There’s an interesting aside in Andrew Pickering’s The Cybernetic Brain on pg 98 which has left me thinking about why I’m so interested in distraction:
Here he tied his essay into a venerable tradition in psychiatry going back at least to the early twentieth century, namely, that madness and mental illness pointed to a failure to adapt—an inappropriate mental fixity in the face of the flux of events.
While I obviously don’t think distraction is a mental illness, I do think it can be characterised as a failure to adapt. But as insufficient mental fixity in the face of events, as opposed to an excess of fixity. It is a failure to find form, a distinct stance towards a situation liable to give rise to action within it.
Categories: Archive
Perhaps the very notion of Adaptation is it self a failure to adapt.
I just finished reading this: https://www.wired.com/story/how-the-videogame-aesthetic-flows-into-all-of-culture/ and found the one-size-fits-all theorisation of ‘flow’ in all kinds of digital experiences a bit too convenient (even after the considering the author’s predicament while he tries to fit his book-length argument into a tiny article). I went back and read some of your entries conceptualising ‘distraction’. It seems the author of the Wired article is overcompensating the popular perception / stigma of ‘distraction’ when it comes to digital experiences and valorising them as some kind of techno-religious ‘flow’.
I’ve toyed with that about ‘cultural bingeing’ https://markcarrigan.net/2017/08/12/the-phenomenology-of-cultural-bingeing/ I’ve still not made up my mind, I think there’s something to do this but to frame flow as straight forwardly positive seems like a mistake.
will read. my point exactly about the pure positive spin. hope the argument in his book is more nuanced.
also more on streaming video bingeing: https://blindfieldjournal.com/2017/11/28/stranger-things-binging-on-demand-the-serialized-symptoms-of-late-capitalism/