The Art of Distraction

Gonzalo Baeza

Take a second to be really honest with yourself, how many times a day do you pick up your phone subconsciously to check how many notifications you just knoowww you have? How many times a day do you realize that you have been on the phone for more time than you’re comfortable with admitting??How many of you are reading this on your phone??? 

If you have noticed these things before, or if you did not realize all of things apply to you until now, then you are part of the mass majority of the rest of the world. But before you start feeling guilty for the amount of time you spend looking at the tiny screen in your pocket, just know it’s designed to be addictive and distracting. The balance between the phone being something for play and for work is just perfect enough to keep us guessing. A surprise. A gift maybe! We never know until we open up our phone and flip the screen to figure the mystery out.

Ken Unger

I know for myself, I can spend an ungodly amount of time looking at this screen. It’s a combination of using my phone to do work (like I am right now) when I’m on the go, and mindlessly scrolling through the different social platforms that constantly have my attention. Everyone I have asked about how much time they spend on their phones admits that they realize they are spending hours of their day looking at the same screen. And I mean who wouldn't? This tiny little computer is there for everything! When we are pathetically bingeing a new Netflix series, when we are sad, when we get good and bad news, when we get updated on anything, it's there when we go to sleep and right there when we wake up. The most reliable and knowledgeable best friend that does exactly what we want it to, when we want it to. But why do we have this tiny computer during all of those times? Sure, emergencies and bad news that needs to be delivered immediately are a good reason but wouldn’t that take the fun out of having a phone in the first place? Would we not then become conditioned to think of our phones as a burden or something that we feel obligated to answer? 

Penn State

Our phones are designed to keep us distracted. It has all of the elements that humans need to stay entertained. It has sound, different sounds at that, it vibrates in all kinds of ways, it is visually stimulating and it's small enough to fit in our pockets. Tell me that isn’t the perfect combination of ways to remind us that it’s just sitting there, waiting, begging for your attention. “If you wanted to train all of society to be as impulsive and weak-willed as possible, how would you do it? One way would be to invent an impulsivity training device – let’s call it an iTrainer” James Williams begins to explain in his book Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy. He very obviously adds the “i” in front of the trainer so that we very very obviously understand the point he is trying to make about the popular iphone. Impulsive and weak-willed are two words that are hard to swallow for those of us who really do understand how impulsive they are when it comes to their phones. I for one am so guilty of this. But how does this relate to the rest of our lives outside of our phone? Do we become more and more impulsive naturally with things that we normally do anyway? In other words, do we become trained to be this way in our daily lives? Another way to look at it in which my professor explained it, we become Muppets. The more impulsive we are, the less thought we put into checking our phones or living our lives in general, the more “Muppet” we are. Flopping around like mad people with no sense of direction, no idea where we are going or what we are doing until someone or something tells us so. I think most of us are more Muppet than we would like to believe but we can change this. 

Violette

Making a subconscious effort to put the phone down when we do not need to be on it, realizing how much time we have spent on it already and turning it away, bringing ourselves back to earth from the separate world of social media are all ways in which we can become less Muppet than we want to be. Finding time in the day to take a step back and enjoy the flowers, learn a new thing without writing in our phones to remember what that specific thing is. There are so many ways to step back and bring that Muppet meter down. The hardest part is retraining our brains to realize whatever is on that tiny screen of ours, is not actually worth the kind of praise that we seem to give it when we make an excuse to hop right back on. We can become less Muppet the more time we spend retraining ourselves and it will be a long journey, but hopefully a part of humanity will be restored in this age of technology.