If the ‘Elastic Mind’ Snaps: A Lenten Lullaby
By Porter Anderson (@Porter_Anderson) | February 20, 2015 |
Image – IStockphoto: nastco
This will be my last post until Monday, April 13,2015.
No, not me. (You wish.)
Kathy Pooler
No, that’s a colleague, the memoirist Kathy Pooler. She’s a good, cold-weather Catholic, mind you, so Lent means a lot more to her than it does to troppo Protestants like me.
Following a retreat with some author-colleagues, Pooler has decided to cut her exposure to social media way back for Lent. She writes:
Being away with these treasured friends got me in touch with my own need to step back—rest, refresh, renew. After five-plus years of nonstop weekly blogging and intense social media involvement, I have decided to…go on my own Lenten sabbatical.
She’ll have a few guest posts going up, and she’ll check email. But, she writes, “I will limit my time on Facebook and Twitter to automated sharing of guest posts. This will mean turning off my social media notifications on my iPhone.”
So now we can talk about her all we want. Just kidding. Pooler goes on:
I know that limiting my social media presence will be a supreme challenge as I so love connecting with others. But I also know I need to take care of myself; to step back and reflect before I can come back and be all I need and want to be. And it fits in with my mantra to “simplify.” Until we meet again, I wish you all peace and quiet moments of reflection during this Lenten season. I look forward to returning in April refreshed and renewed. I plan to share the lessons learned when I return.
Therese Walsh
Aside from the fact that Pooler turns out to be really good at benedictions (who knew?), this has reminded me of the February 3 post here from Therese Walsh, author and Writer Unboxed’s co-founder. She wrote about a search for “mono-tasking,” meaning, in essence, the ability to hunker down on one sustained project or task without feeling pulled apart by competing thoughts and stimuli. So many of us know what she’s talking about, all too well.
Walsh and I have been in touch a bit since that post ran, comparing notes. I’ve offered a few technical responses that I find helpful to the relentless blitz — RescueTime (which I find invaluable — you’re welcome to explore it free with my link); “frequency following” sound recordings, which I find helpful while focusing on work; meditation.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what she wrote, her distress at feeling her concentration is challenged — I can relate; that bad feeling (this is my characterization, not hers) of having our livers pecked out by data transmissions.
And I’ve been thinking about what Pooler’s doing, heading off the social grid to get a grip.
In keeping with the Lenten theme, it has to do with temptation, somehow. I think this is part of what we’re talking about.
Sins of Transmission
Provocations graphic by Liam Walsh
You’re good on Lent, right? In case you need a refresher, for 40 days and 40 nights, Jesus of Nazareth is said in Christian mythology to have fasted in the desert, sometimes with Satan tempting him to use his godly powers as a workaround to the rigors of his ordeal.
This is where an obnoxious minister’s son (who might be me) always points out that Noah’s flood also lasted “40 days and 40 nights.” What is it with this fondness for “40 days and 40 nights” in both the Old and New Testaments? It’s like biblical Expedia bookings, see 40 stations of the cross and enjoy one free drink on the Riviera.
As a preacher’s kid, I always thought that the Second Temptation was especially lame, anyway. The Prince of Darkness proposed that lamb of God throw himself off a mountain because if he really was the Messiah, then the angels would swoop in and rescue him. It’s the sin of pride, of course. Brag-tweeting in high places. Jesus told Satan to shove off. And this was the right call. What if the angels were off doing something and not paying attention, right?
[pullquote]For me the worst temptation is the walkaway. To duck out into the desert now would be, somehow, to give up a certain amount of flexibility that I think I’ve managed to put together by “keeping my soul in the room.” Working the time zones. Juggling the Samsungian dings![/pullquote]
Today, there are many traditions, with lots of variants, on how one’s “40 days and 40 nights” might be observed, but almost all formal treatments of Lent involve some degree of self-denial, one or more abstentions. One of my favorite author-friends in London gives up drinking for Lent in some years, enduring the agony of sobriety for the full term — a level of sacrifice that passeth all understanding.
But at the Vatican this year, Pope Francis — who keeps getting more interesting, doesn’t he? — has made an Ash Wednesday appeal this week, calling on the faithful to reject what he terms the “globalization of indifference.” TIME’s Christopher J. Hale quotes the papal Lenten message as saying:
Each year during Lent we need to hear once more the voice of the prophets who cry out and trouble our conscience.
Don’t worry, we can break away here from the papal reforms troubling the consciences of the Roman Curia these days (Lent 2015 is no party at St. Peter’s). But there’s something in what Francis is saying that bears on what many of us are experiencing in the digital diaspora of our tech-leveraged lives — the nerve that Walsh hit in her post here on the third of the month.
