In defence of distraction

While clearing out an old box of childhood memorabilia, I came across an iPod Classic 120GB, the first advanced piece of technology I used. I immediately tried to charge it but, no, it seems to have suffered some kind of death. Just touching it brought back a rush of memories. For the first few weeks of owning it, I was consumed by it, excited to laboriously download my Dad’s CDs onto it. The first time I used it out in the corner shop, I found myself in an ecstatic frame of mind. I could stand in a queue, just a regular shopper, but at the same time, I could feel like my own private world was somewhere else, could be traversing the peaks of a piano sonata, or thrill to the snarl of the Velvet Underground. I could be present, and somewhere completely different, and no one would know about it.

To listen to music on my iPod, I first had to select what kind of music I liked, and leave the CD plugged into the computer for hours. The selection process, building a library, had something in common with owning a record player – records take up space, occupying a corner of a room. And they also take up time – you must make sure they aren’t too dusty, and change onto the B side halfway through the album. When I had new albums set up, I tended to listen first, and then relisten repeatedly, until I knew every beat and every shape the music had left behind. Now, I can access almost any piece of music recorded in the last century, immediately, and at will. Smartphones and AirPods work on these feelings in counter-intuitive ways. What once felt like a conscious and physically demanding exercise in making my own choices now feels like just another step into a flow of images and data, the mind moving seamlessly from one point of concentration to another.

Exciting new ways to communicate have always produced delight and anxiety in equal measure. The early modern writer François Rabelais, who wrote Gargantua and Pantagruel, a series of grotesque fables involving a family of giants, responds directly to the advent of print culture and the literary excess it made possible. The text is threaded through with nonsense lists, with dozens of words spliced together. These include the giants’ food, terms of abuse, place-names, and so on. The reader is momentarily transported inside one of the giants’ mouths. Inside his jaws, whole towns and cities are found, full of miniature people. It is as if the extraordinary power of the word can swallow up whole civilisations.

For previous generations, new technologies were ambivalent agents of change. The writer Robert Louis Stevenson recalls falling in love with the idea of storytelling as a boy obsessed with toy theatres. With the help of cardboard cut-out figures tailored to ready-made scripts and scenarios, the boy could play out the imaginary scenes to his heart’s content at home. ‘The purchase and the first half-hour at home, that was the summit’, he recalled as an adult: ‘In the mind of their once happy owner all survive, kaleidoscopes of changing pictures, echoes of the past.’

Marcel Proust’s narrator in his novel series In Search of Lost Time remembers in childhood his first interactions with art, a magic lantern broadcasting scenes onto the wall of his bedroom. He registers queasily how nothing stops the gaze of the magic lantern, not even a doorknob. There is something scary about the way the lantern seems to think nothing of transgressing physical boundaries. However, when his mother reads out passages of the story that comes with the lantern, he feels deep and lasting emotions in response to the artful collision of colour, sound and story.

In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, absorption in books is a strategy as much as a source of pleasure. The only person truly capable of moving Mr Darcy’s attention away from his reading is Elizabeth Bennet. But he sometimes chooses to immerse himself in his book to advertise his aloofness. It is precisely this kind of absorption that gives way on contact with real life. At first, Darcy wants to control his attraction to Elizabeth, on the basis that her status is far beneath his own exalted station, but he finds himself suddenly captured by the beauty of her eyes, and by his memories of their quality. How often do we remember a person by incidental details, barely noticed in the moment? The shape of a hand, the arch of an eyebrow, the startling shade of an iris.

The protagonist of Samuel Richardson’s enormous epistolary novel Clarissa, one of the most extraordinary testaments to sustained, structured thinking in any language, lives a life beset by constraint and confinement. In the opening stages, she is put under pressure to make a marriage for social advancement. She writes that women treated in this way are ‘cajoled, wire-drawn, and ensnared, like silly birds’. Clarissa, in her reams of writing to her friends, is desperate for answers, to find definition and meaning in her life. She does so by elaborating her difficulties in sentences of deliberate, Latinate complexity. It is a brilliant, although ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to create an identity from something beyond her diminished present. One of the first ways in which her family tries to restrict her freedom is to take away her writing materials. Writing is her great consolation, but there is also something curiously limiting about her life in words. At various points, on first reading the novel, I felt like pleading with her – put down your quill! Act! Do something! She is a personality so thoroughly moulded by the word, and by its mysterious power, it is as if she lives in suspended animation, condemned to live in a world of gorgeous, sterile patterns.

The smartphone and personal computer combine and transform changes wrought slowly on the imagination of past generations. They are magic lanterns, capable of constructing powerful, malleable fantasy worlds anytime and in any place. They are like toy theatres on which it is possible to play out boyhood dreams on stage for an eternity of pleasure. And they are signals that what is going on in the box or on the screen is of far more significance than the person of flesh and blood standing in the same room.

When tech-pessimists instruct the public to be ‘more present’, they underestimate technology’s legitimate, enchanting appeal, like a boy entranced by his own portable, private library. The call to be more fully immersed in life can itself be a tragic enterprise. Previous generations grappled with much the same dilemmas. The hope is that we live up to the beauty and sophistication that characterised their responses.