Death and distraction
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 31: Ways of Seeing
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Helen Elliott
Download the complete article PDF
Helen Elliott's biography and other articles by this writer
HER subject is distraction. She’s written a book about it, published by one of those intimidating American academic houses. She’s American and has that attractive twangy accent I can never place. South coast? Boston? With her, though, it’s not about the accent. She’s very, very smart and the Radio National interviewer is very, very taken with her.
So am I. Google my name and ‘distracted’ will be riveted to it. I was about to do some reading when that twang lured me across the kitchen tiles, nearer to the radio. Witty, that capacity to morph into your subject. But she’s not just a witty snare; she’s saying fresh things about a scrappy and infinite topic. I unscrew the still hot one-cup espresso machine, empty the grounds into the compost and, despite my recent swearing off at two, make my third coffee for the day. While I wait for it to spit and gurgle at me I empty the dishwasher. I can’t rush out with the overflowing compost, because I’ll miss what she is saying and already I don’t want to miss a word.
She’s making the interviewer laugh. Oh-oh-oh-oh! He has an elegant lilt and black lines of TS Eliot slide down my peripheral vision. Was it The Waste Land? How many years since I’ve read that? I still have my original copy. I think.
They’re talking about language, about the anachronistic meaning of the word ‘distraction’, the way it was used for around three hundred years. Not so long ago it meant being pulled away or being pulled in pieces. That’s what she says. Yes! I remember! I can even see the book, Latin Roots, with the cracked cover in a weird black-green colour that made my mouth dry. That book was in some shape when I got it third-hand, after two boys. The Latin root distrahere means to pull asunder.
There was, she says, a recent American survey of people working in offices that attempted to track their attention spans. What? The results must be wrong. I tear some paper from the roll and wipe down the bench. After seventeen years it never looks clean. The survey indicated that workers are interrupted every three minutes. Every three minutes? And if they’re doing something that requires detailed attention it might take as long as twenty-five minutes to get back into it. Workers spend 28 per cent of their day being distracted.
I’m the cartoon cat that’s fallen on its head. Twenty-eight per cent? Exclamation marks bounce off my eyeballs. Companies are interested in this study, because the time their workers waste costs billions every year. Translate global into millions every second.
Then there’s this: she says – or the interviewer, who seems to have read her book, says – that it isn’t just outside interruptions that cause these minor bleeds every three minutes. The workers distract themselves. Their email pings; their mobile drums; they need to look up a result or Facebook, or monitor an online discussion.
She’s set me off like a metronome. How right she is; concentrated work is not possible in offices. I know this because there have been times in my life when I’ve had to work in those glass and steel cylinders that shimmer on the horizon when I take the freeway from my snug little suburb into the city. As I get closer they take shape, looming like independent colonies. One of them has pointed ears à la Batman, and every time I near the end of the freeway I expect an image of Jack Nicholson playing the Joker. He’s an actor I dislike. Still. People who know about architecture tell me that the Batman building is a fabulous example of creative architecture.
That’s what they tell me, but I’m cautious about rushing to admire the newly made buildings we live and work in, especially these public buildings, facades agitated with bling, angles calculated against serenity. When I’m in them I don’t feel awed or uplifted. Disconsolate and nervy, more like it.
If I think about all the people who work in these buildings, all these individuals going about their one precious life as ardently as I go about my one precious life, I feel a distant, but glacial prick. It’s closely related to that stupefied panic I have whenever I’ve watched archival footage from World War II, where lines of people are standing on the edge of trenches waiting to be shot. Or being shot. Bang. Oblivion. Each separate soul. Just like me. Who were they? What were they feeling, thinking? Disbelief? Acceptance? Distraught? The word that used to be an alternative to distract. These days I can’t look at anything violent.
I was thirteen when I read Anne Frank’s Diary and it left an invisible tattoo. I turned sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, sometimes delighting in myself and in the world, just as she did, so sometimes I thought about Anne and about how she never knew what it was to turn sixteen. How could this happen? That there was once a girl exactly my age, just as dazzled with life, expecting to live just as I expected to live...and then she didn’t. This happened. I knew Anne Frank. I knew what she was feeling but, despite my empathy, my famous empathy, I’ll never understand what she faced. That’s like trying to pocket the wind.
What luck that I can work from home, where no one can distract me every three minutes.
I turn off the gas and pour my coffee into a small white bone china cup that has gold laurel leaves, handpainted, winding around the rim. It’s called Golden Laurel and was made in Derbyshire when dishwashers were a pair of slim hands in pink rubber gloves. She’s using the word ‘hopscotching’ to describe how we navigate the new, technological world. Fragmentation, sound bites, split-focus all sound lumpy compared to hopscotching. Hopscotching cascades with images: children, barelegged, short tartan – tartan! – skirts flying as they leg across the pattern to wherever the tor has landed. I used to love the chance and the exhilaration of that game.
The interviewer just called her Maggie, but I missed the introduction and have no idea who she is, other than that she has written the distracting book they are discussing. The interviewer is galvanised by the subject, so much so that he forgets himself, and the whole thing threatens to dissolve as he shambles in like an intellectual elephant just as she’s starting to say something. Oh-oh-oh-oh! Do shut up. He’s a brilliant and learned man, but I’ve listened to him for years and I know his patterns of thought and I know – and mostly agree with – his opinions. (We’re both calcifying.) Because of this I’m always tolerant of his foibles, but today I’m sailing towards impatient. Maggie has only twenty minutes. Let her speak!
I bang my cup down in its saucer and the golden laurels threaten to crack.
She starts speaking about intellectual restlessness. Her thesis, as far as I can gauge, is that while technology is amazing and helpful (tonic, she says – lovely), the way we use it is changing the physical capacities of our brains. As she speaks my own brain highlights in mercury. Neuroscientists are coming to believe that our constant hopscotching may be physically altering wodges of our brains in such ways that we are no longer capable of reflection or of the deep thinking that results in difficult problem-solving. She cites two things that cause my brain – currently in a humming state of orange alert – to skid to a halt. One is that fifteen-year-old American children rate very low on critical thinking (although, hooray! Australian children perform far better) and are lining up for huge doses of adult ADHD medications. The other is that a high percentage of long-standing internet users in America did not realise that paid content is common online.
She means, I imagine, marketing, advertising masquerading as independent scholarship, something I expected people automatically assumed every time they read on the net. I never trust it face-up, particularly the first arrival from Google, but she is saying, what? No! Over 60 per cent of people, of educated people, read everything without scepticism, without doubting what the professional, visually attractive text says. But I suppose that in a world in love with the image, the text is the image. So if a piece of text looks attractive it has a greater chance of being believed.
Like people? What about all those studies done confirming that pretty people of both sexes do better in every way in the world: rail against it if you like, but it seems we’re hardwired for prettiness.