Tagged: Knowledge
Jacques Ellul And The Desensitizing Impact Of Our Technological World: Or, How To Reclaim Your Life From Technological Distraction
I feel out of touch–literally. Even now, pressing fingers over smooth keys I feel an emptiness of feedback. There’s no feedback in our technological world. The world of touch is a digitized landscape of ultra smooth surfaces and two dimensional images. Our only experience of this world, really, is through the eyes–the other senses are left out.
Do you know that the skin has been proven to ‘see’ colour? What about the skin in this digital world?
Have you ever done research on sensory deprivation? Researchers will take people and pay them money to have no sense of touch or smell or hearing or sight, etc. Then they’ll see how long they can go before they completely freak out. In a world of consensual sensory deprivation, is it a wonder we are feeling so out of touch with the world and each other? Is it a wonder we are all feeling so lonely?
My attention span has diminished also–it seems to be getting worse. I used to spend hours on a single passage of philosophical or poetic text, analyzing the argument, scribbling microscopic notes all over the margins in ultra-fine pencil. I can’t do that any more. Sure, part of it might have to do with age; but I know of 70 year old scholars and writers who could put me to shame. No, it’s not age–it’s that my attention is taken in so many directions when I’m just trying to read something. The quiet page is too dull, too painful, too demanding.
I talked to a friend who’s in IT. I asked him the same question:
“So, how is your attention span these days?”
“It’s brutal–” he said. “I can’t focus on anything. I used to be much more precise, analytic . . . Now I can hardly get through a book.”
I couldn’t believe it–he was repeating the same things I had been telling myself just days prior. My friend continued.
“Ya, it’s even effecting what used to be entertainment. In the past, I could get through a show or movie without distraction. Now, I get five minutes into a movie before I move on to another one, or my phone distracts me and I lose interest.”
“What can we do?” I asked. “Technology seems to have reached another phase transition–it’s speeding up. Is there a way to push it back?” He looked at me with puzzlement and nodded in agreement.
“I don’t know,” he went on. “I would like to think we can, but it seems too late. I work in this stuff. My job is to create technological systems for people to use made up of the latest technological tools. I wish we could push it back, but I think it’s too late . . .”
It was too late for Jacques Ellus back in 1964 when he wrote one of the most prescient books of our times, The Technological Society. He saw way back then that we had already lost control of our technological tools.
It was then that I started a quest to somehow reclaim my life. It sounds cliche, I know, but I want to recapture what was lost. I want to have time again. I want to feel life, beauty, the sense of wonder I had as a child–back when telephones didn’t have answering machines, TV only had a handful of channels, and I was out all day on my bike returning only when the sun went down.
The next few posts will be an attempt to share some of that reclaiming . . .
This Is How You Beat Failure And Find The Razor’s Edge Between Disaster And Perfection
I’ve been thinking about a post for the past couple of hours. There are different avenues I can go, but instead of hitting those, I’m choosing to write on something whimsical–ooh…
Why We’re All Afraid Of Failure
My day job is in education. And one of the most difficult things about it is to see what learning is (mis)construed to be, and what it actually is. I read an article today that children’s imagination is taught out of them by a system that is test-based and self-perpetuating. There is a well-known longitudinal study done on creativity, presented by Sir Ken Robinson in a famous TEDTalk, that showed that the longer one stays in school, the more one’s creativity is arrested. One of the main reasons is that students are taught linear rather than divergent thinking (one way in which creativity is measured). But another reason is that students are not taught to risk. As children we’re taught to play it safe, stay organized, don’t risk, and whatever you do don’t fail!
In watching the Mogul competition last night on the Olympics, a maxim struck me that I can’t get out of my head: The closer one gets to disaster, the closer one gets to perfection.
Creative Versus Karaoke Culture
It reminds me of a talk I heard once by the contentious Malcolm McLaren, called Authentic Creativity and Karaoke Culture. He was recounting his first day in art and design school. His instructor, disheveled and bearded, sat down and asked, “Who here wants to be a successful designer?” A group of young students raised their hands. The instructor’s response: “Then there’s the door–because everyone knows that as an artist it’s much better to be a glorious failure than any banal success!”
The closer to disaster, the closer to perfection.
Do you ever just dive into something without looking before you leap?
Do you ever just follow a hunch not knowing where it’s taking you?
Do you ever get off track, run the car off the pavement and off-road it for a while pushing the machine to its limits on unfamiliar terrain?
If You’re Working On Something That’s A Struggle, It’s Probably The Right Thing
My writing coach is amazing–it’s Steven Pressfield (though he doesn’t know it). I get his weekly newsletters. He writes the Wednesday posts, and he has a team of writers contribute the other days. There was one post–it wasn’t written by Pressfield–that struck me, and that came to my inbox right when I needed it. I don’t remember the specifics of it, but the main message was that if you’re writing something that is nothing but a struggle, that you have no handle on where it’s going, and that you want to quit writing every other day, then that’s the book you have to write.
Why?
Because you’re taking the risk, you’re hitting that tension between disaster and perfection, and in so doing, you are digging deep into yourself and pulling something out that is unique to who you are.
It’s that razor’s edge between disaster and perfection–it’s the sweet spot of creativity.
But let’s not be melodramatic here. The great disaster, the glorious failure, is really just a piece of paper. When you crash and burn, simply pick up a new snowy white sheet, and begin again.
Prefaces 