It is a theme that tends to fascinate me these days, and one that I don't skip in my workshops with clients or in my class at Columbia University School of Journalism.
We must learn to practice a journalism of everywheness and interruptions.
That is why I found a recent David Brooks column, The Art of Focus, interesting and worth analyzing here today. Brooks begins with a sort of mea culpa confession:
"Like everyone else, I am losing the attention war. I toggle over to my emails when I should be working. I text when I should be paying attention to the people in front of me. I spend hours looking at mildly diverting stuff on YouTube. (“Look, there’s a bunch of guys who can play ‘Billie Jean’ on beer bottles!”)"
True, it is difficult for many of us to relinquish our addiction to all those tasks brought about fast and furiously by the digital revolution.
There are pings, alarms, chimes, you name it to alert us that someone or something requires our attention. We know that most of what these signals send us to is NOT really that important, but we are happy to comply.
Oh, got three emails.
Oh, got 10 Likes for that Facebook entry.
Oh, my friend Annie shares a YouTube video that she thinks "will make my day".
Yes, but I am reading the David Brooks piece about focusing in my iPhone right now. What I should I interrupt my reading?
But I do, just like you do. I check those emails, check who likes what I posted on my Facebook wall, and stopped to see a clip of the great and late Ann B. Davis in a hilarious scene from The Brady Bunch. (Remember the one where one of the girls wrapped her like a mummy?)
And then I get back to The Art of Focus, and it is as if the teacher is scolding me for my distraction.
The Erra of Distraction
So, not only do we have the journalism of everywheness and the journalism for interruptions.
We also have the journalism for distractions.
Let's face it: if you are writing, editing and designing for the small screen of that smartphone, you are also going to have to learn to think of interruptions and distractions.
True, a good story will keep us from some of the distractions—never all of them.
However, if you want to play it safe, you will write stories with shorter paragraphs, more subheads (internal navigation), and somehow will think of "re entry" points in the story, so that if I return from seeing my Facebook page, I can pick up the story where I left it two minutes before and make that reentry as smoothly as possible.
Once I re-entered the Brooks column, I learned about Adam Phillips, a child psychologist,whom Brooks quotes. Two things jumped at me from Phillips' observations of children (which may help us understand our state of distractions today);
—Phillips reminds us about how much appetite children have. You can use the word curiosity here as well. Phillips says that "there’s something very frightening about one’s appetite. So that one is trying to contain a voraciousness in a very specific, limited, narrowed way. ...". Perhaps we as adults in the digital era are frightened by the direction that our distractions (and interests) take. Is too much multitasking while we hold that phone in our hand good or bad?
—Phillips states that "everybody is dealing with how much of their own alivenesss they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves.” How true. In the digital age, sometimes we have been revved up by more sensations by 7 in the morning that we could have experienced in the course of a day 10 years ago.
This prompts the question: how much disruption is too much?
How much multitasking is healthy before we lose focus and gain little from our engagement with information?
Thoughts for anyone creating and producing information to ponder.
(Wonder how many distractions you had while reading this blog post!)
