In 2019, an academic study identified that humans' attention span is shrinking.
of 2019 Zeldes was ready to sound a note of defeat. “I’d love to give you a magic potion that would restore your attention span to that of your grandparents,” he wrote in a blog, “but I can’t. After over a decade of smartphone use and social media, the harm is probably irreversible.” He advised people to take up a hobby.
6. In an age of overload it can feel as though technology has rather chanced its luck. Pushed too much, too far, bone-deep. Even before coronavirus spread across the world, parts of the culture had started to tack towards isolation and deprivation as desirable lifestyle signifiers. 7. Hilda Burke, a British psychotherapist who has written about smartphone addiction, told me that part of the problem in this age of overload is the yoo-hooing insistence with which each new parcel of information seeks our attention. Speakers chime. Pixelated columns shuffle urgently or icons bounce, as if to signal that here is the fire. Our twitch response to urgency is triggered, in bad faith.
THE DARK SIDE
8. Winston went into the dark for a month in a bid to escape the digital bell-chimes, the bouncing icons, the bulletins and info-blasts – our exhausting daily scroll. “But when you go into the dark for a long time,” Winston admitted to me, recently, “you’re not going into a void. You’re going into yourself. And good luck finding blissful empty quiet there.” There was nothing to compete with the loud, incessant inner monologue or drown it out. I wondered, then, whether we’d created and refined all our sparkly informational distractions because on some level we knew the relentlessness of the subconscious had the real power to overload.
7. 9. One afternoon in January this year I met Winston in east London. More than a year had passed since the end of his monkish retreat. He had become an advocate for making art in the dark. Winston’s retreat had left him with conflicting feelings, but he was convinced of one thing: that a blast of darkness, taken in moderation, was a powerful creative tool. The boiled-down pitch he’d been making to other artists was that by depriving yourself of visual stimulus, the mind had to leave its comfortable grooves. He created works he exhibited at the Barbican and Southbank Centre.
10. One of the most time-consuming tasks, Winston admitted, had been his efforts to persuade curators in London and Norwich to construct enclosed black-out spaces, so that visitors could try immersion in the dark themselves. An hour or two at most, Winston suggested. Not 672. He said he wouldn’t recommend what he’d done to any-one. A year on, Winston had finally found his bearings again but it took him months, maybe six, to get his equilibrium back. For a long time he couldn’t stop noticing every little inbound impression. In a city as loud and smelly as London that was too much to tolerate. After the retreat he often felt glum, almost bereaved, because, for all its terrors, the dark could be addictive.
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