Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘Broadly speaking, there are two schools of thought on attention. The first argues that we haven’t lost our ability to focus, it has been wrested, even “stolen”, from us by technology. In this view we’re little more than lab rats lured by notifications and algorithms, pings and dings in a large-scale social experiment. We may develop strategies for resisting those dopamine dispensers, such as blocking software or switching to a “brick phone”. But the game is rigged against us.

Those in the second camp may scoff at this: they maintain that most of our struggles with focus are more to do with self-control. There is no notification that can distract us unless we are on some level willing to be distracted. Even the notion of a “shorter attention span” may provoke scepticism. Instead, could it be that you’re just not that motivated? Whichever worldview you subscribe to – that our attention has been hijacked by our devices, or by our lack of self-discipline – they share an element of fatalism: there is either little you can do, or you’re just not doing enough.’ (from the Guardian)

‘It’s really sad. The main thing about the phone is that you’re no longer where you are. You’re no longer in the room. You’re no longer anywhere. The opportunities to have an interaction with the things around you are taken away. I just see the world as richer without the phone. I have a friend who’s a writer. No matter what we’re doing or whom he’s around, he’s on his phone. We were sitting out in a parking lot, and there was a guy who came out who was in this full orc costume with a shield. I thought, I’m not going to say anything. Let’s see if my friend looks up. The guy passed right by him and — it was outside a hotel — tried to get through a revolving door. There’s all this bump ba bump ba bump, and if my friend would have looked up, he would have seen an orc go by! But he never looked up! Then later I told him, and he’s like, “That didn’t happen!” It totally did happen!’ (Lynda Barry in the New York Times)

‘In the past few years, in part because of how frayed my mind felt, I started avoiding my Twitter and Instagram feeds altogether. From this remove, I sat down and wrote out on paper what it was that I really wanted from these platforms. The answer ended up being a sense of recognition among peers, connection to people with shared interests and whose work I admire and the ability to encounter new, unexpected ideas. As opposed to algorithms, I wanted these new things to be recommended by individuals who had reasons to like them, like the weekly set on my local college radio station by a D.J. whose wide-ranging taste I’m at pains to describe, but reliably enjoy. Really, I think I just wanted everything to have a little more context.

With this in mind, I slowly started piecing something else together — at the time, a mix of emails, group chats and RSS feeds. But finding more context often means going more slowly and as I did so, I was confronted by my old habits and expectations around time and pacing. Information no longer came in through one nonstop fire hose, and even though that was precisely what I had complained about, the change made me uncomfortable and dissatisfied. Was something missing? The management scholar Allen C. Bluedorn has written that patterns of entrainment can persist in an organization long after the original zeitgeber is gone, and this is a bit like what happened to me. Years of inhabiting a temporal attitude had left a deep indentation on my mind, as if I were waking up early for a job I no longer had.

Over time, the indentation softened, and I got used to a different definition of what it meant to be connected. In the absence of the constant updates, signs of other tempos began to enter the picture: the migratory ducks arriving in the lake nearby, the long email from a friend that only comes once every few months and requires my full attention, the unglamorous city council meeting, the long, historical arc of something just now cresting in the news. My breathing, eating, sleeping body felt more real, with more traction among the sensory minutiae of the everyday. I even felt I could see further in both directions: into my past with all its failures and triumphs, and into the future where I might do something as-yet unimaginable. But what I’m describing is not a linear progression or a once-and-for-all kind of story. Now and then, I get remagnetized to that old clock and have to remember to step away.’ (Jenny Odell in the New York Times)

As with neuroscience, I have many articles in my Notes about the damage devices are doing to our attention spans – or that we are doing to ourselves with our devices. I even had a note to combine the latter two observations.