The Digital Banal by Zara Dinnen

Author:Zara Dinnen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

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REFRESH, UPDATE, WAIT, OR, LIVING WITH THE DIGITAL BANAL IN CHRONIC CITY AND REFRESH REFRESH

When Berta waits for the Telligentsia database to recognize her at the airport, she begins a reflection that carries the reader through the entirety of The Bug. Her wait-state is an unresolving present that occurs in digital time—the presentification of the computational meets the presentification of contemporary narrative modes. Berta’s reflection is also a kind of distraction. Distraction is broadly understood to be an affectively distinct aspect of contemporary culture.1 Distraction is a type of perception we associate with digital media—digital media as a set of objects and platforms that distract us from our real lives, or social interaction as something that we now do distractedly. Distraction implies that a subject is barely engaged. Such subjects are not fully attentive to the action of distraction or the act they are distracted from. Distraction is a way of modulating attention in terms of visibility. To be distracted is to be embroiled, to some degree, in a mode of effacement whereby attention is pulled in one direction, blocking or suppressing the viability of an alternative. Being distracted presumes “a strategy of disappearance or invisibility. Distraction allows a second event to take place behind or ‘to the side of’ the first one—it enables a close approach.”2

Writing about distraction in the digital age, William Bogard argues that we must attend to the “material scene” of distraction and understand it as a scene of “proximate relations.” Distraction is “a social-machinic assemblage, … a machinery that generates differential rates of flow of matter and energy.”3 Distraction, then, is not only mediational but is premised on the mediational encounter, or scene, as one of differential kinds of perception that are more or less visible. Distraction is not so much about moving attention from one path to another but about increasing attention in one direction and decreasing it in another. Boredom is a quality of perception that determines distraction. Describing the “generational shift toward hyper attention,” which “can be understood as a shift in the mean toward the AD/HD end of the spectrum,” N. Katherine Hayles argues that hyper-attentiveness is a mode whereby “normal stimulation is felt as boredom and relatively high levels of stimulation are necessary for [young people] to feel engaged and interested.”4 Despite the speed and hyper-lively quality of digital media—its mode of presentification—living with digital media is a condition of perceptual boredom. Distraction is a way to account for the pull to be stimulated, which is not only embodied in the human subject, but is an aspect of the socio-machinic assemblage of everyday life, which runs on boredom.5 According to the logic of the digital banal, boredom itself is a kind of reification, appearing throughout culture as distraction, effacing the material conditions of digital media, which programmatically makes users in its own rote image. Of course, such boredom manifests most explicitly as a culture of banality: the taken for granted, barely noticeable presence of digital media in everyday life; the

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