The Commonplaces
Everyone is distracted. Here are the commonplace explanations:
Addiction. Smartphones, laptops, and other “screens” are the cause. We are addicted to our devices like drugs. Other activities fail to hold our interest because we wish to return to the devices. This is a public health issue.
Damage. Social media algorithms are the cause. This is compatible with the first explanation, but here long use weakens one’s “attention span.” The actual powers of attention are damaged.
Scheme. Evil, cynical, or hapless elites are the cause. They intentionally distract us from the important things with baubles and entertainments. The circuses become ever more tawdry and the bread less nutritious.
Whatever truth these interpretation of our condition hold is jeopardized by their banality. The meaning of these is so thoroughly moralized that no further insight can be achieved by intoning them other than the obvious recommendation for lifestyle reform. The “digital detox” regimens that are so popular online take the addiction thesis as entirely literal. Those troubled by the algorithm may complain about it and seek new platforms that will even better tailor their experience of free time. And there is nothing more germane to the Internet Dreyfusards who are ready to accuse these platforms of manipulation, censorship, overexposure, or any other such moral crimes against our nature (simple and rustic as it remains at base) than to ask for people to repost and follow these messages. Electrification of the whole country has been accomplished—now we only need all power to the posters!
I think it is perfectly reasonable to talk about a form of mass addiction to phones, screens, platforms, social media. I have no doubt algorithmic recommendation is powerful in directing and shaping mass behaviors and that this knowledge has been and can be put to nefarious ends. I even believe that the apparently innocent usages of marketing products to the audience most likely to purchase them involves an erosion of publicity and an evacuation of the (already quite meager) elements of social media that could be used for the development of democratic energies. But I nevertheless feel that these “explanations” of distraction are inadequate. They leave us with no better understanding of our condition, no alternatives of action beyond retreat or rationing, and no possibilities of creative inquiry. So rather than seeking the underlying cause of our collective distraction, perhaps we need a reassessment of distraction itself and its place in our lives.
Content: Parts Without Wholes
An older tradition of social and cultural criticism (Simmel, Kracauer, Adorno) sought to investigate what seemed like a new form of mass distraction. But they turned their attention not primarily to the individual but the mass forms of attention, seeing them shaped by the habits of city life, spectacle, and the culture industry.
Perhaps most notorious here is Adorno. His criticism of popular music is often held up as an example of his cultural elitism. Perhaps it is elitist, but I get the sense that most people who make that claim have not read the pieces quite carefully. Adorno was quite explicit about beginning with the popular distinction between “popular” and “serious” music, but also departing from the conventional understanding that pop music (in his time, this was more Benny Goodman than Bad Bunny) was simple and unsophisticated while serious music was complex and artful. He spends sometime pointing out examples that contradict this commonplace on musical terms. The distinction he draws is between “standardization and non-standardization.” The standardization of popular music means that the piece as a whole is not so important: the form of verse-chorus-verse-chorus (and all the other forms of popular music) are so reliable that you do not need to hear the whole song to “get” it. This in turn gives us the feeling that this hypermodern set of musical conventions is natural—it seems to come directly from our own musical intuitions and sensibilities, forgetting that we have been “trained” to listen to it every time we listen to this form of music.
We might prickle at this severe judgment, but it is hard to deny that our habits of listening strongly favor the part over the whole. Consider how easily you are able to tell whether you like a song. Or that many, if not most, hit songs today are promoted on TikTok as “sounds,” where people experience them as soundbites. (That this is part of the regular operation of the music industry is only made clearer by UMG’s recent removal of its licensing rights from TikTok.) Spotify’s “curated” playlists are designed for activities or moods. They are rarely if ever organized around musical material itself, save for the microgenres of music journalism that are correspond to (often defunct or dying) social scenes.
This is furthest advanced in the realm of music, but narrative television and film is only a nose behind. Consider the rise of “ambient television,” specifically written, filmed, and edited with a distracted audience in mind. Television always required a compromise with the interruptions of advertisement, and its typically episodic structure acknowledged that audiences might not watch every episode, so complex through-lines of season-long development did not get approval until streaming on-demand content gave rise to binge watching. Comic book films are so inflexibly generic that footage can literally be substituted between them.
Perhaps everyone is distracted because our distraction is demanded by cultural production. Contemplation, absorption, or devotion are simply out of place here. There are only parts without wholes. This is why the term “content” is absolutely fitting for this condition of distraction: the counterpart of “form” is absent. The delivery of content on a platform or by a vendor is itself the form. The ability or inability to technically manipulate a digital object—to scroll past it, to block ads, the inability to not hear the music on a plane, in a store, on public transportation—is itself the form of our experience of content.
