why don’t you
OK, I’m old enough to remember that perennial ‘Easter school holiday’ television programme, Why Don’t You…Just turn Off Your Television Set And Go And Do Something Less Boring Instead’ where the louche youth of the day were berated for their sloth-like behaviour and, oh the irony, chastised for couch-slouching in front of the goggle-box, as opposed to building tree-houses or torturing frogs with a high-powered magnifying glass. Well, I kinda feel the same about technology these days as we are incessantly interrupted and distracted, yet the new fad is to get offline using the very same ‘zenware’ technology, in a daily digital sabbatical.
The question is, is it all driving us round the bend, or even worse, is it making us stupid? C’mon admit it, how many times have you walked into a room to get something, and by the time you got there, you’ve forgotten what you’d gone in there for in the first place? How many times have you started to read an article and glazed over before the end of the third paragraph? How many times have you to put the kettle on before you finally make the cuppa? How long does it take you to read a book these days, if indeed you can even face the long-haul of a book? Yep, guilty. We browse, dip-in, skim the surface, pick-up & put-down, taste but fail to digest. In today’s dopamine driven, Pavlovian or Skinner response hungry society, are we just too self-obsessed to invest in anything beyond the immediacy?
I do concede these concerns are nothing new. Erasmus worried that the printing press would damage scholarship and Socrates contested that the invention of writing would result in the failing of society’s collective memory. Time has shown we ain’t done too badly with those inventions and I’m sure we can figure out how to handle smartphones and Facebook updates, but there is a subtle difference. It’s the all-pervasive nature of today’s distractions: what we focus on, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, ends up comprising our whole life; to be diverted and interrupted becomes our very persona.
And in truth, the dirty little industry secret is that all this distraction and interruption is immensely profitable: the real way to build a successful online business is to control your customers/clients’ attention. So, if the very idea of visiting donothingfor2minutes.com strikes you as a serious misuse of your time and attention when, of course, you could be doing something far more digitally stimulating, then I suggest you really, really need to visit! And whilst we’re on the subject, why don’t you just turn off your computer/smartphone/tablet/twitter feed and go and do something less boring instead.