How Elastic Is Your Mind?
Paola Antonelli
Paola Antonelli is an author and the gifted Senior Curator in Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and also MoMA’s Director of R&D. Antonelli is the person who decides when something like the original iPod is to be entered into the permanent collection of the museum. She’s also the person who hung a Ferrari on the wall of the Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building lobby.
I was moving to Rome in 2008 when she told me about her exhibition, Design and the Elastic Mind.
Here’s an excerpt of how the show’s intro finally captured what she was telling me in our conversation:
Over the past twenty-five years, people have weathered dramatic changes in their experience of time, space, matter, and identity. Individuals cope daily with a multitude of changes in scale and pace—working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nanoscale images, and being inundated with information. Adaptability is an ancestral distinction of intelligence, but today’s instant variations in rhythm call for something stronger: elasticity, the product of adaptability plus acceleration.
Plainly put, Antonelli was thinking about how much and how fast we can take on new infusions of information; how well we can withstand new blasts of data; how successfully we can keep performing new stunts of mental athleticism.
Is our adaptability, that “ancestral distinction of intelligence,” up to it?
Or when Walsh comes to the Writer Unboxed community with her research into multitasking and mono-tasking, understandably alarmed about a frazzled attention span for long-text reading — and we all chime in, “Me, too!” — has a line been crossed? Are the ancestors rolling in their grave mounds?
[pullquote]I want to join with Walsh in trying to sort out what we can do in the creative community to come to terms with these unprecedented tools of communication, which are our hope of sales and comradeship, of course, as much as they also seem the dire wolves of a cyber-threat we don’t yet understand.[/pullquote]
In my tweets today, you’ll see me announcing our #FutureChat on women in publishing — and you’re most welcome to join us — at 4 p.m. GMT (London), 5 p.m. CET (Paris), 11 a.m. ET (New York), 8 a.m. PT (Los Angeles). I translate time zones all the time this way, as I work on events with The Bookseller and The FutureBook, based in London, and with colleagues in other parts of Europe on a daily basis.
- How ready are our minds to cope with such concepts as chatting live from an early-morning laptop in Palo Alto with a late-afternoon tablet in Madrid? How well do we really grasp how far-flung in time and space we are in these events? Can we handle it? Or do we get by in a kind of “globalized indifference” to how amazing this is?
As mentioned before, I also produce a weekly series of columns (you might enjoy these) called Music for Writers at ThoughtCatalog.com, and in those articles, we embed Q2 Music’s Album of the Week SoundCloud so you can listen to the music of a composer as you read his or her comments.
- How good are we at listening to the Credo in Gregory W. Brown’s Missa Charles Darwin while reading him tell us about visiting the Galapagos in 1993 — and using the amino acids of Darwin finches to generate a melody? How easily do we remember that the great composers of the past never even heard their music recorded? Are we good at taking advantage of coupling sound and text this way? Or do we deploy more “globalized indifference” to shield ourselves from having to think too much about it?
When electric lighting became a widespread reality, you know, people for the first time could work at night. So what happened? ‘Round-the-clock shifts happened. Once we could work all night, we did work all night.
And the effects of our tech on us is a lot like that. A tablet makes it possible to (try to) read a book while sending and receiving email, watching a video, tweeting, pinning, and texting in a kind of itchy nest of connectivity. So we do all those things. Or we think we do. We try to. We end up with splintered focus, unfinished tasks, to-do lists that stretch from here to Seattle, and Kindles groaning with books we’ll never have time to read.
I’ve written before here about how research like that reported by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney in their book Willpower shows us that rest, physical rest, seems to be the engine of what we think of as the cerebral or emotional strength called “willpower.” The more tired we are, the less willpower we have.
[pullquote]My team will need to keep advancing, trying to spread our arms wider, take on more and more, not duck it, to find out about that elasticity. Where do we break? How will it feel when we do? How will we know if we don’t go there? (Watch our backs, will you?)[/pullquote]
And nobody, surely, would say that the contemporary collisions of our digitally engaged life don’t tire us. I feel it, you feel it — we all feel it when it comes time to write and the energy has been leeched right out, one tweet and text and email and Instagram shot at a time.
But you know what else is tiring? Resistance.
Availability becomes inevitability. These “modern conveniences” — “labor-saving devices” was another marvelous euphemism, wasn’t it? — aren’t going away. And at the risk of sounding crazy to your yoga neighbors, maybe the sabbatical for Lent is right for Pooler (she has my vote), but not for me. Or for you?
I’m finding that while rest, yes, is crucially important in the up-rush of digital demands, evading those challenges is not helpful.
