Digital Reality by Melanie Chan

Author:Melanie Chan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Flow

At first glance, there seems to be connections between the dynamic aspects of movements made by proficient typists or jazz pianists and what Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi (2013) terms the flow state. In the case of proficient typists and accomplished jazz pianists, through continual practice their movements have become entrained with the keyboard. As such there may no longer be a sense of separation between the typist and what they are typing or the piano player and the music they are playing. When this flow state is achieved, a bodily knowing comes to the fore which cannot be entirely captured by language.

Yet it appears that the habitual movements made when using smartphones, such as pushing digital buttons to open a notification or social media feed, are for the most part about reacting to stimuli rather than entering a creative state of flow. Moreover, it is easy to overlook our bodily movement dynamics as we become engrossed in the content represented to us via digital devices. In fact, swiping or clicking on screen seems to require minimal cognitive and physical effort. For as we engage with digital devices, our minds seem to dart from one thing to another as we click on hyperlinks and respond to pop-up messages that open up new rich informational vistas. The continual partial attention that is given to digital devices and the content they provide seems to differ from the focus required to enter into the flow state that Csikszentmihalyi associates with improvisation and creativity. For instance, the multifunctional aspects of digital devices such as smartphones encourage us to engage with an array of content such as clicking on a social media post, sending an instant message, replying to a text, scrolling through news feeds while chatting with friends. This continual processing of digitally generated stimuli can diff er from the concentration that occurs in relation to a single focused activity such as typing or learning to play the piano.

Galit Wellner (2019) states that arguments which are based on attention as a form of concentration reinforce what she terms the hyper-capitalist attention economy. Offering a different approach, Wellner claims that distributed attention is a reflection of our daily lives in the digital era. Going further into her explanation of digital multitasking, Wellner asserts that this ‘mode of attention calls for dual, triple and even quad attention, like a dual core processor computer that performs two tasks at the very same time’ (2019: 57). Yet it might be misleading to make analogies between human beings and machines. We do not necessarily operate in the same way as machines because we are sensory, emotional beings. Illustrating the virtues of digital multitasking, Wellner states that distributed attention ‘may explain how one can write an academic article while listening to music; change diapers while attending a conference call; or drive a car while talking on the cellphone’ (2019: 58). Yet, is it possible that writing an academic article while listening to music might be related to a particular type of music? Perhaps,

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