| Describe your overall ability to pay attention when it comes to school work (<100 words) On a scale of 1 – 10, indicate how addicted you are to your phone |
| I am generally able to pay attention to my school work, especially if it interests me. I enjoy learning. I also do enjoy doing other things when Im not doing school work, so I sometimes tend to put off my work until the last minute. That being said, I usually start and finish my homework in a single stretch of time— not in multiple sessions. This only applies for assignments not studying, though. I find myself getting distracted when it comes to studying. I think being face to face with work I’ve already completed in hopes of memorizing is incredibly boring. I find myself stopping to clean my room, get a snack or drink, or socialize with my parents. I would say on a scale of 1-10 for phone addiction, I am a 5. I give myself this number because I know I’m not innocent when it comes to mindless scrolling, but it’s a last resort when I am bored. When I have nothing to do, my first instinct is to either go to the gym or on a walk. I think it’s so important to have something you love to do in your free time, and mine is physical activity. Even when I am traveling an hour and a half to school every day, my phone stays in my pocket until I have to tap my OMNY. |
| While reading “My Distraction Sickness” please note how long it takes you to get through the piece (Google says it’s a 45-minute read); also, count the number of times you get distracted (for whatever reason) and tally them at the end. |
| The piece took me 53 minutes to read. I was distracted twice. Once because I got a text from my boss, and I had to text him back. And once to check what questions were on this worksheet. |
| Describe the tone of all three articles, how do they differ? (<100 words) |
| “My Distraction Sickness” was a personal story on the writer’s phone/internet addiction. The author uses his personal story battling with a phone addiction as a warning to the reader. In “Defense Of Distraction” is seemingly more informative, but also much more informal. The author writes in a very casual manner and doesn’t have much evidence to support his arguments. “The Distracted Student Mind” is entirely informative and formal. The piece also includes graphs and statistics from studies conducted by the author himself. |
| What are Sam Anderson’s primary arguments in defense of distraction? (see part III of In Defense of Distraction) Do you find them convincing? Why or why not (<150 words) |
| Anderson’s points are that, “we’re evolving towards a new techno-cognitive nomadism, in which relentlessness will be an advantage,” “The truly wise mind will harness, rather than abandon, the power of distraction,” “Einstein and Lennon… What made both men’s achievements so groundbreaking, though, was that they did something modern technology is getting increasingly better at allowing us to do…” and another point saying that not being distracted is as bad as having ADHD? I think these points are honestly a little ridiculous. I don’t think there’s much “power” to be harnessed in distraction, at least in truly bettering ourselves. Being glued to a screen takes away so much from living, breathing experiences. |
| After reading all three articles, what are your thoughts on this “epidemic of distraction”? (<50 words) |
| I do think it is sad to see how these devices are so important to us and necessary for us to function on a day-to-day basis. The three pieces took me back to reading Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman in High School. I find it funny that that book, from 1985, might have better arguments and analyses of modern media and technologies than Anderson or Sullivan did in their pieces. |
| Please annotate “My Distraction Sickness” – highlight at least three instances for each of the following rhetoric concepts: -Invention -Style -Memory -Pathos -Ethos |
| Invention – “I was, in other words, a very early adopter of what we might now call living-in-the-web. And as the years went by, I realized I was no longer alone. Facebook soon gave everyone the equivalent of their own blog and their own audience. More and more people got a smartphone connecting them instantly to a deluge of febrile content, forcing them to cull and absorb and assimilate the online torrent as relentlessly as I had once.” – “But of course, as I had discovered in my blogging years, the family that is eating together while simultaneously on their phones is not actually together. They are, in Turkle’s formulation, “alone together.” You are where your attention is. If you’re watching a football game with your son while also texting a friend, you’re not fully with your child — and he knows it.” – “When someone next to you answers the phone and starts talking loudly as if you didn’t exist, you realize that, in her private zone, you don’t. And slowly, the whole concept of a public space — where we meet and engage and learn from our fellow citizens — evaporates. Turkle describes one of the many small consequences in an American city: “Kara, in her 50s, feels that life in her hometown of Portland, Maine, has emptied out: ‘Sometimes I walk down the street, and I’m the only person not plugged in … No one is where they are. They’re talking to someone miles away. I miss them.’ ”” Style – “After my panicked, anguished confession, he looked at me, one eyebrow raised, with a beatific half-smile. “Oh, that’s perfectly normal,” he deadpanned warmly. “Don’t worry. Be patient. It will resolve itself.” And in time, it did. Over the next day, the feelings began to ebb, my meditation improved, the sadness shifted into a kind of calm and rest.” – “Rejection still stings — but less when a new virtual match beckons on the horizon. We have made sex even safer yet, having sapped it of serendipity and risk and often of physical beings altogether. The amount of time we spend cruising vastly outweighs the time we may ever get to spend with the objects of our desire.” – “If the internet killed you, I used to joke, then I would be the first to find out. Years later, the joke was running thin. In the last year of my blogging life, my health began to give out. Four bronchial infections in 12 months had become progressively harder to kick.” Memory – “My goal was to keep thought in its place. “Remember,” my friend Sam Harris, an atheist meditator, had told me before I left, “if you’re suffering, you’re thinking.”” – “My mind drifted to a trancelike documentary I had watched years before, Philip Gröning’s Into Great Silence, on an ancient Carthusian monastery and silent monastic order in the Alps. In one scene, a novice monk is tending his plot of garden. As he moves deliberately from one task to the next, he seems almost in another dimension.” – “Charles Taylor used a term to describe the way we think of our societies. He called it a “social imaginary” — a set of interlocking beliefs and practices that can undermine or subtly marginalize other kinds of belief. We didn’t go from faith to secularism in one fell swoop, he argues.” Pathos – “I absorbed a lot of her agony, I came to realize later, hearing her screams of frustration and misery in constant, terrifying fights with my father, and never knowing how to stop it or to help. I remember watching her dissolve in tears in the car picking me up from elementary school at the thought of returning to a home she clearly dreaded, or holding her as she poured her heart out to me, through sobs and whispers.” – “It was as if, having slowly and progressively removed every distraction from my life, I was suddenly faced with what I had been distracting myself from. Resting for a moment against the trunk of a tree, I stopped, and suddenly found myself bent over, convulsed with the newly present pain, sobbing.” – “My doctor, dispensing one more course of antibiotics, finally laid it on the line: “Did you really survive HIV to die of the web?”” Ethos – “And as I watched my fellow meditators walk around, eyes open yet unavailable to me, I felt the slowing of the ticking clock, the unwinding of the pace that has all of us in modernity on a treadmill till death. I felt a trace of a freedom all humans used to know and that our culture seems intent, pell-mell, on forgetting.” – “And then, unexpectedly, on the third day, as I was walking through the forest, I became overwhelmed. I’m still not sure what triggered it, but my best guess is that the shady, quiet woodlands, with brooks trickling their way down hillsides and birds flitting through the moist air, summoned memories of my childhood.” – “In the days, then weeks, then months after my retreat, my daily meditation sessions began to falter a little. There was an election campaign of such brooding menace it demanded attention, headlined by a walking human Snapchat app of incoherence. For a while, I had limited my news exposure to the New York Times’ daily briefings; then, slowly, I found myself scanning the click-bait headlines from countless sources that crowded the screen; after a while, I was back in my old rut, absorbing every nugget of campaign news, even as I understood each to be as ephemeral as the last, and even though I no longer needed to absorb them all for work.” |
The J Journal
A blog by Juliana Wilson