I’m perfectly willing to speak only for myself here, don’t try any of this at home (except the Campari).
But for me the worst temptation is the walkaway. To duck out into the desert now would be, somehow, to give up a certain amount of flexibility that I think I’ve managed to put together by “keeing my soul in the room.” Working the time zones. Juggling the Samsungian dings! that tell me an email, a text, a tweet is incoming — while on a conference call with an offshore office and trying to get the image into this story…a few minutes late. Yeah, I’m not fully on top of this yet, I get that. But I think trying is right. For some of us. Not all of us, it’s okay, stay with me.
The “troublesome cries of the prophets” are not wrong. Nor are we to ignore the nags at our consciences that might tell us we’ve dashed past something important for a digital dab of nonsense we could have let slide.
But I want to join with Walsh in trying to sort out what we can do in the creative community to come to terms with these unprecedented tools of communication, which are our hope of sales and comradeship, of course, as much as they also seem the dire wolves of a cyber-threat we don’t yet understand…we’re too distracted…so distracted…oh, my God (and yours, too), the distractions.
[pullquote]I’m perfectly willing to speak only for myself here, don’t try any of this at home (except the Campari).[/pullquote]
And I think we may need two forward teams here.
- One looks for the safe haven of the sabbatical, yes, to find the quiet meditative blessing of creative space unchallenged. I kid you not, I do see the beauty in that glade, and wish I could come along.
- But my team, I think, will need to keep advancing, trying to spread our arms wider, take on more and more, not duck it, to find out about that elasticity. Where do we break? How will it feel when we do? How will we know if we don’t go there? (Watch our backs, will you?)
What’s your sense of this? Is it better to try to step back from the beeping, flashing fray of digital? Or are you up for trying to take it all onboard and keep writing? No judgments here. You’re right, whichever way you go. I’m waving to Pooler. She’s doing the best thing for herself. And I’m pressing on. You have another tweet for me? While I’m trying to write? Bring it.
@Porter_Anderson is a fellow of the National Critics Institute. He is Editor-in-Chief of Publishing Perspectives, the international news medium of Frankfurt Book Fair. He co-founded The Hot Sheet, a newsletter for trade and independent authors, which now is owned and operated by Jane Friedman. Priors: The Bookseller‘s The FutureBook in London, CNN, CNN.com and CNN International–as well as the Village Voice, Dallas Times Herald, and the United Nations’ WFP in Rome. is a recipient of London Book Fair’s International Excellence Award for Trade Press Journalist of the Year. PorterAndersonMedia.com
Porter–Your thoughtful piece is itself evidence that it’s possible to be immersed in “the now” of global electronic volleyball, or jai lai or whatever you care to name it, and still stay focused.
And you may be right about two tribes or teams of the species known as “writer”: one, overwhelmed by it all, seeks the “safe haven of the sabbatical” in the maelstrom of appeals to vanity, ambition, etc., that beckon consciousness. The other, your group, spreads wide their arms, choosing Ulysses-like (Tennyson’s version) to embrace whatever comes, testing the envelope of consciousness, etc.
This matchup makes me think of William Golding’s novel The Inheritors. It’s a speculation on that moment when Neanderthals encounter those who will supersede them, Cro-Magnon or modern man. You sure could be right: anyone my age watching children with hand-held devices knows the feeling of being “superseded,” of glimpsing a future that turns its back on continuity, and changes course altogether.
Robert Lowell says in one of his poems that “we either bend or break.” I think he’s right. You announce you will re-up in the Special Forces probing for the breaking point. Who wouldn’t wish you well?
But I am sure there is such a breaking point. Assuming this, a fair question to ask is this: immersed as you are, how will you be able to recognize the breaking point? How long might you be broken before you come to awareness?
I believe in Darwin. This means I believe in the limits of adaptation. It takes place over long stretches of time, but what I see going on challenges this idea by making demands for change at a laughably fast pace.
Or, that’s just someone from the past who’s unwilling to leave home and set sail.
Hey, Barry,
Sorry for the slow response, I’ve been busy pressing ahead with my forward team, lol.
Actually, that is it. In the same time that we tend to fill the time we have, I find that the enabling elements of digital work — and all of my work is digitally enabled — tends to make me amplify the amount as well as the detail and texture of what I’m doing.
In terms of your good comment, I agree with you that there must be such a breaking point. I do think it can be quite different in one person and another. (At a large corporation for which I once worked, we had a saying, “Each person’s time is different” — by that, we meant that each stressed-out employee would come to his or her own saturation point at a different time and bail.)
So without any desire to overlook the inevitable strain of all this, I do think it’s important to try to see if one legitimate response isn’t to try to integrate it more into life than less.
