The hidden choice of establishing your media environment or repertoire

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.

Living while distracted

As I walked hurriedly down South University on my way to catch a bus, fishing my headphones out of the jacket pocket as I went, I passed an older man who was standing still. He was holding his hands behind his back, idly gazing in the window of an ice cream shop while students whizzed by him on their way to class. His idleness struck me - what might he be thinking about all the people around him. In particular, what might he be thinking of me or any of the many students fiddling with Ipods and phones. The answer is: probably nothing (I tend to assume people are thinking about me when they're not, so egocentric am I), but it made for a productive jumping-off point for some musings on media distraction.

Media is an exceptional tool for distraction, perhaps the best that has ever existed. It is always available. It presents significant variety in terms of songs we can listen to, people we can text, shows we can watch, profiles we can check out. We can use it to distract ourselves (actively choosing the content or people we access) or we can be distracted by it (being confronted by people or content we didn't seek out). Usually, its some combination of the two: going to a site that links to some unexpectedly interesting other site, texting one person and getting a text from another, etc. All of it serves to take our minds off whatever we happened to be thinking about or feeling before. It distracts us.

Distraction has a bad reputation. First, it is other people's doing. We wouldn't choose to be distracted, but more and more, we are confronted with a distracting environment, cluttered with advertisements and solicitations. It prevents us from working efficiently, prevents us from thinking deeply or for sustained periods of time about problems which helps us to solve those problems (either personal or societal). It reduces us to attention-depleted pleasure junkies, incapable of reflection.

OK, fine. I'm not necessarily doubting this curmudgeonly way of thinking about our modern world, a view I probably falsely ascribed to the stationary man staring into the window of Stucchi's ice cream. But I think there is pleasure in distraction (or at least the potential reduction of pain). Its not something that advertisers forced upon us.

Jonah Lehrer cites the research of Walter Mischel on self-control, finding that the key to preventing yourself from indulging in something you desperately want but should not have is distraction (this is a gross oversimplification of it, but whatevs). Children were presented with a short-term reward - a marshmallow - and told that if they held out, they could receive a larger long-term reward (two marshmallows). Some kids were able to hold out, others were not. Those who were able to hold out, on average, went on to be more successful in life, having fewer behavioral problems, higher SAT scores, and better jobs.

What helped those children delay gratification wasn't that they desired the reward any less, but that they were skilled in the art of “strategic allocation of attention.” In Lerher's words, "instead of getting obsessed with the marshmallow—the 'hot stimulus'—the patient children distracted themselves by covering their eyes, pretending to play hide-and-seek underneath the desk, or singing songs from 'Sesame Street.' Their desire wasn’t defeated—it was merely forgotten." It isn't just that the children were distracted and that they resisted temptation b/c of this, but that they understood how their minds worked. They engaged in meta-cognition, and were able to make themselves think of something else to help them hold out for a long-term reward.

In other words, self-imposed distraction was good. It helped prevent the children from indulging in immediate gratification, helped them hold out for long-term rewards which, as it turns out, is a big part of succeeding at life. Could we then think of media as an aid in this process, a super-effective tool for self-distraction? When we are tempted to indulge in some immediate gratification that will hinder our abilities to succeed in the long run, if we pop on our ipod or distract ourselves with an episode of Glee or text a friend, all other things being equal, does that help prevent us from indulging?

There are other effects of this kind of use of media, ones that may hinder our abilities to achieve our long-term goals (lowered attention span, expecting positive and novel stimuli at the push of a button at all times, etc). But it is interesting to consider this particular incentive for using media, as a way of distracting ourselves from things that we should be distracting ourselves from, things that it would be in our best interest to forget about for a bit. If you distract yourself from working through an issue you have with, say, your father or your job, this isn't good. You should take time to reflect on those problems, think about how to resolve them in a way that benefits all parties. Otherwise, they will fester and grow bigger. But if you distract yourself from your immediate desires for the proverbial marshmallow, this may just help you hold out for long-term rewards. No amount of reflection on that desire will help you. its just rumination, perseveration. It helps no one.

How, then, to tell the difference between the two, between escapist distraction and beneficial distraction?