My iPhone turned into an expensive paperweight yesterday, and so today I have been going about my life without this ubiquitous device.
There have been numerous times where I’ve thought to do something and realised I couldn’t: A photo I wanted to take, a quick check of my calendar, looking something up on the internet, a birthday wish to a friend and so on.
This has demonstrated how often I get distracted, and the amount it disturbs my train of thought. It’s highlighted to me how my thinking itself has changed, eternally craving quick fact gratification, and cutting my attention into easy to manage bite size chunks.
Without my ‘little internet’ in my pocket, I spent my lunch break today pootling about, and found a surprising number of times, after the urge to distract myself had passed, that I’d notice something about the world around me, and take delight in it.
As I sat eating my lunch a crowd of pigeons gathered around me, and I noticed that 2 of them seemed to have feathered gaitors/spats whereas the rest had bare familiar pigeon legs. I immediately thought of looking it up on my little internet, but without the ability I spent time just watching the interaction and appreciating the moment rather than losing myself in pointless fact gathering.
Even in the course of writing this post, I’ve searched for various things, checked my email, read a bit of an ebook and generally hopped around all over the shop. I certainly don’t have the attention span I used to have, and it looks like other people are noticing the same thing. Nicholas Carr has just written a book on it, and I’d recommend a look at the following article, and see if you too have the urge to unplug….
How the internet makes us stupid.
