I Love the Smell of Distraction in the Morning

teamaskins, via Flickr (CC license)

there are some software-related tricks that might help damp down internet distractions

Nick Carr's essay Is Google Making Us Stupid? has gotten a lot of play recently. Extended discussions on Edge.org and the Britannica Blog are worth spending some time with, if you can resist distractions long enough to read text that fleshes out concepts and is longer than 140-characters.

Those discussions gave me appetite for more. And, yes, it was a web search (Summize/Twitter, no less) that turned up what I found an entertaining feature on all this in the Times Online. That Times piece kind of summed things up with regard to attention/distraction and broadened the discussion to general informational stuff, not strictly limited to the long books or text works that Carr talked about.

As I was reading it, I had a thought about the usual source of distractions: the internet and by extension the applications and information on our computers or mobile devices. To me, what makes distraction probable in this environment is multitasking. Not our own multitasking, but the computer's. That is, today's operating systems allow you to run multitple programs simultaneously, which allows (encourages?) distractions with programs running in the background. And if those programs are hooked to the web ... well, you know.

You know when an email or tweet arrives because a sound goes off. It's a trivial matter to simply switch windows to attend to it, distracting yourself from whatever you were doing before. But if you had to close the program you were running and open the other program, it might be a different story. Like the iPhone 2.0 apps.

And like operating systems used to be. One application at a time; if you wanted to switch from word processing, you had to close, say, Wordstar and open your communication program. But of course we're not going to go back to MS DOS anytime real soon.

But there are some software-related tricks that might help damp down internet distractions while you're at the computer, and might help you attend to longer amount of text without skimming.

About those networked distractions: if you turn off the network while you're reading or writing something, emails, tweets and urges to look up something on Google disappear. You aren't connected anymore, so it's useless to try reading email, IM, twittering, or whatever. The easiest way is to pull out the network cable or just turn off your system's network settings. But it's just as easy to plug it back in or turn it back on.

If you're on a Mac, you're in luck. Freedom is an application written by a grad student plagued by distraction at dissertation time. You give Freedom the amount of time you want to be unconnected from the web, and it dutifully complies for just that amount of time. And, as I undertand it, nothing short of a reboot can shorten that time. (Disclosure: I haven't tried it myself: too busy getting this blog post out.)

For attending to long pieces of text and resisting the urge to just skim them, I've been using Videocue, a teleprompter application. I simply paste the text of almost any length. It automatically strips out links and formatting so there's no temptation to follow a link. Instead, it forces me to run through the text sequentially, without stopping. I have to pay attention if I want to get anything out of it. I wouldn't want to read War and Peace this way, but it works for Atlantic essays I might stumble across