In her book, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, Maggie Jackson eloquently, methodically, and compellingly explains the pitfalls of electronic and digital technologies as they become mass media in our society. Her study specifically focuses on the human sense of attention; consisting of awareness, focus, and judgment (215). She proposes that as a result of our often thoughtless acceptance of new media, we have culturally rewired our brains from once was once a print culture to what we may now designate a digital culture (167). Tracing technological artifacts such as the telegraph, the book, surveillance systems, and the fork as well as their place in history, Jackson discusses how their prevalence or decline helps us to understand the organization and values of our society.
In short, her book is a summary of how “the virtual shatters our conceptions of space…simultaneity redefines our notions of time” and “a life of perpetual movement reshapes our relationship to place and what it means to be in the world” (99). Interestingly, Jackson’s survey seems to also describe the development of certain dualistic and docetist tendencies within an American digital society. What does the internet have to do with docetism? What does the history of the fork have to do Cartesian dualism? Through Jackson’s review of our loss of attention, we can see the rise of these cultural commonplaces and their threat to the Church in our changing senses of space, time, and place.
First, let us look at Jackson’s history of our relation to space, time, and place. One of her most provocative assertions within the book is the idea borrowed from Darra Goldstein that “the progress of the fork traces nothing less than the development of Western civilization” (105). The fork did not enter Western life until around the 1600s, and Jackson posits that its “slow infiltration…mirrors Western society’s increasing valuation of the self-conscious individual” (106). Previously, meals in the medieval era as well as life in general were characterized by “an earthy, sensual communality” (106). The introduction of the fork marked a shift from closeness to our earthly surroundings, and Jackson documents our current move away from the fork towards “clean, processed, and unobtrusive foods” that resemble astronaut food (107).
Jackson looks specifically at eating in the medieval era, Victorian era, and the 21st century, and these divisions show interesting parallels to media history, as the author would like us to realize. Marshall McLuhan, in The Gutenberg Galaxy, notes the difference between manuscript culture and print culture, in that print gave man “an eye for an ear” (27). In this concept, we see how the dominant medium of the age can reorient our relation to space, time, or place. With the introduction of print as a mass medium, “the fission of the senses occurred, and the visual dimension broke away from the other senses” (54). Accordingly, the printed book allows for a different view of the world, on that thoroughly shocks “oral cultures based on memory, discourse, and the interpretation of symbols, such as landmarks” (Jackson 157). Additionally, print culture creates the possibility of relating to the natural environment mediated through road signs, as we do today on our highway system. When print, as with any medium, becomes the mass medium of a society, it truly does create a new environment, a phenomenon that McLuhan explains in Understanding Media (13). Thus, when print became the new environment following the Middle Ages, new values arose, such as individualism and the acceptable use of the fork.
In the same way, Jackson shows that our leaving behind the fork is a sign of leaving behind print culture. Jackson characterizes the readers of today as people who “dance on the surface of a thousand texts, skimming over billions of words in books and magazines, myriad flashing ads, and across the mesmerizing web” (161). This is only possible through our information-wealthy digital technology, and our multi-tasking between e-mail, Twitter, blogs, e-books, and cell phones leads to a “head-down, tunnel vision way of life that values materialism over happiness, productivity over insight and compassion” (95). Moreover, just as print created a new environment and a new way of relating to the natural environment, digital technology as mass media has created the phenomena of “real virtuality,” wherein we experience the virtual world as real (47). While it is intuitive why our new environments become real to us, their effects in relation to our old environments remain significant.
With digital communication, “we can connect with almost anyone and at any time, but the connection is to the person and not to the place” (Jackson 54). As a result, our connection to place is weakened, as is our connection to time and space, since in “a boundaryless world … coming home doesn’t signal the end of the workday” (63). Though physically present at home, we may be working on our Blackberries or connecting with friends on Facebook, remaining emotionally and psychically absent. Accordingly, our idea of the virtual world as real makes sense, as it can easily become the primary way in which we relate to others. Yet, not only is it real; when it is the primary way we interact with others, it becomes more real than physical, face-to-face interaction.
