how to use restraint #3
In his video essay Why The Movies Will Never Feel the Same Again, Thomas Flight shared an idea that should’ve occurred to me already. The idea of Media Ecology, which looks at the physical, cultural, and psychological environments wherein we consume media. Already for the better part of a year I have been thinking about
Attention Ecologywhat is attention?
From where I am sitting on my balcony I can see the TV out of the corner of my eye and it’s very difficult to ignore it. I keep turning my head away to think of what to write next, but then when I turn back to resume typing on my computer, the flashes of color and light from the TV make it very difficult for me to focus. I just went inside and turned it off, but still my mind keeps diverting attention to the now black rectangle in my peripheral vision. Let me draw the curtains.
Sometimes when I want to be alone I come out and sit here. It’s a lovely little space detached from the living room. However, if Z is sitting at her desk on the other side of the glass where I can see her and if my need to be alone in that moment is particularly potent, I draw the curtains. Her presence remains exactly as it was and I remain aware of it, but it doesn’t intrude on my attention in the same way.
In his book
The World Beyond Your Head, Matthew B. Crawford points out that this involuntary aspect of attention makes a lot of sense from an evolutionary standpoint. New information demands attendance. Is it a predator? Prey? Or just a gust of wind? Regardless we must pay attention to it so we can make sense of it and integrate it into our mental model of the current environment.
Crawford appropriates the term ecology – the branch of biology that deals with the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings – to describe this fundamental relationship between our attention, our life, and our environment. He describes, for example, the “ecology of attention” in airport lounges where the news stream endlessly on TVs oriented in various directions. Even if the talking heads are muted, the infinite sideways scroll of symbols at the bottom of the screen will hijack the attention of travelers who would rather rest idly.
(Crawford astutely points out that the advertisements shown on these TVs exist to continue the transfer of wealth from these common travelers to the ones in the VIP lounges, who rest comfortably without having their attention exploited by their surroundings without their consent. I find these socioeconomic analyses of technology much more relevant and important than the technophobic ones. The same goes for Artificial Intelligence. I don’t worry that AI will take over the world, I worry that those who already rule the world will use AI to accelerate and automate processes of wealth extraction.)
I think the evolutionary perspective can also help explain why time in nature feels so right. This is the primordial ecology of our attention, the environment in which our brains adapted for us to live and thrive. And yet I don’t think we need to draw purist or atavistic conclusions against technology from this observation. Feelings of connection and coherence arise in us not only from time in nature, but also from time using artificial tools and inhabiting constructed environments.
The humble coffee shop for example is a place where many of us go to read, write, think, converse, and do other things that require our focus. The intricate weave of activity and mixture of sounds create a conducive ambience for our attention. How is it that such a busy, public space is so popular for quiet, private activity? This is only counterintuitive if we think distraction is the only unneutral effect our environment has on our ability to focus. From experience we know that it can be easier to focus in spite of extraneous sensory information rather than in absence of it. Perhaps because our cognitive capacities evolved in settings where total absence of sensory input was rare, our minds focus more easily against a backdrop of mundane information. Certain kinds of technologies are essential here and even computer screens are welcome, but not TVs because they would be too disruptive. A good ecology of attention not only prevents distractions, but encourages focus.
I’ve moved into my apartment now, into the warmth. Out in the balcony my fingers were getting too cold. Above my head the clock ticks and farther away traffic brushes by in irregular strokes. The faint wail of an ambulance emerges suddenly and then fades quickly. Occasionally in the hallway outside our apartment a door opens and then shuts a moment later. Our little dog scurries about the living room looking for amusement. My wife Z works intently at her desk a few feet away in silence apart from intermittent bursts of typing and muted clicks of her mouse. Attention to my writing flows easily despite all these things, except when my gaze drifts over to what is happening on her computer screen. So I adjust my sitting position to make it vanish.
