Take a moment and listen to your deepest, most secret heart: Is it telling you that you text too much?
Okay… maybe that’s just me. I have a very contentious relationship with texting, and according to this story in The New York Times, my discomfort makes sense. This piece is all about the potentially negative effects of texting on teenagers—who are averaging over 2,200 texts per month (!)—but I’ve experienced quite a few of the phenomena that this story describes.
This quote from MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle hits me where I live:
As for peace and quiet, she said, “if something next to you is vibrating every couple of minutes, it makes it very difficult to be in that state of mind.
“If you’re being deluged by constant communication, the pressure to answer immediately is quite high,” she added. “So if you’re in the middle of a thought, forget it.”
Amen, sister! Like many of you, my workday (and a large swath of my personal time) is dominated by distraction-making devices. They deliver text messages, yes, but also IMs and e-mail and voicemails and on and on and on.
Often, this barrage of distractions makes me anxious. I feel assaulted by information, and I feel like I’m losing control of my time. And god help me if I leave these channels open while I’m trying to write something thougtful. Even in the process of writing this post, I’ve had to disable my Gmail notifier, beacuse the damn thing kept interrupting me every five seconds to let me know that I’d received yet another press release about some no-budget solo show in Brooklyn that celebrates somebody’s beautiful pain.
According to this recent cover story in New York magazine, distractions like this can throw us off course for up to twenty-five minutes. No wonder I’m shocked at how quickly I finish a story when I turn everything off. I’m saving hours.
But as the New York piece astutely states, “the virtual horse has already left the digital barn.” We are irrevocably in an age of constant information, and now our task is to handle that information (and its conduits) wisely.
I mean, I’m certainly not an alarmist who thinks the internet or texting or the iPhone signals doom for all humanity. I run a website, for god’s sake. I embrace the digital age for all its many glories.
My concern isn’t about accepting or rejecting this era of “partial attention.” It’s about making sure that the distractors don’t control me.
As author and researcher Winifred Gallagher says in New York:
Once you understand how attention works and how you can make the most productive use of it, if you continue to just jump in the air every time your phone rings or pounce on those buttons every time you get an instant message, that’s not the machine’s fault. That’s your fault.”
Which leads me to ask: Do you feel yourself being whittled down by electronic distractions? And if so, how do you deal with them?
I’ve only started thinking about this in the last few days, so my strategies are still forming, but here are a few
- For one, there’s The Critical Condition. This website exists to foster conversation, not hurl factoids at your face. Taking the time to really think through an essay I’m posting, or to consider the engaging comments you guys leave every day, makes me feel calmer and more focused.
- Then there’s reading. I’ve been devouring books recently—I’ve read six in the last five weeks, which is a huge number for me. And there’s something so… centering… about reading a book. No ads flashing on the sides of the pages. No opportunity to look in the margin and see if I’ve gotten a new e-mail. Instead, I get to fall into a single narrative and wallow around. After devoting my mental attention to a single object like a novel, I feel noticeably refreshed.
- Finally, I’ve been making more of an effort to leave my phone at home when I’m out with friends, or turn it off when my boyfriend and I are having alone time. It’s awfully nourishing to give my full attention to a human being instead of a machine.
