"Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts"

I ran across this article on Friday and saved it as a draft post to write about when the clutter of the week had cleared from my mind at least a little. It’s Saturday night, we’ve got Dartanian playing on the stereo, and I’m holding a truly great cup of decaf coffee, so here goes:

My summary: we* now have more access to more information than ever before. That sounds great, but what no one predicted in the internet’s early years was that more access to information would also lead to taking less of that information in in depth. Interestingly, as we lose the skill of in-depth information processing, we become expert skimmers. This may be good or it may be bad, but it is a distinct and measurable change.

Comments & anecdotes:

On Tuesday evening I met T at our usual coffeeshop. We talked each other through our latest plot developments and T commented that she’d started yet another disconnected piece of writing. “I’m too scattered,” she said. “I spend all day at work jumping around from project to project. I can’t focus.”

I spent two hours at work on Friday working my way through a couple hundred emails. I sorted them into ‘Actions’ I need to take, projects where I’m ‘Waiting’ for someone else to do something, and some I just trashed. A few I filed in ‘Read,’ and spent another two hours attempting to do exactly that while camped out in the massage chair in the lobby. Every time I hit something longer than a single screenful of text, I found myself sighing and flipping back to my Inbox to see if there was anything new.

Friday night I spent two hours with my drafting board, figuring out the proportions for an Ikea hack I’m working on.

Earlier this year I did some reading about the so-called ‘flow state’ of concentration, where you get so involved in something that you lose track of time and become entirely ‘present in the moment.’ You’re not thinking about why you’re doing what you’re doing, or what you need to do next or failed to do yesterday. This is one of my most enjoyable ways to work, whether it’s for my day job or not, and my reliance on it probably explains why I instinctively assume that rewiring my brain for skimming would be a bad change to fall victim to.

Neal Stephenson reportedly claims that all fiction can be written in Emacs; Stephen King says that if you don’t have time to read, then you don’t have time to write. The guru of Getting Things Done exhorts us all to make lists of all the little nagging questions and to-dos, getting them out of your head and freeing up space for the ‘flow state.’

There’s a way that fits together, but right now I’m too scattered to see what it is. If you can see it, maybe you haven’t been skimming.


*We: this isn’t explicitly called out in the article, but in this context ‘we’ can only mean heavily internet-based cultures. These are mostly Western, and in the US I suspect mostly coastal. It would be interesting to see how cellphones compare.... The effect is probably magnified for so-called ‘knowledge workers’ such as yours truly, which makes me wonder whether that job description will in 10 years seem ironic or prophetic.