, an idea I found ingenious for taking Ecology out of its native context and applying it to the psychological phenomenon of Attention, and yet it had not ccurred to me to reproduce that same trick with something else.
Through the lens of Media Ecology, Thomas Flight analyzes how the circumstances of moviewatching dictate what it means to watch a movie. Once, watching a movie meant commuting to a certain place at a specific time to see something that you were likely never to see again. It was an occasion and often a communal experience among friends, loved ones, neighbors, and other locals. Today, a movie can be something insignificant and something entirely private. It can be nothing more than a stimulus for alleviating restlessness as one does house chores or waits for sleep to come. A movie is no longer just a public event. It can be like a flavor of digital chewing gum, a substance waiting in our pocket for a moment of boredom. The default mode of watching movies has changed and going to the cinema is now an unusual one. Consequently, movies today play a different role in our lives.
This is true of music as well. In the past, it may have seemed inconceivable to divorce music from its social aspect, but now the primary way to consume it – at least in my “Western” reality – is in personal privacy. We put devices in our ears that acoustically shut out the world beyond our heads and pipe into our consciousness a private sountrack. Books function in a similar way. They are technologies that encode into symbols for the solitary consumption of readers ideas, stories, and facts that might be otherwise shared in social spaces through means like conversation and lecture. These mediums are layers of communication that open a gulf between people and fill it with alternative, virtual experiences. With one hand media brings us together and with the other it sets us apart. As a supplement, media is a tremendously enriching substance, but problems arise when it becomes our primary means for connecting to the world.
Technology is not evil. But it gives us power, and power corrupts. Who can blame a human that, when anxious feelings spring as they do so readily in the kind of lives we live, reaches for the anesthetic device always at their disposal? We need barely lift a finger and our mind is cast out beyond the preoccupations in our head and into a virtual source of stimulation tailored to our taste. Mindless escape is a bad habit and it is a common one because technology gives us the power to indulge it so easily.
Chastening and berating ourselves to resist stimulation that is so easily accessible is a poor strategy for countering the negative effects of digital technology. A much more efficient and productive one is ecological, one that looks to the nature of the organisms and to the nature of their environment. What we need to preserve the magic of moviewatching and more generally to neutralize the ills of unadulterated access to infinite digital streams is to reintroduce limits that were removed not for our benefit but in service of the profit motive. We must contrive restraints to create new default behaviors. Put simply, we can change our behavior by changing what we interact with.
The possible tactics are many. Leave your phone in a different room, somewhere out of sight and reach. Use a purpose-built alarm clock instead of the equivalent feature your phone offers. Delete problematic apps from your phone. Configure it to render in black and white. Exchange it for a flip phone or for a “dumb phone.” The methods I find the most satisfying are cheap and simple. Market solutions for problems created by the market feel the worst. And they’re unnecessary, anyway. The most relevant technology for shaping our reality is the one in our head. Sometimes, changing our environment and therefore our behavior is as simple as introducing a paperthin layer of mediation between ourselves and the technology we use.
Many times I’ve sat down to watch a movie with friends and we found ourselves browsing torpidly through a streaming library so vast that no single movie seemed to have much luster. To neutralize this unpleasant effect, I might employ a tactic I’ve used successfully this year for books. I prepared a short list of books to read throughout the year. Each time I finished one I checked it off my list and each time I wanted to begin a new one I perused the remaining options. With satisfaction I watched the checkmarks accumulate one by one and each time felt rekindled my motivation to continue progressing. I felt the value of each book on the list because it was one of a handful and I spent very little time feeling like I was missing out because I had mentally eliminated an endless library of options. If I was reading one book, I was only ignoring a few others and I would get to those soon enough anyhow.
It’s startling how powerful a contrived rule can be. It seems silly that the human mind could be duped so easily, but then again it is a testament to its power that it can take an idea and construct from it a reality. I suppose it is precisely our adaptibility to virtual domains that gets us into trouble in the first place.