Distractions. The things you see out of the corner of your eye. Things that keep you from doing what you want to do. The TV on, music playing too loudly, the smell of the food cooking just around the corner in the kitchen (or the growl my stomach is making right now because i haven't eaten much all day besides some cherries!) All these things are adding up to form distractions.
And they take over the life, slowly absorbing it all, like Bob the Blob from Monsters VS Aliens, sliding in and around my life, feeling like it is sucking it all away. Distractions take forms that i don't often think of when i think of distractions. The comfort of my bed in the morning is a distraction. The comfort of my life is a distraction.
Perhaps that's all life really is, a series of distractions, interplaying mirages that keep us from focusing on things. And why not? If we can't focus on what is around us then a T-Rex is gonna come up and chomp us! So we pair off little pieces of our attention to everything around us, and watch it. And we notice all the things around us, we know what is going on.
But we don't focus. Because we have a limited amount of attention to spend we can't simply focus on one thing, meaning that when it comes to simply sitting down and doing something like writing out a blog post we can't. Because our attention is split all around us.
Which leads into what i really want to talk about. The death of writing. The death of a decent sized attention span.
The first one needs to be explained through the second. As attention spans shorten we need more and more mental control to be able to tune out those things around us that are unimportant. That means you need the mental discipline to do so. Now how will you find that today?
I mean do you really need it? The modern mind actually filters out advertisements automatically now, apparently you need to see a commercial ten times to remember it. Think about that. 10 times. Advertisements are loud. They use colors that in nature mean "DON'T EAT ME! I'M POISONOUS!" things that the human mind should be developed to pay attention to. And our mind has learnt to ignore them. That seems to be a good thing, except the mind needs to note something in order to disregard it if it looks like that (this isn't supported by science, its just my thoughts) i mean, look. This is something evolution says is important. Meaning that it is something the mind will notice. Meaning our mind is trained to disregard it.
In order for a mind to be trained to do something it has to be exposed to it repeatedly. Think about training a dog, it doesn't learn to sit after one lesson, it takes quite a few. This means that we have had to be exposed to enough advertisements as young people to be able to disregard them by an older age.
This split up of attention is a problem. Have you ever read a page in a book only to realize that while your eyes moved over the page properly your mind completely ignored every single word on that page? I have, many times. And i have to go back and reread it.
And that leads to the death of the novel. With audio books and eBooks and the rise of Coles Notes who really needs to read the actual book? Look at the rise of books like Eragon and Twilight. Both books are of the same reading level (i have read them both and can attest to that) yet one was written by a kid during his high school terms, the other was written by a middle aged mother.
Both are very popular. Both are easy to read. There is a quote in Twilight Abridged on YouTube that i would like to use here "Myer wants you to notice this, cause it will be important later". In both of these books there are slight twists (though the harder to predict ones come from the high-schooler book) but the thing you realize second time around is there is so little of the general atmosphere revealed in the books that anything even slightly different than the rest of the chapters means that it is important later.
This is a distinct lack of complexity from other books that i have read, yet these books are less popular (the only one more so that actually has unnecessary details would be Harry Potter, and then only in the first few books).
Now i am not saying books should be filled with details such as the exact number of ants on each brick in the sidewalk. But details which do not actually push the plot forward but rather add realism to the environment. You could make the argument to me that authors who make the minimum amount of details are the better ones, but to that all i really can say is, which deserves respect, the one that does the basic work and shows no other details, so that the second time you go through the entire plot offers nothing new? Or the author who makes each reread something new?
No comments:
Post a Comment