Disembodiment in the Attention Economy
I was a guest on a podcast earlier this year, and I mentioned how staring at screens all day can make us feel oddly “disembodied.” It was the only word I could come up with at the time, and it occurred to me weeks later what the feeling reminds me of…
The Accidental Nap
Now, I don’t know if this was a universal childhood experience, or maybe it was just me, but I used to get this hazy, almost otherworldly feeling whenever I woke up from an accidentally long afternoon nap as a kid. Picture this: suddenly it’s pitch black outside, and for a moment you panic not knowing if it’s the middle of the night or it’s almost time to get up in the morning for school. Somehow it’s only 7:30pm, so you stumble downstairs for what should be a normal dinner with your family, but you’re still enveloped in a dense fog that’s hard to shake. For the rest of the night, you feel like a movie extra or non-playable video game character in your own life.
The Knowledge Worker
Turning the conversation back to screens, I know you don’t need me to tell you that the whole topic is incredibly nuanced and situational. For one thing, logging a lot of screen time isn’t necessarily indulgent. If you’re a knowledge worker – aka, your primary capital is theoretical or applied knowledge, rather than applied physical skill – then you’ll know how this goes. From growth marketing to computational genetics, knowledge work almost certainly involves staring at a screen or three for extended amounts of time.
But even when screen time is indulgent – is it really that bad? I for one have loved playing on the computer since Putt-Putt and KidPix. And now, at 30, I’ll spend hours sifting through eye candy on Pinterest at night and taking long, romantic scrolls on Hinge on the weekend. I like my screen time. (Although since we’re on the topic, I think my dating history alone could tell you that I like a lot of things that aren’t good for me in the long run.)
The Five Senses
Cheeky subtext aside, here’s the thesis: the digital world has a way of untethering us from our five senses, which is in part what creates that out-of-body screen-time feeling. Our senses are grounding. It’s no wonder, then, that consciously naming the things we can see and hear, touch and taste and smell is such a potent exercise for soothing stress and anxiety.
So it follows, then, that maintaining an attentiveness to the sensory feedback we’re receiving throughout the day – even a very digitally saturated day –reminds our bodies and minds that we’re here. We’re in this world. We’re present, we’re engaged, and we’re not going to live our entire adult lives like we just woke up from an after-school nap.
Supplementary Reading Material:
Author:
Cal Newport — theoretical computer scientist, purveyor of a deep life, & Rachel’s long-time intellectual crush since c. 2011
Excerpt:
“Increasingly, [the technologies we use] dictate how we behave and how we feel, and somehow coerce us to use them more than we think is healthy, often at the expense of other activities we find more valuable.
What’s making us uncomfortable, in other words, is this feeling of losing control – a feeling that instantiates itself in a dozen different ways each day, such as when we tune out with our phone during our child’s bath time, or lose our ability to enjoy a nice moment without a frantic urge to document it for a virtual audience.
It’s not about usefulness, it’s about autonomy” (Newport).
Author:
Oliver Burkeman — Cambridge-educated writer, mortality-ponderer, and former psychology columnist at The Guardian
Excerpt:
“As the technology critic Tristan Harris likes to say, each time you open a social media app, there are ‘a thousand people on the other side of the screen’ paid to keep you there – and so it’s unrealistic to expect users to resist the assault on their time and attention by means of willpower alone. […]
We mustn’t let Silicon Valley off the hook, but we should be honest: much of the time, we give in to distraction willingly.
Something in us wants to be distracted, whether by our digital devices or anything else – to not spend our lives on what we thought we cared about the most” (Burkeman).
Author:
Jia Tolentino — whip-smart wordsmith, former Peace Corps volunteer, & one of Rachel’s favorite staff writers at The New Yorker
Excerpt:
“Like many among us, I have become acutely conscious of the way my brain degrades when I strap it in to receive the full barrage of the internet – these unlimited channels, all constantly reloading with new information: births, deaths, boasts, bombings, jokes, job announcements, ads, warnings, complaints, confessions, and political disasters blitzing our frayed neurons in huge waves of information that pummel us and then are instantly replaced.
This is an awful way to live, and it is wearing us down quickly. […] But the worse the internet gets, the more we appear to crave it – the more it gains the power to shape our instincts and desires” (Tolentino).