But there is a development of this form of cultural production in the digital era that Adorno did not witness. Yes, culture’s all in pieces—but that makes trash-picking possible. We can take up any number of these pieces and reassemble them. I remember the first time I watched a show and wanted to get one of the scenes “as a GIF.” Something is “memeable” if it participates in this structure of partial attention and instant recognition. And now we might defer to the meme over the original. It’s much more fun (and faster) to watch YouTube’s The Bachelor Fantake than ABC’s The Bachelor. We don’t need to pretend this is somehow more democratic, more creative, a “remix” culture of bricoleurs, or anything else that has been suggested by cultural critics who have tried to make nice with the market. And we don’t need to feel any shame about taking pleasure in pop culture either. But we can say that this shows creativity is much more social than individual and that it does not depend on the integrity of a “work.” Cultural value is up for grabs. If now that also means everything feels grasping, we at least see in the subsumption of all culture into market value, cultural authority has become so weak that it has ceased to be felt as a social force.
The piecing out of culture is also visible in the form of politicization that social media precipitates. We might speculate that a “take” (and its bastard child, the “hot take”) seems to have dually evolved from “double-take” — a reaction that calls for a second viewing but is not afforded one — and a film take — a trial shot, one that calls for many other attempts, in order to choose the best one. Here we can see the structure of distraction as both viewer and producer. We are all caught in a loop of a double-take that never reaches its moment of recognition, and produce our opinions as directors who, always willing to keep shooting, can never achieve a vision that would tell us when to stop.
Utopias: Wholes Without Parts
There’s a related tradition of criticism of distraction (Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin) that I would distinguish from the one I’ve indicated above. They focused on what might be fruitful within distraction. But here I want to turn to an even older and more eccentric thinker: Charles Fourier, the utopian.
Dissatisfaction is distraction’s hope. And distraction is always dissatisfying. Here’s is where I think that there could be a renewed relation to distraction, or what Fourier called the papillon, or butterfly, that human passion for the “next thing,” the “something else.” This was the strongest of all human passions, and a new human society would need to respect that. Indeed, it would need to be organized around it. Fourier’s highly elaborate (bordering on graphomaniacal) vision of this took the form of a new form of communal architecture that he called the “phylanstery.” In a sense, this was an interiorization of all social variety. One could travel within one’s own residence—the areas correspond to all manner of activities.
Compare this to social media distraction: there is something similar. What appears in distraction is a desire to know what others are doing. It is a social orientation to time, a present that one cannot fill oneself. But the social media articulation of this want moves us from room to room where every activity is basically the same: posting.
Both in social media and in our civic life, that underdetermined desire to see “what’s going on” has nowhere to go—literally. The public spaces that once institutionalized that desire have largely disappeared (that is a euphemism for have been destroyed). Try to find a pub, cafe, or teahouse that does not already have music playing, often along with televisions, and often with clashing audio streams. The double hit of neglect and policing has turned a great deal of urban public space into antisocial zones. Approaching strangers are threats, and anything happening there must be organized ahead of time. The private spaces where people actually congregate are subject to any number of social and legal conditions that severely limit the forms of possible socialization. Nor is it closed off from the public world as the bourgeois interiors of the European nineteenth century were. The average noise of traffic is estimated at 40-70 dB.
Flitting from one thing to the next is a way of sustaining that utopian desire: something else could be, one hopes, just around the corner, or just further down the scroll. But what would recognizing this do differently?
If distraction does not come from our internal weakness, but instead the strength of a passion seeking something worthy of it, we might think of how we cultivate a space for our distraction. Keeping Fourier’s metaphor, we might think of it as a butterfly garden. What kind of collection would let you flit about, in that familiar distracted manner, in a way that would satisfy that papillon? Of course, only you can answer that question, and only with experimentation.
Simply stunning. I love that you read distraction not as a sign of weakness but as the activity of a desire that still hasn’t found what it’s looking for. (At least, that’s what I think you’re saying, through the thinkers mentioned.) And I’ll have to think more about the idea that distraction is a sign that we are doing what humans do, and that the question we should be asking is not “who’s to blame” or “how can I train myself to live in this attentional hellscape” but something like “how can I get distracted toward what is better and better? How can I make going from distraction to distraction equal going from strength to strength?” (Am I getting this right?) I’ve got all kinds of thoughts about what to put in my butterfly garden, but occasional hazards has got to be in there. And I have to say, this piece’s conclusion has me thinking theological thoughts.
Could you direct me to the Simmel, Kracauer, Adorno text you referred to, please?