1. On a scale of 1-10, I’d give my ability to pay attention when doing homework a 6. I’m not really addicted to my phone. It’s just that I get up several times (at least when I’m at home), to give myself several breaks. I also do get a bit impatient when researching something or having to read something, so I may rush it because it would seem so difficult.
2. It took me roughly 40 minutes to get through, though I did speed up a little towards the end. I tallied 6 distractions. There were probably several more times when my mind was on something else other than the reading, but not all of them actually had me stop.
3. “The distracted student mind” and “In defense of distraction” sound for the most part confrontational, maybe even more so in the latter, because it’s about distraction in general, and not just school-related matters. Both, however, seem to just compile external information. However, in Sullivan’s essay, while there still are external sources cited, it’s mostly about personal experience, which makes it more human. Not only that, because of personal experience used, it sounds more understanding rather than confrontational. There is an attempt of that in “In defense of distraction”, but it’s not as strong.
4. Anderson’s main arguments are that this “distraction epidemic” can’t fully be resolved, because according to him, focus is a paradox which involves distraction. He does think, however, that it can be mitigated with exercises that can train one’s brain to focus, such as focusing on a dot on a paper for a certain amount of time. I, for the most part, agree with these arguments, because we are all forced into stress, with very many responsibilities to take care of. But, I don’t think I agree that focus is a paradox, because it doesn’t make sense and Anderson doesn’t go into that point too much for me to make sense of it.
5. After reading the articles, this “epidemic of distraction” sure is real. I had a hard time paying attention and found myself having to skim through parts of them. That certainly supports the arguments made in “The distracted student mind”, which in part is about students losing sleep to usage of tech. I find myself going to sleep at unreasonable times just because I want to watch YouTube videos and in compromising sleep, I am compromising attention.
6. Invention:

• Sullivan cites statistics such as YouTubers uploading 400 minutes of video each minute, and in each minute, there are over 1 Million swipes on Tinder. He also mentions that each day there are billions of likes on Facebook. This is all to show the extremes of engagement online.
• Sullivan states that in a survey (conducted the year before he wrote the article) that 46% of respondents say that they can’t live without a phone.
• Sullivan uses the thought of someone else to build off of, which would be someone by the name Karra talking about how her hometown of Portland, Maine is disconnected.

Style:

• Sullivan often switches to 2nd person or 1st person plural to try to relate with the audience and an example is “think of how rarely you now use the phone to speak to someone”, instead of saying something like “people don’t call others anymore”.
• Sullivan repeats the same idea in a few sentences in a different way in each sentence: “Every hour I spent online was not spent in the physical world. Every minute I was engrossed in a virtual interaction I was not involved in a human encounter. Every second absorbed in some trivia was a second less for any form of reflection, or calm, or spirituality.” This “missing out” progressively sounds worse with each sentence.
• Sullivan, before citing a statistic, asks a rhetorical question: “Am I exaggerating?”. This was added to make the statistics he cites scary, which becomes the tone around the paragraph that this is in and in the one before.

Memory:

• Sullivan talks about how silent it feels while meditating around others without being on his phone, which could be a callback to his reluctance of surrendering it in the beginning of the essay.
• Sullivan mentions Nicholas Carr’s critique of the GPS, which is that it has led to not seeing nor remembering the environment. This could be a callback to an instance that Sullivan mentions, which was of him taking a meditative walk in a forest without his phone and him finding his way back using his sense of direction.
• Sullivan makes the point that staying away from the web allows us to let out emotions. He uses an example of a person in a car pulling over and crying when a sad song on the radio comes on. Sullivan also makes it clear that he was planning to text his friends, but doesn’t. Similarly, Sullivan cites an experience where he is on a meditative walk in the forest alone, and cries recalling past trauma. He didn’t bring his phone with him.

Pathos:

• There could be an emotional impact when Sullivan talks about his decline of health and how a doctor asks: “Did you really survive HIV to die of the web?”
• There could be emotional impact when Sullivan brings up the concept of being “alone together”, with a whole family on their phones at the dinner table as an example.
• The aforementioned rhetorical question “Am I exaggerating?” could be used to evoke fear from readers.

Ethos:

Any example of invention can classify as an instance of ethos as well as any personal story Sullivan mentions. Also, the aforementioned relating to the reader would be another example of this.