The Distraction Addiction: Getting the Information You Need and the Communication You Want, Without Enraging Your Family, Annoying Your Colleagues, and Destroying Your Soul by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

Author:Alex Soojung-Kim Pang [PANG, ALEX SOOJUNG-KIM]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Tags: Social Science / Media Studies, Computers / Social Aspects / Human-Computer Interaction, Science / Philosophy & Social Aspects
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2013-08-20T04:00:00+00:00

The first thing to observe is that it’s possible to use familiar technologies more mindfully. Sometimes you can cultivate this facility. Sometimes it sneaks up on you, and the best you can do is be prepared for it.

It hit me one afternoon in Cambridge during a long walk with my wife and a fellow visitor at Microsoft Research. We were trekking from Cambridge to Grantchester to visit the Orchard, a teahouse on the banks of the Cam, the fabled river that winds through Cambridgeshire’s fens. For a century, people have followed this path, blazed by the great poet Rupert Brooke when he sought to escape Cambridge, which he described as “urban, squat and packed with guile.” While Brooke found “peace and holy quiet” in Grantchester, he actually didn’t go very far, as the village is only a couple miles upriver. It’s roughly the same distance Henry David Thoreau’s little cabin beside Walden Pond was from the town of Concord, my wife reminded me. Contemplation can be closer than we think.

To get to the Orchard, you follow the Cam south through Cambridge to Grantchester Meadow. The gently rolling meadow is quietly beautiful; farm and woodland are visible in one direction, and the spires of the colleges occasionally visible in the distance. It doesn’t seem like it’s changed much since it was purchased by King’s College in 1452, the same year Leonardo da Vinci was born and the first Bible rolled off Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press. You might see a herd of red poll cattle grazing near the water. After a mile, when you reach Grantchester village, walk down a narrow walled lane, pass a church, and you’ll come to the Orchard.

I thought it was exactly the sort of trip that was meant to be photographed exhaustively, and I’d brought our digital SLR and a couple of lenses. My father was an avid amateur photographer when I was young, but it wasn’t until the invention of digital cameras and the arrival of my children that I became a photographer myself. For me, the camera can easily become an intrusive, unwelcome object that distorts the events it’s documenting (“Everybody stand together for a picture!”) or threatens to pull my attention away from the environment and onto itself. It’s easy for me to become caught up in the geekier aspects of the craft. I’ve spent as many hours experimenting with the virtual lenses and films in Hipstamatic, the iPhone’s retro camera app, as I spent mastering mazes in Pac-Man in my youth, and I love the feel of a great camera’s heavy precision. Digital memory lets you take vast numbers of pictures, which leads you to believe that by sheer random luck, some of them will turn out well. This attitude encourages profligacy at the expense of skill; speed instead of seeing; distraction and disruption rather than concentration. Why actually frame a picture when you can play the lottery and assume that if you take enough pictures, one of them will look good?

Certainly there have been times when I’ve been too focused on documenting the moment to be in the moment.

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