Later On

It would be useful to have some index of the level of daily distractions.

It seems to me that the degree to which people in the US (and probably worldwide) are being distracted has steadily increased over the past few decades. In my childhood, we had fewer distractions: radio programs in the evening, movies on Saturday, listen to records occasionally, phone calls from time to time. A weekly high school football game. College games—seen at colleges or in newsreels. (This was before television.) But large chunks of time were left for one to fill as s/he wished. There was a sense that you were in control of your time.

Now I see people as being more or less constantly distracted. The entertainment industry pumps out movies, TV shows, games, and the like as fast as it can. Major-league sports franchises constantly strive to extend their reach and their involvement in our daily lives with product and activity spin-offs. We now carry our phones with us constantly, and can watch movies, sports, TV, or the news, read the paper, and exchange text messages. Twitter and Facebook and other social media augment (and to some extent replace) face-to-face visits.

Many jobs have seeped into time once reserved for one’s private life: it’s one thing to bring home a briefcase of papers, another to have a computer the keeps you connected to (and interacting with) your work colleagues pretty much any hour of the day or night, not to mention the iPhone or Blackberry.

People now have much less time in which they are free to simply sit and contemplate—think about—their lives and the world around them. Rather they are constantly having to respond to external stimuli: distractions.

Being in a constant state of distraction has its upsides, of course. Corporations really like for consumers to be slightly distracted since that lowers their guard and allows easier psychological manipulation and triggering. Indeed, the environment so carefully conceived and created for shoppers—malls, supermarkets, department stores, auto shows, casinos, and the like—are designed to distract: to deliver exactly the right sort and level of distraction to put the consumer in a state where his or her credit cards emerge almost involuntarily and the accumulation of stuff begins.

And politicians also want us distracted. In general, they do not want an informed and active citizenry, because active, informed citizens start making demands on their elected officials. From a politician’s point of view, it’s better to have citizens that are aroused but whose informational diet is carefully restricted and monitored—nothing is more distasteful to the average politician than citizens getting useful and accurate information about what the government is doing. Better to keep citizens stirred up and angry at each other.

I got to thinking about how distracted people are because now that I am retired with a fair amount of free time, I look at things happening in plain sight in the US that somehow people are not noticing. I started thinking about this on seeing the Jon Stewart program that lays out quite clearly and simply how the Palin family decided as early as June that Ms. Palin would not run for president, but deliberately kept that decision secret so that they could continue to harvest donations from their supporters, including one last big round of donations they requested just before she would finally announce her decision—a decision she had made months before.

The Palin campaign was a scam, pure and simple, and it’s obvious from publicly available information. But no one seems to notice. No one has time to notice because of the constant din of distractions. We are drowning in distractions while important issues either go unaddressed or are addressed in ways that, were we paying attention, should horrify us.

UPDATE: Part of the efficacy of the distractions visited upon us is due to our increasing knowledge of how the human brain and mind work: neurology and psychology have now delved pretty deeply into how we function, though much remains to be learned. Still: of all the research and knowledge we now posses, I would love to know a breakdown of its use in two categories: helping people become more autonomous and free, and controlling people.

UPDATE 2: I was thinking that we need more rituals like these.