Interestingly, Jackson makes the connection between virtual reality and spirituality, in that cyberspace is “a new, spiritual heaven” (51, see also: Is there a digital afterlife?). Just as mystical religions became popular towards the end of the Roman Empire, decline in Western civilization has sparked a “deep desire to find spiritual meaning in cyberspace” (51). Jackson goes on to consider the idea of virtual cemeteries and video games, but this connection between the virtual and the spiritual is quite significant in regards to digital technology and dualistic tendencies. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, dualism refers to the idea that the mind and body are radically different, and that “the mind cannot be treated as simply part of that world.” Characteristic of this way of thinking is Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, in which he defines himself as most essentially a thinking thing, but doubts all else. This kind of doubt betrays a lower value of the material world, and our digital technologies seem to be an extension of this philosophy. Though Descartes did not explicitly think less of the material world (his meditations attempted to provide certainty for their existence), his assertion of cognition as the essential human quality is obvious in our digital technology. We neglect face-to-face relationships in place of mediated relationships, because relationships are a cognitive, psychological, and emotional phenomenon, having little to do with our bodies. Jackson notes by devaluing unmediated relations, “we are turning away from the messy, unpredictable, and real in life,” as “the virtual becomes the preferred reality” (66).
As our uncritical understanding of the world becomes more dualistic in nature, it would be foolish to think that our faith would remain unaffected. Particularly, the dualistic influence of digital technology evokes memories of gnosticism within the early church. Docetism is the idea “that the one (indivisible) Jesus Christ was completely and absolutely divine, and for that reason was not a real flesh and blood human being” (Ehrman 181). The heresy denies the human incarnation of Christ, positing instead that he merely appeared to be human. A failure to understand the reality of Christ’s incarnation has vast implications for the Church in the world, and Jackson’s advice is especially relevant to Christians unaware of the dualistic tendencies within digital technology.
As we have seen, our relationships to the earth, our food, and even each other are increasingly experienced in less inclusively sensorial ways, as our digital media habituate us to detachment. In response, Jackson promotes “a way to counter our detachment from the world, recover the strength of deep connections, [and] salvage wholeness in perception and thinking” (123). The way to achieve these ends is in recovering our declining skills of attention. For Jackson, attention makes us human, as it is the means by which we are embodied and made aware of our real circumstances (94). Attention is the key to learning, critical thinking, and self-control, and without any of these, we risk losing our ability to effectively and mindfully shape our lives (232-3). It is imperative that as Christians, we hear the urgency of Jackson’s argument, as our lack of understanding the formative effects of digital technology on our ways of thinking about the world is dangerous to our faith. We must reclaim our attention in order to become embodied followers of an incarnational God.
Works Cited
Descartes, Rene. Meditations on First Philosophy. Ed. John Cottingham. Cambridge: University Press, 1996.
Ehrman, Bart D. The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament. Oxford: University Press, 1993.
Jackson, Maggie. Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Ed. W. Terrence Gordon. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 1994.
---. The Gutenberg Galaxy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962.
Robinson, Howard, "Dualism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), .
Well, on that day when my confessor and I were in conversation, Father Mole showed me the letter which he had just received from McLuhan, and in the postscript of that letter McLuhan wrote this statement, "The modern media are engaged in a Luciferian conspiracy against the truth." Certain statements you never forget. And that was prophetic. Since I've been with the Holy See, from Pope Paul VI to the present pope, John Paul II, the popes have wanted Catholics to change that. Imagine the alternative: "The modern media are engaged in a Christlike, shall I use the word, conspiracy, for the truth."
In Canada, the old parishes depended on horse and buggy to bring in the neighbouring farmers. Then suddenly the car appeared, and yesterday's communities disappeared because people no longer came together long enough to get to know each other. What sort of parish did that create? Made up of individuals who didn't know each other? Little by little we became like strangers at an airport waiting for the same airplane. And once in the airplane, we tended not to talk to our fellow passengers. To separate us better, we were supplied with headsets which, instead, put us in touch with the rest of humanity.
