Imagine a world where you didn't have any technology to suck you into a mindless world of existence. I know we've all heard our parents talk about the days they stayed out till the street lights came on or our grandparents' tracks through the snow to school every day, but seriously. No Instagram to scroll through, no Facebook to pretend to enjoy, no PlayStation to hop online with, no Game Cube to play on for hours, no payphone to call your parents from the library. Then what would you do to keep yourself entertained?
That's the theme of this unit: distraction. Life today is all about how we can build our days around the screens we are consumed by. In James Williams' Stand Out of Our Light, he discusses the ever-increasing effect of technology on our attention.
His book is mostly broken into three parts. The first part, "Distraction by Design," is mostly an introduction to the limits technology has put on human attention and the increase of self-regulation responsibility it has given to us. Now, more than ever before, we must carefully set boundaries and find new ways to limit our wasteful technology usage so as to not fall behind on our day-to-day duties. By creating endless scrolling capacities, companies have also been given the advantage of increasing capital by using social media like Facebook or Twitter to help increase foot traffic on their sites and get the word out there.
The second part, "Clicks Against Humanity," was his way of showing how detrimental technology can be to our lives (on a sometimes extreme scale). In fact, he discusses the relationship that technology has that can come between us and our true priorities. See, for many people, social media is a way to get likes, follows, connections with people because they can't in real life or they feel unworthy of it behind the screen. However, this presents a painful reward system when we notice that a friend has more likes or views than we do. It can not only harm our view of ourselves, but the competition for who has a "more likable" picture can break friendships as well. It is hard to see others succeed in things we wish we could be good at, but social media has presented us with just the platform to flaunt these successes on.
In his final section, "Freedom of Attention," he makes sure to make his stance clear. He is not here to argue the good vs the bad in technology, he is simply here to argue that "if our technologies are not on our side, then they have no place in our lives." He discusses the attention economy at length and how we feed off of attention to run our society, for if it is not quick and eye-catching, we will simply walk on by.
All of this to say, a lot of this unit has been for self-reflection. Taking time out to measure our screen time and stepping away from the phone as much as we can for self-analysis.
In fact, 2 years ago, this became a big thing for a lot of influencers as well. (I'm not sure any of them got the idea from Williams' book). Emma Chamberlain, Youtube Vlogger and big social media influencer, did a video on this exact idea: "24 HOURS WITHOUT A PHONE." In her video, she taped her phone in a box, went on to live a normal day, and blogged the whole thing. While she still had screen time on her TV, there were a lot of things she didn't think she would miss. While she talks about how relaxing and good her day felt, she also realized that there were times she wanted her phone for no reason, she realized her music had to come from the radio, she had no way to use a digital map to get from place to place, she couldn't even comfortably go to the restroom without her phone to play on.
It is the trivial day-to-day things that we don't realize require attention until we lose something like our phone to distract us. Our phones provide an escape for us to lose focus and scroll endlessly without a thought in our minds. It is easy to get lost in these escapes. Williams talks about it in his book and Emma even mentions at the end of her video when she gets her phone back that all of her work is done.
Just like Williams says, we have to learn to separate ourselves and set boundaries between us and our screens.
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