'The Distraction Society'

In response to Damon Young’s BBC article ‘The Distraction Society’:

I take out the article, open my laptop, and Facebook pops in immediately. I’ve got new notifications.
Several friends had commented on my pictures, others had written on my ‘wall’, some has replied my message, and so on. Obviously I start commenting back, responding messages, checking their new pictures, and seeing if anyone is online. The chat buzz sounds very loud; someone is talking to me. My cousin, sending me a video we made over the holiday. I watch it. Hilarious. I send it to my sisters. I check my school e-mail: high school announcements. That reminds me of something… I was doing this homework.

Damon Young’s article ‘The Distraction Society’ starts out more or else exactly like this blog; him trying to write the article but getting easily distracted by e-mails, videos, photographs, an ‘internet hit’, etc. Although technology and the Internet are here to make our lives somehow easier, nowadays it is causing us to drift our attention from working to simply ‘surfing’ the Internet, finding always some excuse to keep wasting our time. With his article, Young made me realize how true this issue is in our present lives, hence my decision to copy his manner and describe how often it occurs to me daily. Moreover, Young’s article relates to the latest novel from my English class, Hunger by Knut Hamsun.

Hamsun’s novel ‘Hunger’ describes the life of an unnamed writer (the narrator) who is in a constant attempt of finding a job and writing successful and perfect pieces as a way to keep from starving. Work and writing is his way of survival. However, just like Young or myself, when writing he is constantly distracted by whatever comes into his way or mind. There is a moment in Part I of the novel where the narrator is sitting in a bench trying to write, but instead gets distracted by some flies. He describes: “But write I could not. After a few lines nothing seemed to occur to me; my thought ran in other directions and I could not pull myself together enough for any special exertion. Everything influenced and distracted me; everything I saw made a fresh impression on me. Flies and tiny mosquitoes stick fast to the paper and disturb me.” The scene continues with the narrator focusing on the bugs, his shoes, his pulse and his feet, a band, people’s voices, etc. and not being able to write at all.

The entire novel focuses on the character’s mind distractions, which I think, are his manner of staying away from his pain and poverty and hunger. His mind ends up playing tricks on him. Somehow, we are the writer described by Hamsun in ‘Hunger’, distracted by technology; distractions that are “unfortunately less rewarding than they appear”. Nevertheless, Young states that it is not technology the one to blame but we, supporting his claim with philosophers Nietzsche and Blaise Pascal. Blaise Pascal describes that it is "The sole cause of man's unhappiness, is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room" and Nietzsche defines these distractions as “human, all too human.” With distractions we are seeking a way to overcome boredom, anxiety, pain, and finding a sort of “easy pleasure”, leading us however to unproductivity and weakening our strengths.

Distractions human’s “unwillingness to confront pain, boredom, anxiety”, and try to keep us away from them, avoid them. However, in the end they will trouble us even more. The Internet is our present major distraction; with millions of e-mails, videos, games, and social networking. But with or without it, we shall always find ways to ‘draw us away’ from ourselves.