The Age of Distraction

Reading, Writing, and Politics in a High-Speed Networked Economy

Robert Hassan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351486248
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Connections between time, technology, and the processes of reading and writing make clear the links between experiences of what appear to be quite different phenomena. Reading and writing have functioned together in a particular way to build the world as we have known it for three thousand years. These interacting processes have now been transformed at their core and are building a different world, one where certainties of the previous era are disappearing and being displaced by what the author sees as a chronic and pervasive mode of cognitive distraction. Robert Hassan offers a perspective permeated by a sense of history, beginning with the invention of writing and the development of the skill of reading. Together with technological developments, these provide a unique view of the trajectory of modernity into late-modernity, and illustrate how the arc of progress has transformed. New modes of time, technology, and reading and writing are helping create a faster world where we know less about more-and forget what we know evermore quickly. What is the "time" of a thought? Is it possible to measure thinking? Can we consider knowledge or information, or reading and writing, as having temporal "rhythms"? These are questions Hassan tries to answer. So unfamiliar are we to thinking in such terms that they sound impossible. To a significant degree, time, thinking, and many forms of knowledge are the fruits of subjective experience. We connect experiences at superficial levels, where people have different experiences that may be objectively the same, but our interpretations will always diverge in respect of the "reality" we confront. This intersection of philosophy and communication takes the reader into new realms of analysis.

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1
This Other Temporality

Do I have Your Undivided Attention?

This is a book about a contemporary cultural cognitive condition called distraction. Attentive readers will have possibly noted the rather inelegant and overdone attempt at alliteration in that sentence, where five “Cs” collide, albeit quite gently, one after the other, causing a kind of speed-bump effect that serves, ideally, to slow the reader down a little bit. Longish sentences, like the one you have just read, can have a similar effect. There are a couple of points to be made in this observation. One is that advertising professionals (as well as book editors and publishers) tell us that to sell something to somebody, be it a brand of toothpaste, or car, or book, or idea, there must be a tactic employed, whereby the “hook” catches the attention of the reader and pulls him or her toward where you want them to go. The other point is that what is happening—and what is happening if you are still reading—is that a certain amount of cognitive traction is taking place, the effect of “interest” keeping you here on this page for a while longer. On the Internet, website designers routinely aim for something similar. They call it “sticky content” and it is the kind of stuff—and could conceivably be anything—that keeps eyeballs from wandering too quickly from Website to Website. The search-engine colossus Google has made a business out of tracking “stickiness” and selling advertising on the back of it. There will be much more on the Internet (and Google) later. What I want to do in this first chapter is to think from a different perspective about what is happening in the traction–distraction dialectic. The value of stickiness (or anti-distraction) to advertisers and booksellers is obvious. But what (commercial concerns aside) is actually happening when we are being distracted, or when efforts are made either by people in the world “out there” to get and sustain our attention, or when we ourselves make the conscious effort to remain with the process of reading and writing a little longer, and resist the impulse for the mind and the attention to wander? Why, indeed, does the concentration tend to lapse? Are we innately shallow creatures who are easily distracted and endlessly diverted? Or can we see this restlessness in another way, as some do, where instead of terming it distraction we can put a positive spin on it and call it “multitasking”, something that is supposedly a useful, efficient, and industrious skill for today’s world? Does it actually matter very much?

Writing this book would indicate that I think that it does, and deeply. As children at school we all learned that distraction is a bad thing. For the eyes to stray out the classroom window to the clouds or the playing field, or for the mind to roam to untold realms of fantasy and idleness was always seen to be to the detriment of the purpose of schooling—which was to learn, to absorb information and knowledge, and to become more or less rounded and functional individuals and citizens. Doubtless, some of us continued longer in our visual and mental wanderings. But we could be trained to moderate this and learn the discipline of sustained concentration. Others could learn to be creative within a distracted state. And yet others, indeed, learned to be more flexible and develop the ability to move in and out of all three modes. However, that age-old problem for kids and for adults too has come up against the unprecedented challenges of the “network society,” where lightning-speed information processing and its application have transformed the contexts in which we relate to information and knowledge. The classroom has changed; the workplace and the home space have changed. The effect is that never has it been so difficult not to be distracted, and never has our resistance to it been so low and feeble.

