shouting loudly

For purposes of writing the great French philosopher Michel de Montaigne found it necessary to isolate himself in the library of his château.  There he spent the latter half of his life reading, thinking and writing thousands of pages of essays and reflections.  But our new wired lives have made such isolation a much harder commodity to come by.  Montaigne’s library is no longer the sanctuary it once was.  At least not if it has wifi.

A colleague who is travelling the long, lonely road of dissertation writing recently dropped me a note about her own version of Montaigne’s château:

Just downloaded this program called “Write or Die.”  On the “kamikaze” setting if you fall behind your self-assigned words-per-minute typing speed, it starts to DELETE your existing writing.  (The more gentle settings just play an unpleasant noise.)

Having wrestled with writer’s block in the past, I thought I’d give this cunning bit of software a go.  Sure enough, when I fell behind I was confronted by the horrifying sight of my words being gobbled up by an invisible Pac-Man-like entity (my reference dates me, I know).  While I’m not sure that the program is capable of generating good prose, soaked as it is in the musk of fear, it certainly boosts word count.

This is just the latest bit of software I’ve seen that imposes some sort of temporary condition to help the user focus.  Some programs (like Write or Die) maintain focus through incentives, others, like Freedom or SelfControl (which block internet access for preassigned blocks of time) maintain focus through obstructions.  What all these applications share, however, is a common enemy: digital distraction.

 In 1967 Marshall McLuhan wrote that “All media work us over completely.  They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered.”

I think many of us are aware that the internet is working us over completely and in ways that have yet to be fully discovered.  Distractions come at us from many directions: from the steady stream of emails that bludgeon us at work, at home and on our mobile devices, to the newsfeeds of our social networks that update us on every sniffle and whim of our hundreds of “friends”, to the omnipresent temptation to ramble the midway of the endless carnival called the internet.  Few would argue that being online all the time has not had an impact on our ability to focus and function.  What is unclear is whether the new distraction is purely environmental or whether it is actually rehardwiring our brains (as writers like Nicholas Carr suggest), like the trauma of war can rewire the brains of soldiers. 

McLuhan, despite the caricature of him as a blind technological cheerleader, was by no means oblivious to the dangers of new technologies.  Indeed, the ultimate goal of his work was to provide people with the tools to do battle in a “global information war.”  Like some memetic Zen master (or mustachioed Canadian Yoda), he drills the reader with koans, riddles, puns, aphorisms, and visual and linguistic games in order to make the them aware of the active processes that create their media environments.  He writes: “The environment as a processor of information is propaganda.  Propaganda ends where dialogue begins.  You must talk to the media, not to the programmer.” 

Talking to the media is just what programs like Freedom, Write or Die and SelfControl do.  And what they are saying (as another blogger recently quipped) is “Stop the Internet, I want to get off!”  They allow us, however briefly, to turn the medium back upon itself, creating an antienvironment that both makes visible and transcends the tendency toward digital distraction.