Look Up!

Last week, we learned about James Williams' Stand Out of Our Light. We took his discussion about the way that our phones distract us from our reality and pull us into an unknowing world in which we are consumed. Over the past couple of weeks, we practiced that. We took the concepts we learned with Williams and applied them to some of Manoush Zomorodi's Broad and Brilliant and Rob Walker's Art of Noticing.

For the purpose of this blog, we are going to focus on the challenges in Rob Walker's book. Our professor provided a list of five short challenges for us to take on. Simple enough, we could choose to sit and listen to some things around us for a bit, sketch a room from memory, look out a window, sit by a window or in a room you may not normally sit in, or take a color walk.

Seems kinda dumb, huh? (I'm just saying what we all thought so if you see this, Vroomen, don't be mad).

actual representation of me people-watching at 11:30pm

I started my challenge late one night after work and chose to look out the living room window for a few minutes. At first, I had the urge to be bored and check my phone but after a while, it went away and I started noticing the number of people walking on the side of my dorm building at 11:30 at night (weirdos), I noticed a line of small trees behind the large one I had never noticed before, I noticed the number of cars in the parking, a broken light at a building across the street, and other little things.

Once I noticed the number of things I hadn't noticed before my mind began drifting further into thought:

"Where are these people going? Can they see me staring at them from the second floor? If they looked up here would I be scared? Would they? Why have I never seen anyone in the other windows when I'm walking around campus? I don't recognize them..."

A guy in my class actually did the same challenge and he went into a similar spiral. After looking out of the window for a few minutes, he somehow began thinking a lot about why we have fingers, how they move, how our brain can just tell our bodies to do something and we do.

(Now there are two types of people reading this right now: the first will completely understand because we have these thoughts on a regular basis; the other will think it is crazy because they haven't ever thought like this.)

Regardless of the reader you are, the point of the discussion we got out of class that day was about our attention. it was about how our minds have changed and stopped noticing things that aren't necessarily right in front of our faces anymore. The theory of the 3 men we have learned from and discussed recently is that our phones (and technology in general) have taken away our ability to be detailed oriented. We forget to notice the little things around us and enjoy the moments without a screen 2 inches from our bodies.

The challenges take 5 minutes of your time but they are worth it. They gave me a refreshing start to my days. They reminded me of why I go do the things I do and it's not for me to record for later, it is for me to live in the moment. Whether we are alone or with people, we need to remind ourselves to step outside of the hold technology has on us and come up for air every once in a while. 

Look up and enjoy what is around you.

Try one of these challenges and let me know...

A Life Offline

 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.