Why this is so will not become clear, nor solutions thinkable, until the problem of our now-chronic distraction is properly identified. Accordingly, I want to locate the ground zero of the malaise of chronic distraction in the realm of time. At one level this is obvious. If we try to concentrate on something, such as reading another page of Wittgenstein on a park bench when your mobile phone is buzzing, or when an e-mail delivery icon pops up when we are trying to write an essay at home or a report at work, then we are dealing with a specific relationship with time, a contextualized one where different things are competing for your time (your attention). At this surface level of analysis, the problem may be brushed aside as simply a fact of our busy networked lives, examples of what Dale Southerton (2003) calls the “time squeeze,” and is something that we all just need to cope with as best we can. However, unless we understand the nature of social time and our relationship with temporality, then not only will these problems become worse—which then becomes a political problem—but we will also understand them correspondingly less, because the network society, as I will show in Chapter 3, is one that is set on a path of open-ended acceleration , that is to say, if you think life today is getting faster, then you ain’t seen nothing yet. Today the imperative of needing to understand time as a changing social phenomenon is acute, because the new relationship with time—like the network society itself — permeates so much of our lives.

The first job then is to make clear and definite links between the experience of what may prima facie seem to be quite different phenomena. These are: time, technology , and the processes of reading and writing. I want to show how these have functioned together in a particular way to build the world as we have known it for nearly three hundred years. This has been the world of modernity. In very recent times, however, these interacting processes have been transformed at their core and are now building a very different world, a late-modern one where the sureties (such as they were) of the previous world are fast disappearing and being displaced by what I see to be a chronic and pervasive mode of cognitive distraction that is the expression of a world increasingly devoid of the Enlightenment impulses that gave it meaning and purpose in the first place.

The foregoing sentence reads like the beginning of a serious, if not familiar, tale. But this is not another whingeing critique of a dissipating late-modernity—nor is it just one more pleading case in support of an ossifying modernity. It is another way of looking at these ways of being and seeing through a very different lens. It is a perspective that is permeated above all by a theory of time, which, in its turn, throws a different light upon technological development, beginning with the invention of writing and the development of the skill of reading. Taken together, these will provide a unique view of the trajectory of modernity into a late-modernity, and illustrate how the arc of “progress” has been transformed into its opposite: that is to say, into a negative circle (or cycle) of presentism where past and future are compressing steadily into a constant now. It is here that new modes of time, new modes of technology, and new modes of reading and writing help create a faster and shallower world and more instrumental world where we know less about more—and forget what we know every more quickly.

Adorno and Horkheimer in their Dialectic of the Enlightenment, argued that reason and rationality had become “negative” and evolved into a “mere construction of means” where there was no way back to a logic of emancipatory reason (1986, 42). There is no doubt, as this book will show, that they were right and that a world obsessed with “means” has reached such heights of intensity that even Adorno and Horkheimer could scarcely have dreamed of. But that is not the end of the story. I am telling quite a different tale regarding the evolution of the Enlightenment-created world, one that suggests that if there is indeed a way back, then it will be through the finding of new intellectual, cultural, and temporal paths to follow. To do this it will be necessary, however, for the reader to persist with a challenging (challenging for me at least to think and write about) few opening pages, to then perhaps be rewarded by what I see to be a fresh perspective on our current reality. This new reality, a “temporalized” reality, is one that, contra Adorno and Horkheimer and their generations of adherents, is in fact full of promise and potential and ways of seeing that are not possible through the many current, and largely baleful, modes of analysis.

So to begin with some framing questions with which to consider the nature of and the relationship between the processes of temporality, technology, reading and writing: What is the “time” of a thought? Is it possible to measure thinking? Can we consider knowledge or information (a crucial distinction to be taken up later), or reading and writing, as having their own temporal “rhythms”? Can time move too fast for us? Questions such as these might seem akin to trying to grasp fresh air with your hands. So unfamiliar are we to thinking in such terms that such ideas sound (and feel) impossible. By contrast, so familiar are we to thinking and experiencing as “individuals,” that we assume, intuitively at least, that what goes on in my head, what I carry around as “thoughts” and “knowledge” may indeed have a generalized association—after all we share a common world, do not we? However, to borrow a phrase from the existentialist and psychiatrist R.D. Laing, “I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience” (1967, 16). To a significant degree, it seems, time, thinking, and many forms of knowledge are the fruits of subjective experience. These are ways of understanding, processes, and modes of being that we cannot really and fully share. We connect our experiences only at the most superficial level, where what you experience and what I experience may be objectively the same, but our interpretations will always diverge in respect of the “reality” we confront. Like two friends experiencing a football match. They will likely see the game in very different ways, with a myriad of factors shaping each interpretation, be it boredom, or excitement, or knowledge of the game in general or perhaps a comparative lack of it. Never can we “match” exactly our subjective experience of the world.