The standard (and perhaps most intelligent) reaction is to try to move away from the depths of digital immersion — as Pooler says, to refresh, renew, etc. But in one way or another, that’s an avoidance reaction. And while it’s true that my work, being so utterly dependent now on the international real-time presence of digital, doesn’t give me an easy option of stepping away from all this, I’m not sure I want to. The “renew, refresh” thing — the sabbatical — isn’t me. I’d rather learn how to sustain this on an ongoing basis, both to avoid snapping and to see just how much more I can get out of it if I embrace it instead of pushing away.
Remember, I’m not trying to convince anyone to do this or anything else. This is just my response. I think I’m not alone, but I’m not canvassing for fellow immersives, lol.
Thanks much,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Porter–
Thank you for a typically careful, thoughtful–let’s call it a Porteresque reply. Maybe the simplest (if not simplistic) way to see your perspective is in terms of the old bromide about necessity being the mother of invention.
I read your response to Heather Webb, and was struck by something you noted, “a subtle response to less-than-gripping as probably not worth the focus [read: time and attention] that long-focus takes.” I can’t help wondering: to what degree will brevity and rhetorical bells and whistles become more and more important in the digital clamor for attention? To what degree will it come to mirror the way in which jittery editing and special effects are used to keep TV viewers’ hands off the remote? We are all going to find out.
Exactly, Barry –
This will affect the content, one way or the other.
For me, one of Marshall McLuhan’s most profound comments was this one:
“All media work us over completely.”
I find it terrifying and yet comforting in an odd way, in that a part of what McLuhan was saying is that we can’t avoid this. These media, as they arise and morph and move, are going to be upending to us. It’s not that we’re doing something wrong, it’s that these things are so fundamental to cultures facing in information-age values that we just cannot avoid this sort of effect. We are being worked over completely. And repeatedly.
No wonder we’re all tired, lol.
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
This is an intriguing question. I’m a social media junky, myself. I really enjoy keeping up with what’s happening in the world, in publishing, with my tribe. In fact, when I go out of town or do family events, etc, which I thoroughly enjoy, I still feel a part of me is missing. What’s missing? Both KNOWLEDGE that is being generated at an unprecedented speed and the all-important sensibility of BEING CONNECTED. As a writer, being connected to the fabric of human experience (isn’t so much of this media just reflections of our experiences?) is essential. It spawns new ideas, feeds my creative brain, and also helps keep me buoyed in a difficult industry.
Having said that, I also value the quiet space of focused creative time. This is when I silence my phone and close all windows on my computer but two– my manuscript and my music. I snuggle into my cocoon of “the writer’s space” and block out all else. But just for measured time. There’s so much else to be done, seen, consumed.
I guess this makes me in alignment with Antonelli’s ideas. As a military brat I’ve always been about adaptation and evolution. Now I attempt to live in a world with an elastic mind.
Hey, Heather —
Yep, exactly, I know this resonates with you because you, too, are all over the Web, as I am.
Some of us duck it. Others of us take to it like ducks to water. :)
I do know what Therese is talking about in terms of worrying about the ability to concentrate on long-form. Way back to The Shallows by Nicholas Carr (2011) https://amzn.to/1vqouoY , this has been a distinct concern for me and for many others. For me, the effect isn’t that I can’t read long-form work anymore — I can and do, primarily while on the elliptical machine, if you can believe that — but that I do probably have a higher requirement of the content: I find I want it to be very absorbing, more so than I think I may have required in the past. And this is likely the same thing, a subtle response to less-than-gripping work as probably not worth the focus that long-form takes.
I’m with you, I can get very antsy when not online for any period of time at all. And I don’t apologize for that. I don’t think it’s rude to stay connected while with people IRL unless you’re staring at your screens when you should be talking to them. So for the most part, I simply don’t come off the grid.
And this is part of what I mean by the embrace. The stepping away thing to me is not satisfying. I want to stay in, as you say, to be connected. Of course, as I’ve said many times, I use RescueTime to do the same “cocooning” you do, as you call it, good term for it. But even then, my online dictionary is alive, my link with Q2 Music is active, and I allow myself one browser window for research — and my “Samsungian dings!” continue to alert me if all or part of hell breaks loose.
I think maybe what I’m working up to is perhaps a certain tiredness of us (myself included) talking about digital as if it’s something counter to our creative and healthy lives.
I can recall that after the first moon landing, there were people who blamed bad weather effects on that event. And when Haley’s Comet arrived with great fanfare back in the day, there were people who stuffed towels under their doors so that the comet vapors wouldn’t get in.
