On Time: Finding Your Pace in a World Addicted to Fast. Catherine Blyth

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СКАЧАТЬ of our lives … [it] interrupts our ability to have a thought or a daydream, to imagine something wonderful because we’re too busy bridging the walk from the cafeteria back to the office on the cell phone.’ Essentially, we are participating in an unfolding experiment in a new way to be. There is no opt-out for anybody participating in the economy or a social life. If every second is colonized, the notion of free time is itself a misnomer.

      Why did Apple mastermind Steve Jobs ban his offspring from using Apple’s iPad? I suspect, like Spielberg, he feared the death of daydreams. I do. It is impossible to imagine today’s teen spending hours lying on a bed, watching shadows tickle the ceiling, grubbing up thoughts, as I once did, not unless a mindfulness app explains how.

      Our technologies are full of useful potential. But only if used as tools. What Jobs will have known, and is increasingly widely understood, is that digital media are addictive. Pierre Laurent, formerly of Microsoft and Intel, who also forbade his children computers or smartphones until the age of twelve, explained why one glance into the wormhole of Facebook can easily turn into a lost afternoon:

      Media products are designed to keep people’s attention. In the late 1990s, when I was working at Intel and my first child was born, we had what was called the ‘war of the eyeballs’. People don’t want you to wander and start playing with another product, so it has a hooking effect … And there’s a risk to attention. It’s not scientifically proven yet, but there’s an idea that attention is like a muscle that we build. It’s about being able to tune out all the distraction and focus on one thing. When you engage with these devices, you don’t build that capacity. It’s computer-aided attention; you’re not learning to do it.

      What Laurent is suggesting is that not only are media products designed to have a hypnotic appeal, but their strength might weaken our apparatus for concentrating. For evidence to support this theory, how about the 2015 report by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, Students, Computers and Learning? It concluded that ‘most countries that invested heavily in education related IT equipment’ witnessed no appreciable improvement in student attainment over ten years. OECD education director Andreas Schleicher added: ‘Students who use tablets and computers very often tend to do worse than those who use them moderately.’ Moderate use requires self-restraint – but this is not something digital media encourages. If you never feel the slave of a smartphone, congratulations; however, it may only be a matter of time.

      Theoretically our horizons are broader, our intellectual reach enhanced by computers’ memory, pace and data, yet our engagement is often shallow, compressed. We cram thoughts into ever slighter packets of time and space (140 characters or less). Our powers of concentration are also depleted if our time is monopolized by what writer Linda Stone described as ‘continuous partial attention’, grazing multiple media instead of zoning in and focusing – the old and still optimal way to get things done.

      Snapchat demonstrates how slyly digital media evoke compelling time pressures. Users exchange messages that self-destruct in seconds, eradicating potentially embarrassing backlogs. This should make time feel freer (unlike email silt, which haunts our inbox). But Snapchat does not offer the deeper social satisfactions of face-to-face contact: it scratches the social itch rather than satisfying it. Each time a message vanishes it creates a void – and the compulsion to fill it.

      No gadget or app yet – not even by Apple – has added a millisecond to our day. Arguably, technology shortens it, since our distracting toys rip gigantic holes in the space-time continuum because our brain cannot compute frictionless, virtual time; we evolved to grasp it through memorable experience. The stimuli delivered by this technology locks us into dopamine loops, often triggering fight-or-flight stress responses, even as our bodies are perfectly still – stranding us on a toxic neurochemical plateau, unable to escape it in the way we are designed to (by fighting or fleeing). Meanwhile the hours that are hoovered up by gadgets must be taken from something else – such as daydreams.

      I did not sign up to a life divided between a load of junk hours and a few good ones, but this is exactly the deal we risk striking if life becomes a spectator sport. Who will lie on their deathbed fondly remembering their Facebook posts, unnecessary work meetings, or zingers on Twitter? Life gains perspective from experiences – first-hand ones that you can share.

      Spend too much time online and you become less yourself. Social media addict Andrew Sullivan grew so unsettled that he could not read a book:

      In the last year of my blogging life, my health began to give out. Four bronchial infections in 12 months had become progressively harder to kick. Vacations, such as they were, had become mere opportunities for sleep. My dreams were filled with the snippets of code I used each day to update the site. My friendships had atrophied as my time away from the web dwindled. My doctor, dispensing one more course of antibiotics, finally laid it on the line: ‘Did you really survive HIV to die of the web?’

      He went off on a retreat to relearn how to live in the moment. One day he noticed something beautiful – then was beside himself when he realized that he had no phone to share it with his followers.

      The quality of your time – how fast, fun or deadly it feels – depends on the quality of your attention. Our attention is us. It is no coincidence that yoga, meditation, mindfulness apps, and – what must be the definition of voluntary tedium – colouring books for adults, are boom industries amid all these time pressures. Some claim that such trends reflect a thirst for spirituality in a godless world. In fact, what unites them is that they all help us to focus our minds. We turn to these tools to nurture our capacity to pay attention. And well we might. Otherwise someone else will snatch it.

      A great battle for our attention rages. Each time you surf the net or saunter into an online store, you participate in tacit tests designed to sniff out smarter ways to detain you in these wonderlands, so they can convert what were once experiences and opinions into crunchable data. Google routinely runs parallel experiments to see which web pages intercept the most pairs of eyes, which shade of blue holds the greatest goggle-appeal. Alas, the trillions of insights aggregated by algorithms from the information we generously donate when we go online exceed the ingenuity of a billion distracting Shakespeares.

      Eyeball grabbing is not always subtle. Witness the shouty, freakshow journalism that empurples once-stately broadsheet newspapers, desperate to monetize flighty readers with clickbait (the more people click on an article, the higher the advertising rates). Witness the soap opera storylines: psychopaths, aeroplane crashes and baby theft are standard fare in hitherto staid fictional villages. Witness computer games like Candy Crush, devised to render you a fairground duck, ready to be hooked. In this context, the allure of slow-moving Nordic television serials might appear out of kilter. It is not that thrillers gain gravitas when mumbled in Danish, but that viewers have to read the subtitles or they lose the thread. How delightful and rare to concentrate wholly on one thing, without a gadget.

      Think of those intriguing, big-bottomed celebrities or grumpy cats whose mountain of renown is founded on a pea of proficiency – primarily their talent at diverting vast numbers of us from what we should be doing, perhaps for ten seconds, but fast – and long enough for advertisers to pay top dollar to hire eye-space on their YouTube channel. Now ask this: who benefits most from our increasingly waylayable attention? When you consider that advertising is the chief force driving the internet’s development today, the implications are scary. Who wants to end up feeling like a bystander in other, more scintillating, fat-bottomed lives?

      ‘Several “generations” of children have grown up expecting parents and care takers to be only half-there,’ observed sociologist Sherry Turkle. A dangerous message to send anyone, let alone a child. Paying attention is not just polite and loving but a skill and, like sensible time use, we need to cultivate it. Rare is the soul who likes hearing ‘I’m bored’ or feels relaxed watching children climb trees, yet both such experiences are СКАЧАТЬ