At one register of consciousness this observation on the apparent nature of experience is banal and expresses something we all “know” to be the way of the world. Experience—so this reasoning goes—is singular and is a manifestation (or possibly cause?) of our innate individuality. And so to say that thoughts and knowledge can have rhythms, pace, and a particular speed seems faintly absurd. Consequently, in our western, modernist culture, the subjective nature of experience and the elusive nature of time make for a rather difficult dovetailing. Indeed, it is even more problematic to think of “measuring” such interaction temporally. Time’s intangible qualities and its capacious elasticity between past, present, and future are sunk deep into our literary culture and we can glimpse here the extent of the challenge we face to properly grasp the nature of time. The French novelist Marcel Proust made a career out of such an approach to time. Somewhat ironically, he guaranteed himself in the process the “timelessness” of being admitted into the Western modernist canon. In his Remembrance of Things Past, Proust continually describes time as being an element of both social and individualized contexts. But he inscribes these with a special evanescent and dreamlike quality, ones that he is nonetheless careful to differentiate from the actual practice of sleep. In his discoursing on the subjective unconsciousness nature of sleep at the liminal portal of waking, Proust writes that: “… on those mornings (and this is what makes me say that sleep is perhaps unconsciously of the law of time) my effort to awaken consisted chiefly in an effort to make the obscure, undefined mass of the sleep in which I’d just been living enter in to the scale of time” (2006, 326).

Julia Kristeva has analyzed Proust’s approach to time and noted that his “style outlines this other temporality, which transcends measurement, space, and duration…” (1996, 233) (my italics). The philosopher’s perspective of time’s subjective essence continues with Elizabeth Grosz who, following the phenomenology of Husserl and Bergson, writes that “Time is neither fully present, a thing in itself, nor is it a pure abstraction, a metaphysical assumption that can be ignored in everyday practice. We can think it only in passing moments, through ruptures, nicks, cuts, in instances of dislocation, though it contains no moments or ruptures and has no being or presence, functioning only as continuous becoming” (2004, 5).

The multifaceted, subjective, ostensibly elusive and malleable nature of time is pretty clear in these texts. But this essence also forms the unconscious—and largely unreflected upon—backdrop to our collective social and public lives too. We only have to consider how, in many instances in many social and political cultures, what time “is” is always up for grabs, and therefore not readily “measurable” as real-world temporal rhythms. For example, there is a common view of history which states or implies that it unfolds over the “passage of time,” down through a great chain of events involving particular people and places, armies, inventions, revolutions, and so on. In this view, “traditions” can form as a result of this temporal congealing through ritual and practice, and their relative fixity as facts and events in written records seemingly allow us to be in touch with our collective pasts. History, then, might seem to have its own temporal rhythms, punctuated by patterns and sequences that may act as the basis for a chronologically measurable, historical time. However, as Eric Hobsbawm observes in the opening to his collection, The Invention of Tradition, many of those reassuring social and cultural rituals “which appear or claim to be old are often quite recent in origin and sometimes invented” (1983, 1). Similarly, Benedict Anderson, in his Imagined Communities argued powerfully that the concept of the nation, something that is the very epitome of “tradition” and historical time, is a figment of our collective imaginary, something we agree to be true, because the scope and “substance” of a nation is impossible to appreciate as a individual, if only because he or she can only ever experience a tiny part of the larger totality: so we “imagine” it, so as to give “confirmation of the solidity of a single community…moving onward through calendrical time” (1991, 27).