Now, our digital is a bit more in our faces than comets and lunar landings, lol, and yes, there’s a clearly demonstrable effect to the time you might spend engaged in digitally realized communication. But I worry at times that we’re having similar silly reactions to it just because we are suspicious creatures uncomfortable with more and more elasticity asked of our minds.
Telephones were once thought to be a dreadful interruption and imposition on people’s quality of life, you know. Now the lack of a phone is thought to be all but unbearable by many.
Maybe where we need the elasticity is in our acceptance that one way — not the only way but one way — to look at all this is with an open (and elastic) mind, willing to try to take as much onboard as we can. Try two screening when it makes sense, don’t reject it out of hand. See if we can find some comfort with multi-directional work (which is more the case than “multi-tasking”) rather than rejecting the idea out of hand.
In practical terms, I’m trying to learn to get comfortable with a whole raft of tasks bouncing around on my desk instead of thinking that for some reason I’m supposed to hunker down on each one separately.
“Left to my own devices,” lol, I think I’m actually getting somewhere on this. Yes, I get amazingly tired at times, and I think it’s because, in part, I’m trying to be tuned in to so many channels at once. But, you know what? — I’m sure as hell alive! :) At least when you’re trying to keep 49 digital marbles from rolling downhill, you aren’t doing any dicking around, you’re working like a dog.
And for those of us who actually enjoy work (I do, and I think you do, too), digital may be a potential gold mine for amplification and coordination of many efforts.
I’m all for trying to find out, hence my plan to keep heading deeper in to that digital night, all winking and blinking and buzzing.
I’ve got six screens on right now. And I feel just fine. :)
Thanks Heather — see you on the cyber side,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
The Shallows is an excellent book. I made my son read it before we got him a cell phone. We made him a deal and he earned it fair and square. But we’ve seen a change in behavior, how addictive it is. I’d rather we never had the blasted thing in our house, but as my husband points out, it’s better to teach him to use it responsibly now. Of course, left up to me, I’d never get any of these so-called necessities. Oh, I do love technology … but I often ignore it, preferring my primitive ways.
I’m surprised how often I’ve seen the term evolution used in these conversations, when frankly what I see is a descent of basic courtesy, human relationships, etc.
Hi, Vijaya,
How great of you to not only know The Shallows but to have used it with your son. This is really foresightful of you. While he may not even grasp (or believe) all of the difficulties that Nicholas Carr lays out so well there, he’ll “grow into it” and, as you say, use devices more responsibly. A very smart move.
I know what you mean about what appears to be a corrosion of manners and civil exchange, and there are times when people’s behavior online is quite baffling. I think the important thing to remember, although it’s not much consolation, is that the behavior — and the impulse toward it — has been there all along.
What social interaction online is showing us, I’m afraid, is a fairly ugly side of people’s disregard for each other, and even for themselves (in terms of how bad they can make themselves look). The Net reveals this and exacerbates it with the odd sensation that one is somehow veiled and not as well known when online. This isn’t the case, of course, and many folks do eventually come to wish they’d been less cavalier online.
What’s disturbing is to see so much anger and ill feeling out there — face to fact, it’s much less comfortable to show this. it is, in the end, probably better that we know that this is the world than to live in some charmed misapprehension that it’s not. However, is it fun to see people trolling and ripping into each other and talking to perfect strangers with such sneering rudeness as you sometimes see? Not for a minute.
The only point to make here is that the media are not the reason for this.
We are. Humans are, as we discover in these instances, perhaps a little less prone to cordial and convivial relations than we might have thought. Our commercial world shows us a lot of happy, swell folks. What we get once we meet them online? Can be quite different.
But the media are not the message in this case. They’re only carrying it. :)
Thanks again,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
ohmygoodness Porter, what a dense (as in thick with meaning) reading this morning.
You write about two forward teams, perhaps as a way of simplifying? Because a part of me wants to boil all your information down to one simple question, a saying from Jesus, taken out of context and applied here. Are we the master or are we the servant of our technology?
But nuances exist.
I don’t wish to belong to strictly one forward team. I want a foot in both. My current lifestyle pattern nurtures me: working half-time as a professional in a field that requires extroverted behavior, working half-time as unpaid loving-my-solitude writer, and juggling my various roles as mother of adult children, daughter of aging parents, sibling, friend, and seeker of goals I consider noble: living a sustainable and just lifestyle. I do not have the energy to focus on one team. I’m a bridge-builder and that means I plant my feet in two different places.
Thank you for this, Porter. I’m looking forward to all of the comments that will be coming here!
I’m glad that you, too, Porter, will be speaking out on this topic. It’s a worthy issue, possibly a critical one for today’s writer.
