#like‚ yeah‚ i could stand to edit this down and repunctuate‚ &c &c

[aeide-thea]

[as long as i’m feeling late-night chatty, i figure i may as well give my tag spiral from earlier its own post, bc i’m realizing it got cut off, and in any case was lengthy enough that it’s probably easier to engage with this way—]

#anyway as i said before i get that we all *feel* more distractible #and i'm inclined to think that's true to some extent—certainly the more i read short-form tumblr posts #instead of longer-form articles or books #the less practice i'm getting at engaging with longer-form narratives #in much the same way that a great deal of close reading has made my eyes physically worse at focusing farther away

#but like—i've always wanted constant stimulus. #when i was growing up i had my nose constantly in a book‚ even when i was walking down the street. #these days i scroll through my phone. it's the same impulse. #if i didn't have internet access i expect i'd shift back to the patterns i grew up with. #maybe those were better; maybe it's value-neutral. #i'm not convinced the golden age of extended attention span was as real as people make out—some of us had adhd before we had internet! #and people have always sought diversion—it used to be that you'd see people on the subway with their noses in newspapers‚ before smartphones were a thing.

#and i think that frankly the panic about attention span gets too general #in the sense that like—if something compelling is in front of me‚ i remain capable of engaging with it. #i can spend hours talking to a friend on the phone‚ or out riding my bike. #so really i think it's a question of like—in what specific areas do we find ourselves dissatisfied with our capacity for attention? #and then what are we doing to address that?

#i do think that specifically my readiness to engage with new long-form writing is less than it was when i was a child #but i think that's a product of (a) having other things to read that take less activation energy #and (b) not being enrolled in e.g. english classes that are asking me to read non-genre fiction #which was‚ if i'm being honest‚ the impetus for a great deal of my more ~literary~ reading growing up. #so like. i could join a book club. i could take a book to a coffee shop and leave my phone at home. #there are specific actions i could take to address this specific issue instead of just engaging in generalized overblown despair. #but like. that isn't a Sexy Unified Theory. that won't sell or go viral.

#but like. clearly i continue to be capable of focusing in on projects—just look at the many words i've assembled in this post and its tags! #so i just think like. we need to define the nature and scope of the issue better—once we get specific‚ solutions start to present themselves. #but we have to believe that we're capable of implementing them. which we're less likely to believe‚ if we're nodding along at disquisitions on How Big Tech Fucked Us Up!

a modest assertion: Big Tech has its agenda; we have our own. we are capable of structuring our lives around our own interests and values‚ rather than the interests and values of corporations. like—not to be constantly le guin-posting, but: any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. but the more we marinate in our own feelings of damagedness—which includes ‘reading thinkpieces that seem to confirm those feelings’—the less alive we become to our own capability, and our own capacity for change. in other words: maybe the real thief of our attention was the johann hari we uncritically lapped up along the way.