Paul Ford: The two kinds of distraction
Submitted by Merlin on October 18, 2005 - 5:44am.
Followup/Distraction (Ftrain.com)
Paul Ford, eloquent as usual, on the two kinds of distractions–the wide kind that are the equivalent of a kitty toy for distractible humans, and the narrow kind, which stimulates you to follow a train of thought into tunnels it’s nary entered. Paul concludes, in part:
Distraction is necessary. Minds need to wander to get anything done. But the Internet is sort of the mental equivalent of the snack aisle at a convenience store, filled with satisfying fatty chips and tasty cream-filled cakes. God knows I’ve spent enough time with both the Internet and cream-filled cakes to see the similarities. And I now know that what I want, mentally, is a well-cooked meal. A book gives me that, a well-written, carefully-edited book. Even though your average book is filled with distractions–I mean, Ahab doesn’t just chase the whale. There’s all sorts of stuff in Moby Dick besides that. Otherwise it probably wouldn’t be that good of a book. But the distractions are useful. They get us from one point to another. Sailing wide seas of opinion in a million does not do the same thing. This is not to condemn blogs. They are often great. But there are so many of them, and I will be dead for a long, long time. And on my deathbed do I want to say, I sipped mightily of Metafilter, and saw many video clips that made fun of Rosie O’Donnell, and I am richer for it? Or should I try to make contact with the culture that existed before 1992? The Internet makes it so easy to think that nothing of importance ever took place before the ARPANET was created.
Paul, I should also note, earlier mentions some affection for the AlphaSmart Neo:
The Neo is just a keyboard that stores text as you type it. It does nothing else. It doesn’t tell the time or let me play games. It runs off of double-A batteries and the batteries last for hundreds of hours. Using the AlphaSmart and WordPerfect I’ve started to enjoy computing again. There is no Wikipedia, no email, no constantly changing the MP3s I’m listening to, no downloading going on. The spam still piles up but I’m not aware of it, because my email program is shut down until I want to send a message.
I think I want me one of them.
[ thanks, [Donna](http://www.deliriouscool.org/
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If I were a cynic,...
If I were a cynic, I could say it’s just the pendulum swinging the other direction. Since I’m trying to shed my inner cynic, let’s look at this a different way:
A computer gives us many ways to express ourselves, to get things done. While it is tempting to use all the tools at our disposal, gaining mastership in any medium means being able to work with restrained tool sets. In fact, restraints enable expression.
In that light, I don’t think it’s a coincidence we simplify our computer usage as we grow older - hopefully, along the way, while getting older, we learned a bit and have now mastered this medium sufficiently to restrain wisely.
That doesn’t mean computers are inherently bad - but we’re learning when and how to use them, instead of applying them everywhere and anytime.