You asked “Where do we break? How will it feel when we do?” Perhaps, and I could be wrong, it feels an awful lot like struggling to read long text. And while I, too, appreciate the dream of giving it all up, walking – – without an iPad or smart phone – – into a desert (but only one that has a hotel with a pool and a killer margarita, please), I also realize that this dream is, for me, nothing but a mirage.
My goal is to learn how to become a better juggler. By that I don’t mean learning how to take on more and more; rather I mean learning how to handle these flaming, whirling bits without burning the hell out of my hands. Throw better. Don’t let the fire get out of control. Catch smarter. Share whatever tips I can with others, because no one works well–or looks good–slathered in burn ointment.
And now if you’ll excuse me, I have a few metaphors to juggle in the desert today. Thanks, Porter.
Hi, Teri,
And yes, as I was saying earlier, I’m so glad you’ve put this issue into play so well here at Writer Unboxed.
We’re talking about a tremendous hurdle for writers. There simply is no historical precedent for the kind of challenges the human attention span now is facing. And, as Paola Antonelli’s questions imply, we’re facing uncharted territory. We don’t know how much of this expansion of “opportunistic communications” — I just made that up, lol — and sheer stimulation we can handle. For those of us in creative industries and endeavors, it’s a lot more worrisome issue, too, than it might be for some others, although nobody’s getting away.
I think I’ve mentioned before that I have an elderly friend who likes to say she wants no one to show her any new platforms or tricks of email, etc., because “I’m done with technology,” lol. Good luck with that.
I think we have the same goals, in that I feel that if I can figure out how to embrace instead of duck away from all this, I’ll be better for it. There’s got to be a way to let it work for us rather than against us.
But the concern about long-form is very real and for so many people. For me, too, in some ways, as I was saying to Heather — in my case, it manifests as a need to have far more arresting material than I used to have. It ups the bar. My standard for reading material has gone way up, which means that it’s easier for me to filter out a lot of the amateur / hobbyist work being produced as a result of the digitization of publishing. That part is good. But in terms of my focus and concentration issues, yes, indeed, these are the same for me, however differently I might experience them.
Have I mentioned Nicholas Carr’s book to you, or do you know it? The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brains (2011, WW Norton) https://amzn.to/1FMBFEf
it’s terrific and it completely nails what’s happening. You may know of it already. If not, do have a look, I’ve found it very helpful.
But meanwhile, no, no rest for the weariness on this end, either.
Here’s to better juggling and very attractive desert tans. :)
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Thought provoking post, Porter.
I think, for me, my place is on the fence, balancing both. It’s all about moderation. I can indulge in a small piece of chocolate, without guilt, but if I eat an entire bar along with a big mac and coke, I’ll feel sick. If I set aside 45 minutes for yoga, my body won’t hurt so much when I sit for hours. If I spend 30 minutes with my top 5 blogs (WU top on my list!) and answering email, I can then disconnect and focus on my writing.
Not saying balance is easy. It’s not. But it’s a goal I strive for.
Dee Willson
Author of A Keeper’s Truth and GOT
You know, Denise,
I’ve come to feel that there’s something actually rather noble about people who strive for balance. The general consensus now is that there’s really just no such thing available. In a sense, some say, we need to try to work for our most tolerable and productive IMbalance and concede that getting it all evened out — and keeping it that way — is possible.
When I meet someone who wants to keep working for that elusive balance, I’m filled with admiration. I long ago gave it up, not least because I decided that I was imbalanced as a function of what I like, not what I don’t like. Took a while, but this has been very helpful to me — the happily imbalanced, lol.
But to keep trying for balance is a grand thing. I wish you well and when you do get it just right, bottle it — you can make a fortune with that secret! :)
Cheers,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Porter-
My mind’s pretty elastic. The tasks I do in a day vary hugely, demanding everything from a contract lawyer’s paranoia to cool headed editorial analysis to the discernment of an adoptive dad.
It’s not so much the variety of things that come at me as the volume. My inbox feels like a mountain, my keyboard the rock to be rolled up it. My three to-do lists (today, this week, long term) are sometimes wish lists.
Time management helps but even so there’s never enough time. Simplify? That’s what I call not getting everything done.
For me the issue in all this is not doing less but coping with the conflict between simple tasks and complex ones.
Tweets are easy.
Writing a 23 clause, iron-clad contract in settlement of a thorny dispute involving contract ambiguities, UK bankruptcy terminology and highly emotional authors and publishers…that’s complex. It ain’t four minutes or 140 characters.
The flood of data, information and communication coming at us places value on simple, short and punchy. That’s fine but not everything we must create is simple, short and punchy.
Novels, for instance.
I love long form journalism. Give me The Economist, the Atlantic or even Esquire. I’ll take those over a weblog most days. I’d rather immerse in historical fiction than tweet about the latest movie trailer.
