Doesn't he have form of some sort or other?
The name Johann Hari rings some sort of bell, and it has a certain crack of doom in it?
Your attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen.
You, dr rdrz, know me by now, and that I am a hedjog who looks askance at a lovely rosy vision of the somehow unified consciousness of the past (was that TS Eliot?), that Past when Things Were Better and we lived more in harmony with ourselves and nature.
And I think of the late C19th woezing over tit-bitty journalism - fun facts and listicles and so on, detached from any context.
And ads in magazines and books of my youth saying 'Have YOU got a grasshopper mind?' and offering remedies.
And I think it might have been Langhamer's book on women and leisure pointing out that women's work in the household was often a round of distraction, or at least bouncing between tasks and stopping the baby falling into the fire; and the reason stories and articles in women's mags were of the short length they were was so that they could be read in those brief moments while e.g. the potatoes boiled.
And of the Edwardian school children who learnt so much better once they got school meals and treated for nits and fleas.
As for those people not looking at the view but taking selfies: has this not been a plaint since the rise of cheaply available cameras and commercial film-processing?
I don't know what he's doing on social media/the web, but I observe a lot of intelligent and witty and creative interaction, I get a sense that people are out there writing and creating and researching and Doing Stuff, and indeed, Helping One Another. I will concede that this may be a rather niche corner of T'Internetz.
I.e. I would probably have guessed (and I would have been right) that my Twitter feed would be screaming WOT at the notion that there is an “untold history lesson” of what happened over three centuries of witch-hunting in the UK - described in the fine old 70s feminist spirituality woowoo term as 'the burning times', when, in England, anyway, no burnings took place and it was by no means a major site of the European witchcraze (Scotland, however...). This is not an untold history, and where are these people getting their sources? Margaret Murray??? (Visions of Professor Ronald Hutton beating his head on the desk.)
On distraction/not distraction, certainly there were people who needed to focus, for a period (sometimes long hours) so as not to fall into the machinery, or be eaten by the wild animals they were hunting, mess up the accounts they were copying (though I recall one of Sara Caudwell's mysteries turns on Hilary Tamar identifying a not unknown issue in manuscript transcription, of copying the same line twice instead of two consective lines...)
- and then they were exhausted.
And - to reiterate a theme that has come up here o so many times before - those individuals who were able to fall into an undistracted 'flow' state in most if not all cases were able to do so because somebody else, wife or other female relative or servants - was dealing with domestic distractions.
I will also allude to those discoveries that were made because somebody got distracted by that weird thing that was not the thing they were supposed to be attending to.
This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/3334502.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
comments.