When we think about any choice we make – whether to eat that apple, move to Omaha, or avoid writing your dissertation and check the headlines instead – we typically think about it in two ways: in-the-moment decisions or general tendencies. But there’s an in-between step that’s missing from this picture, a decision or a series of decisions that preceded the one we’re examining: the decision to shape our media information environment. If characteristics of our environment affect the comparisons we make and the decisions we make (e.g. how many options are there, how easily accessible are they, what are their characteristics), then we must ask how we ended up in the choice environments in which we find ourselves. Increasingly, I think we’re partially responsible for them, though we tend to forget this quickly.
When we decide to text someone or check our email or go on Facebook or do some work, that decision is shaped by earlier decisions: the decision to have the internet in our house, the decision to keep our cell phone by our side. These decisions feel obvious because they bundle so many different kinds of options together. You cannot give up the distraction of Facebook because it comes bundled with access to the internet which you need in case a work-related email demands that you respond promptly or you will lose professional standing. Technologies that allow a user to block certain websites or applications from their own future access seem initially absurd, but really, they represent an act of un-bundling. Sometimes you want access to social media; other times, it is not in your best interest. Such prioritizing and self-restriction will become necessarily in a distraction-saturated media environment.
Today’s media environments are often characterized by the extent to which they are saturated by distractions: the vibrating cell phone, the regularly updated blogs waiting to be scanned, the pinging email inbox. We might consider the extent to which they are saturated by temptations, and how we might make a distinction between these two terms. All temptations surely are distracting, but are all distractions tempting? The term “distraction” is used to refer to messages that expect our particular, unique attention at a specific time (e.g. email correspondence, text message) and it is used to refer to messages or characteristics of the environment that are generally directed to us (as members of a larger group or as individuals) but are always there, not needing our attention that that moment. Facebook, ESPN, and that chocolate chocolate-chip muffin just sit there, waiting for my self-control to ebb, at which point I will succumb to temptations and indulge in a distraction.
When I give in to the temptations – Facebook, ESPN, muffin – I feel responsible for the choice, as is indicated by my feeling of guilt upon indulgence. But when I check my work email, read and respond to a work email, I feel no sense of responsibility. This is simply a condition of our collective environment! So, when we say we live in an era of distraction, we fold these two kinds of distractions together: the temptations (i.e. vices) and the expectations of immediate attention related to ostensibly virtuous activities like work. We do this in part because of the way media is sold: in bundles of virtue and vice.
And yet I don’t think we should let ourselves off the hook that easily when it comes to work-related email or other virtuous online distractions. We have some agency in designing our media choice environment. We could’ve decided to put our cell phone on silent or not checked our email for 8 hours. One might complain that to do this would be to give up social and professional standing, and I think that if you just one day decided to do it, without giving the people you are in contact with any warning, then you would certainly give up social and professional standing. But if you simply gave the people around you the expectation that you are unreachable sometimes (either explicitly by saying that you will be “at work” during certain hours or implicitly by purposely delaying your responses to them), you could reduce the number of “necessary distractions” in your life. We have the tools and the ability to unbundle our lives but we have to acknowledge the self that can alter the media choice environment, the repertoire from which our future selves select an activity. That self has more and more say over what we end up doing with our time.
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