Sketches and Snippets 18th January 22
Attention, or the Lack Thereof
Hello again! Thanks for being here, for reading my rambling messages…it means a lot to me! My last post was my most read so far so I'm going to make a mental note that taking time out doesn’t do much harm, and people enjoy reading long lists, especially if they aren’t obligated to do complete any of the tasks themselves! Hope you’ve had a good week. Mine has mainly been filled with life admin. We’ve had a few bright days which is making me look forward to spring…although that’s maybe jumping the gun. Nice to see the sun anyhow.
Attention, or the Lack Thereof
How are you reading this? Is it on your phone screen perhaps? What an incredible invention the smartphone is. Its capabilities are mind-blowing! Well, they would have been to my teenage self but it's not taken long to take it all completely for granted. We can communicate with people across the globe, take photos, make films, and even manage our businesses, all from one small bit of tech that fits right in a pocket but at what cost?
After more than a decade of using smartphones and social media, I've been feeling and seeing some very negative effects. If you have time I thoroughly recommend giving this podcast your full attention. Dr. Rangan Chatterjee and Johann Hari discuss in depth the ways tech and social media are affecting us on so many different levels; how our attention is becoming dramatically reduced by the constant distraction of our phones, how our relationships are suffering as we pay more attention to virtual life than real life, how we’re losing the faculty for critical thought and reasoning because we don’t have the required concentration skills to work through an argument. We’re becoming less tolerant of other opinions because we can ‘unfriend’ or ‘mute’ with ease. Phone addiction is causing unprecedented levels of anxiety especially to the generation who have grown up in the last decade and have never known an unplugged life. All this, in turn, is making changes to wider society and the political landscape…Trump and Johnson, anyone? Scary stuff indeed!
Personally, I had never even touched a computer for the first 35 years of my life and I felt completely left behind, so in 2003 when we got our first desktop computer at home I made it my mission to teach myself how to use it. I would regularly spend whole days staring at the screen without moving from my desk and when I closed my eyes at night all I could see was images and scrolling text.
I began selling on online in 2007 and would spend hours on the computer every day hopping between my favouite sites; Etsy, Flickr, my Blogspot blog, and a blog feedreader, and back again in a seemingly never-ending loop. I had recently moved house to a new town and was home alone most of the time. It was very exciting being online back then, being able to discover creative people all over the globe doing their creative thing, and making new connections. At the same time it was utterly exhausting. That was even before social media was thrown into the mix.
Then, when Instagram came along I absolutely loved it! The format was simple, just sharing images for the fun of it and because the feed was chronological you could connect with people in real-time which helped with the isolation of working from home. But that cosy feeling didn’t last; along came the algorithm (which you can never satisfy). The feeds stopped being chronological and there was no way to ever catch up. There was a shift in how it made me feel. Spending endless hours looking at images often made me ambivalent about them, which is a pretty sad state of affairs if you’re a visual artist. I felt guilty for spending so much online writing captions and sharing photos, and simultaneously guilty that I wasn’t spending more time supporting other makers enough by commenting and sharing. And it goes without saying, I could have spent a lot of that time more productively.
Our brains struggle to cope with this new kind of over-stimulation. I know my attention span has been badly affected. When I was 20 I could work on the same painting for 6 hours a day, for a fortnight, not that it would always be fun…but I could stick with it. Now the thought of working on the same thing for more than a couple of hours fills me with horror. I lose my train of thought easily. If I pick up a book I’ll often be halfway down the page before I realise I’m thinking about something else entirely and have to start again…although that might just be an age thing! Does any of this resonate with you? Anyway, I could go on and on…
The problem is it’s not so easy to untangle yourself from social media. It’s the way I stay in contact with many people now. I wouldn’t want to do a big flounce-off, only to inevitably return full of remorse and embarrassment. Plus, in the last couple of years, I’d say that virtually all my sales have come straight from people clicking links on Facebook or Instagram. I’m incredibly grateful for those sales and for everyone who chooses to buy my work because like everyone else I need money to pay my bills. I need sales to continue doing what I love. But I do need to make big changes in how I use social media so as to reclaim my time and hopefully claw back some of my failing attention.
That’s why writing here is so important to me. I get the ideas down on paper first with a biro which is much more relaxing, and means I don’t spend so much time online, with all the distractions that entails. I don’t know if abandoning Instagram or Facebook is a realistic option but I’m certainly posting less frequently. There are productivity apps that can block you from visiting sites between certain hours and that’s something I’m looking into. I need to work out new ways to market my work and also build more IRL opportunities. It’s difficult just now. I’ve not done any in-person selling events since the start of covid and if I’m honest I’ve lost confidence but I need to get myself out there…somehow!
Now, something which is brilliant for focusing the mind is drawing. I’m so happy to have picked up the habit again, even if it’s only for 15 mins a day. I’ve tried to meditate for years but get too irritated when my mind wanders. There’s no possibility of mind wandering while you do continuous line drawings. They require full concentration on the job at hand and although the purpose isn’t perfection, improvement over time is just about inevitable. I like that there’s some tangible evidence of that hard thinking too.
OK, that’s it for another week. Take care of yourself! Unplug if you can, Julia x
I feel that lack of concentration too. Especially when reading. The book really has to pull me in or my mind just wanders of. I think it's very much because of social media. I used to work on a project all day long on my computer (barely stopping for minimal food and drink breaks!) but that doesn't happen so much anymore. Or at least not in the same way.
P.S. I miss when everyone wrote blogs! :-)