To me it isn’t about mono-tasking or simplifying or meditating, it’s about choices. I don’t mind the wit and brevity we get (and give) online. It’s fun sometimes. I’d rather reserve my time, though, for what is complex.
Simplify? Sure, but I already think we’re making things too simple. To me the better choice is “depth”. That’s what I think we should be clearing time for and working toward.
For me it’s simple: go for complex.
Every morning:
Quick. Check the internet and emails. Is there something broken in the world only I can fix (usually, no)? If so, do a quick fix.
Block the internet for 5-6 hours. Take the meds. and the caffeine which enable the brain to eventually focus. Write/nap/write/nap.
Then, when there is no brain at all left, surf for a bit or the rest of the day.
Writing FIRST.
Interesting post. It addresses something I’ve wrestled with for years. After I had finished my first novel, I joined Facebook and Twitter and set up a blog, hoping to build a platform. I started a second novel, too. But after several years of facebooking and tweeting and all that, my mind seemed unable to concentrate on reading a book, much less writing one. I’m bipolar, and the lack of concentration issue soon wasn’t the only mental issue I faced; I was unstable, both depressed and slightly manic at the same time. (It’s not a good combination.)
I quit writing for a time; I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t control my mind or moods, and I didn’t know why. Finally, I realized that being on social media had affected my mind on a neurochemical level, which had triggered my mental illness again. I also realized that if I wanted to write novels (or just be a relatively sane person who could cope with life), I was going to have to wave bye-bye to FB and Twitter.
I did. It wasn’t easy. Most people didn’t understand. It took a long time to recover. I kept my blog, though I don’t comment on as many other blogs as I could because blog-reading seems to have a similar affect as FB and Twitter did, though on a lesser scale.
I try to balance my time online with my novel-writing time. I take breaks from the online world when I sense my mind is in a precarious position. I try not to multitask and juggle complex writing matter with simpler writing tasks.
For now, that’s how I handle things. Is this how everyone else should handle them? No, of course not. But for me, this is what I have to do. My mental stability has to come first. Even if I am never a published novelist, I am still a mom and wife, and when I’m unstable, I’m not good at either of those.
Laura, what you are saying here is supported by Daniel Levetin in his book The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload. At least that was my take-away. The state of divided attention that things like social media contribute to actually rewards the brain in some ways while also harming it. I think of it like a big piece of cake — my taste buds love it but the rest of my body could do without it.
And as with that big piece of cake that my taste buds want more of, that part of the brain that “feels good” when checking that Facebook account again, replying to emails on the spot, etc., wants to do this again and again. At the same time, multitasking isn’t where the brain is doing its best work.
Porter, a couple of years back I took an Internet break for Lent and Advent (except for the good posts from the Archdiocese of WA from Msgr Pope — I’d love for him to be elected pope, just so we could call him Pope Pope) but these days I’m mired in deadlines and moderating the Blueboards so not possible. I’m online every day. But like a good Catholic, I make a morning offering. As a result of hand injury, I’m reading lots more, cooking and cleaning less, and taking my sorry self to Adoration more. I do love sitting there quietly with my Jesus. Lent also brings double duty choir practice … a Quignard Mass for Laetare Sunday, Triduum prep, and Mozart Missa Brevis in F for Corpus Christi. And music is a cross-pollinator for my writing. While singing the Credo, I had an epiphany about the sex life of aphids. I know, not suitable material for children.
Oh, thank God for Lent. Wishing you a most blessed one.
I love the idea of disabling technology from time to time. I gave up Facebook for lent five years ago and it changed everything. It taught me that I could easily live without it. Taking that time away let me know that I really couldn’t care less about the constant noise and wave of negativity it produces. So many people use social media as a means of complaining.
I still keep facebook and twitter accounts open, but use them almost exclusively for writing related purposes, such as sharing blog posts and connecting with other writers.
Thoughtful post. Briefly, I try to limit my time exploring the web, still preferring to read newspapers and magazines. I spend so much time at the keyboard writing, that it’s a break to walk away from the emails and the twitter feed and be in the quiet. I guess I have a little Lent in my life every day. Books expand my mind and there’s where it wants to be.
Thanks for the great post. For years, I’ve slowed down during Lent and cut all writing activity during Holy Week. I’ve got 3 published books and 3 under contract, and I feel that stepping away like this helps my growth as a writer–especially in terms of reaching for the depth that Donald Maass mentioned and developing fresh perspective on the stories I want to tell.
