Distracted Attraction
Earlier we considered how we analogue beings are constantly sampling the world around us much of it at an unconscious level with only some information passing through to the relatively narrow and limited aperture of our consciousness upon which various stimuli (signals) must gain focus before we can fully engage with something. For our purposes I’ll call this our attention-zone. Once our mind lens has focused whatever input(s), e.g. stimuli or information, upon our attention-zone it may become fully or partially engaged with this input. Other stimuli that come knocking on the door or our attention-zone whilst it is engaged may or may not be admitted. Depending on the context a full focus engagement (deep attentional immersion) can be a good or a bad thing. Good from the perspective in that one or more minds focused on, say, a problem may lead to a rapid resolution. Bad from the perspective that one or more minds focused on, say, a faulty light in an aircraft cockpit may not be focused on the other stimuli, e.g. warning alarms that the aircraft it too low, e.g. Eastern Airlines 401 in the Florida Everglades (December 1972). A partial focus attention-zone engagement from the individual’s perspective may represent a self-defined and self-reassuring belief of inherent multi-tasking abilities but from the other actually exhibits to objective observers as distracted behaviour, sometimes dangerously so. Both attention engagement and disengagment from, say stimuli overload, can lead to distraction for when we engage with something, e.g. crying baby, mobile phone call, we also tend to need to disengage with something else, e.g. driving car and if the multi-tasking fallacy is part of our personal belief system then the consequences of finding out it is a fallacy can be severe or even fatal. Distraction as a human characeristic also features far beyond the level of the individual. Distraction can mutate into political groupthink and ideology and come to so dominate the political agenda of a country that it becomes the equivalent of a chess-game taking place whilst a hurricane wreaks havoc all around. It is not hard to think of the many countries that have a political leadership and polity that is so distracted today. It is also part of the chess-game of politics itself to both cultivate and inject such distractions as this can absorb the attention bandwidth of target to a degree they will lose focus about what is happening around them. It is also a fairly economic way of disrupting political or ideological opponents without requiring armies or weapons since it is they who then do the disruptive work for you.
Focused Distraction (AI generated image)
The Dada de Dada poem and linked essay Disconnected (November 2024) explored distraction in some depth so the topic is included here only because it links nicely to our consideration of the rise of the online ‘influencer’ in the next section.
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