The social dynamics of invention and imagination working upon our sense of time is a continuing feature of the contemporary world. In the former Soviet Union, for example, the forward march of progress through “calendrical time” was a telos set in concrete by the Communist Party and its particular ideology. Through its hegemonizing grip upon the educational, industrial, and media institutions, the past was able to be invented and imagined and projected toward the future in such a way as to place communism, Soviet history, and the Party itself, in the best possible light. Post-1989, however, the psychic structures of history and tradition began to collapse and the institutions they formed began to crumble to reveal a sort of time void. New inventions, new traditions, and new perspectives [through, for example, the articulation of new historiographies (e.g., Brent 2009)] rushed into the space to give past, present, and future new shapes and textures and potential modes of experience. Accordingly, Russia’s past is presently being rearranged and reordered in accordance with the changed exigencies of new Russian power formations. Today there is a largely subterranean (in that it receives little media attention), but hugely significant battle being waged in Russia over what might be called, to use Proust’s title, “the remembrance of things past.” It is a battle between progressive civil society groups such as Memorial and the quasi-totalitarian state that is now in the saddle. Memorial wants to reclaim or simply to discover, through free and open study of the State Archives and other sources, alternative pasts that had been expunged from popular memory through Stalinist repression (Figes 2007). However, the new regime in Russia, threatened by this challenge to their own twenty-first-century brand of soft-Stalinism, continues to invent and inscribe narratives of the past that suit their present and future projects.

An example of these ongoing time wars surfaced in the seventieth anniversary of the outbreak of World War II in September 1939. In an article published on his official website, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin described the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939, which cleared the way for the Second World War, as “immoral.” Such a statement was on the face of it highly significant, as it seemed to suggest a new candor on the part of the Russian leadership, one that might be open to a fuller accounting of the past. However, this was as far as the criticism went. Putin’s article went on to throw a heavy obfuscatory blanket over the past by arguing that the “immorality” of the Pact was justified by the context of the times. The fact that the British had also treated with Hitler at Munich the year before, was held up as evidence by Putin that there were no innocents in the diplomacy of the late-1930s; and anyway, the root of the problem lay in the Allied diktat expressed through the Versailles Treaty of 1919 that placed an insurmountable burden of reparations upon Germany—something in which Russia played no part. And so a closer reading of Putin’s essay reveals that the Nazi-Soviet Pact was something supposedly forced upon the Russians, through circumstances created by the West (Putin 2009). All this is debatable up to a point. However, the essay makes no mention (and this would have been significant) of the “secret protocols” attached to the Pact which allowed for the brutal dismemberment of Poland in the war that was to come, nor of the systematic plunder of Poland by both the Nazis and the Soviets, nor the murder of fifteen thousand of the Polish officer class by the Soviet secret police in the forest of Katyn in 1940 (Snyder 2010).

As these instances show, temporality is rooted in the social, is subjectively and collectively experienced, is impressionably formed and reformed according to context and circumstance and ideological position, and is—as a consequence of these foregoing qualities—wholly and essentially dynamic.

It should be stated here and now that this broad view of time is for me deeply compelling. Time, because it is social, is also as diverse as the social. Time can be mysterious, but it is also as plain as the nose on your face. We can “possess” it in the form of individualized experience and memory, but modalities of power can also remake it for us in ways that are not necessarily to our advantage as thinking beings that wish to understand the reality of the world. Through being rooted in the social, time in this perspective is constituted by what social theory has termed “embedded” times. These are the “complex times of nature and social organization” that are at the very core of life (Adam 1998, 49). As we shall see, these embedded times are, in fact, the many and variegated rhythms that inscribe and modulate the tempo(s) of life in all its diversity. These embedded temporalities act as an internal and environmental force that comprise the baselines of existence, and are expressed, for example, in the cycles of dawn and sunset, in the repeating of seasons, in the emergent process of reproduction and death, in variable sequencing of waking and sleeping, in the patterns of cardiac beating of the heart, and in the rhythms of breathing.

Times that are embedded in the body and in nature are thus irreducible and act to shape our consciousness and so are of course elemental parts of what it is to be human. However, we barely give them a second thought. We move through these times unthinkingly because they (and therefore a possibly more intimate and insightful relationship with them) have been over ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 This Other Temporality
• 2 The Ghost in the Machine
• 3 Everything Nowadays is Ultra
• 4 We Are All Still Mesopotamian
• 5 The Chronic Distraction of Everyday Life
• 6 Canon
• 7 Considerations on the Prospects for Political Change
• Bibliography
• Index