On a different note, I’ve been meaning to write for some time to thank all the contributors to this blog. I’m one of the “lurkers” mentioned in a New Year’s post, and I rarely comment online. But your work means a lot to me. I consistently find inspiration, support and sustenance in your posts. Many thanks to all of you. Mr. Maass and Ms. Cron, a double-thank you for your fantastic books. They’re helping me to develop my craft and I recommend and buy them for fellow writers. I hope to come to the WU conference one day.
Here in the antipodes (Sydney, Australia), we are having summer while you are embedded in snow. We are good with technology but, I think, not consumed by it. I am married to a world leader in medical research; he spends a great deal of time at the computer. But he balances it with necessary travel, exercise and relaxation. I think, too, that if you are writing novels or memoir, you will be more relaxed about technological advances and social media, even though they may be necessary for branding purposes. As a team, my partner and I support one another in complementary ways, utilising opposite skills and strategies. I believe that, without balance, the pressured soul risks falling off the icy track and into long-term rehabilitation.
I love the growing opportunities technogy presents us. Efficiency is fun, and exciting. True there are distractions, and the risk of being overwhelmed, but for me I have no problem with them so long as I wield the word “no”. No Twitter right now, I’m writing. No checking email, I am completing a project. No idle time browsing my Facebook feed–it’s not time yet to check in. For everything there is a season, saith King David, and those words are just as relevant today in our age of gadgets. A time for writing, a time for blogging, a time to tweet, a time to visit Writer Unboxed, and a time to put your computer in airplane mode and lock yourself in a room. I find I have no problem with all these options as long as I have my mind made up exactly how I plan to use them, and that is usually the case on good days. On the bad days, I play iPhone games.
Hi Porter, boy this makes me think of Marshall McLuhan and the ’60s and all its radical changes. And it’s lent, and I was just visiting the Johnson Space Center, which definitely brought the 60s back to the forefront of my brain.
New things, whether electricity, space travel, the internet, social media, come with the need to adapt. Adaptation is at best unsettling. And oh so often when confronted with a new life development or life changes, all I think I want is security and stasis. I decline into protective mode — ‘keep the job,’ ‘don’t lose your way’, etc. without sufficiently examining whether what I already have is fulfilling or just safe. And oddly enough, the times when I was most fluidly productive (when the stories flood my brain faster than I can write them down) were the times of greatest uncertainty and change in my life. I find myself constantly resisting the chimerical hope of a life made stable, and telling myself change is not just inevitable, it is life. Maybe it is not the same daily existence as it was, but without that spark of having to adjust to the ‘new’ it is boring.
I love connecting via the internet, even though I’m widespread across many social platforms (each one has created a unique selection of friendships). but I find myself often obsessing about and have for forcibly tell myself to put down my phone or stop hitting the refresh button.
So, I would definitely find it valuable to take a break and have purposefully left my phone at home for an afternoon or have ignored if for short spans of time. I think it would be valuable to completely disconnect for a period. Probably not for a full 40 days and nights, but for a weekend or full week maybe. I might even take it further and disconnect from all electronics, including my laptop and switch to the old pen and paper method of communication for that period. That would be quite an interesting challenge, since it would mean really getting down and connecting with myself in a way I haven’t done in a long time.
I think you’re on to something. I was one of the people who responded positively to Therese’s idea of blogging about mono-tasking and regaining control over the craziness that is life. I noted that since I’ve been practicing and teaching mindfulness (I feel so trendy) I have decreased social media involvement on my own, mostly because certain aspects of it are just not as fulfilling as they used to be.
However, after I hit the submit button, I started thinking about how I still check twitter quite regularly. I actually increased the amount of blogging I’m doing in January by beginning a blog series on Mindfulness, which increases the demands on my already stretched time. But I enjoy those things. I don’t find them to be as unsettling as some other aspects of social media, which I have stepped back from. I also don’t stress if I don’t get on the internet at all (ie. last night I didn’t even get on Twitter and only realized it this morning.) Something changed about my relationship with social media, and I started to wonder if that’s what Mindfulness had done for me. It helped me unplug by giving me a new perspective about it all.
While some people’s perspective might be one of exhaustion with the electronic world (because of the incredible distraction it is and, for most, the overwhelming nature of it–which was me a year and a half ago), another person might have one of enjoyment and not feel the need to unplug as much or as frequently.
So, after a very long comment, I guess I’m starting to think it’s about the individual creating their own balance. Which is very mindful. :)
Reading all these posts I had an image of the online world (social media, et al) being like a wild horse being tamed.
But in this case, you are taming yourself in a way by assessing and working with your own strengths, sensitivities, responses, etc. While there are methods for working in a connected world that bring about consistent results, there are also individual considerations that make some people highly distracted with an amount that helps another person function to their maximum ability.