own.  After studying workers at two West Coast high-tech firms for more than one thousand hours over the course of a year, Mark sifted the data—and was appalled.  The fragmentation of work life, she says, was "far worse that I could ever have imagined."

-Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age