Embrace this day of rest and take a break from electronic harassment
To walk a beach. Climb a hill. Read a book. Listen to music. To even make the ultimately subversive gesture and pull the white strings with the earphones off their chests and go unplugged for a few hours.
Going unplugged is getting increasingly difficult. To relinquish your iPhone requires the courage to believe nobody will die or have a stroke while you cannot be reached. Of course, 99.9% of the time when you are plugged into the electronic world, what comes through to you is considerably due south of vital, but the hold it has on us is so profound that when we switch off, we become fearful. Some bad thing will happen and we’ll be the last to know. It never strikes us that being the last to learn bad news is quite a good deal.
The myth of electronic connectivity is that it puts us all in charge of our own lives. In fact, it robs us of our lives. We are at the mercy of every text, phonecall, tweet or re-tweet anybody decides to send us, and we convince ourselves that this subservience to media rather than to message means we’re on top of our game, despite the fact that most of what reaches us is of no moment. We have elevated the urgent beyond the important. We invest the sort of trivia and bitching about the neighbours done by our ancestors over the half door with a spurious value derived from the speed of its arrival.
The simple question “did you hear?” now falls somewhere between one-upmanship and perceived threat. To be out of the loop — any loop — seems like the receipt of a P45: An indication that we’ve passed our sell-by date. Indeed, this is one little-noticed aspect of the trauma of redundancy: People who have been “let go” by their employer frequently lose more than a job. They lose a sense of self. They lose a sense of belonging, because suddenly, all the texts and emails that occupied their working day dry up. The relative silence makes the person at the (non) receiving end wonder if they were ever as important as they believed when they were employed, if the people who once shared their every thought with them no longer find any need to contact them at all.
It’s been known for a long time that “shut-ins”, meaning people who, because of age or other factors, stay indoors and consume a lot of TV, tend to be more anxious than those who don’t, largely, it’s believed, because the volume of bad news they see skews their view of the wider world. Understandably. If you constantly see stories about gangland shootings, you’re likely to assume that if you set foot outside your door, you’re likely to be caught in crossfire. Which, even in these difficult times, is not actually the case.
We understand that such constant exposure to one medium might lead to anxiety, but we fail to extrapolate from it to the understanding that constant exposure to a multiplicity of media is likely to add enormously to our tension level.
According to novelist Pico Iyer, the central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them.
“All the data in the world cannot teach us how to sift through data,” he points out.
“Images don’t show us how to process images. The only way to do justice to our onscreen lives is by summoning exactly the emotional and moral clarity that can’t be found on any screen.”
Summoning that emotional and moral clarity requires solitude, stillness and silence. All three are free and constantly available, yet we have a reluctance to see them as the essential resources they are, and even greater reluctance to avail of them. We figure we might miss something. We’re right. We might miss real life. There’s a case, when any weekend rolls around, to remember the concept of the day of rest, and learn to take a rest from electronic harassment.
One of the best ways to do that is to read a book. Nothing eases the breathing and unclenches tension quite as well as curling up with a novel or fascinating work of non-fiction. “I enter a state when my sense and thoughts are concentrated,” wrote Isaac of Syria, a medieval bishop. “Then, when with prolonging of this silence the turmoil of memories is stilled in my heart, ceaseless waves of joy are sent me by inner thoughts, beyond expectation suddenly arising to delight my heart.”
Centuries later, the same mesmerising peace envelopes any devoted reader, to such an extent that being asked a question causes a kind of double-take as re-entry into the quotidian happens. That sense of utter absorption in a narrative or sequence of ideas is easier to achieve with. a real book, as opposed to text on a Kindle or an iPad, however handy (and cheap) e-books may be. According to The Shallows, Nicholas Carr’s examination of what the internet is doing to our brains, therein lies another high tech paradox: The hi-tech added value presented by such technology may, in reality, diminish our capacity for linear concentration.
“A page of online text viewed through a computer screen may seem similar to a page of printed text,” Carr acknowledges. “But scrolling or clicking through a web document involves physical actions and sensory stimuli very different from those involved in holding and turning the pages of a book or magazine. Research has shown that the cognitive act of reading draws not just on our sense of sight but also on our sense of touch. It’s tactile as well as visual... the shift from paper to screen doesn’t just change the way we navigate a piece of writing. It also influences the degree of attention we devote to it and the depth of our immersion in it.”
HYPERLINKS also alter our experience of media”, he continues.
“Links are in one sense a variation on the textual allusions, citations, and footnotes that have long been common elements of documents. However, their effect on us as we read is not at all the same. Links don’t just point us to related or supplemental works; they propel us toward them. They encourage us to dip in and out of a series of texts rather than devote sustained attention to any one of them. Hyperlinks are designed to grab our attention. Their value as navigational tools is inextricable from the distraction they cause.”
Ideal, of course, would be recurring situations where we are jolted from electronic harassment into unaccustomed solitude or quiet companionship. Where we become enmeshed in the lives of others, whether they be historical figures in a biography or fictional characters in a novel. Where we realise that nature doesn’t recognise recessions and hasn’t heard of negative equity.
Maybe that’s why God gave us bank holidays.
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