Slow living
For several years I have been telling students and executives about my ‘information management strategy’. Like a broken record, I repeat the same old story, which goes back to when I began working as the executive director of the Australian Institute of Management in Victoria. A new position, a new partner, it was the ideal time to think about how I might live differently.
One major issue was how I would spend some of my time when not actually engaged in work tasks. Concerned to have the opportunity to think, decisions I made back then, thirty years ago, still shape much of what I do. I decided not to watch the news on television, and I still don’t. In fact, I seldom turn on the television at all, although I do use the monitor to watch the occasional DVD or movie (but only about once a month). Similarly I gave up on listening to the radio, except for classical music programs, like the one I tune into when driving to and from Charlotte.
I don’t ignore news media. The only physical newspaper I see on a daily basis is the Winston Salem Journal, the ‘fish wrap’ as my neighbour calls it, and in that my major interest is in the cartoons (to my frustration several of the better ones have recently been cancelled because they were ‘controversial’) and sports news (I need that so I can take part in casual conversations with students, where sport is a dominant topic, something US students share with their Australian counterparts). I skim the headlines of the online editions of UK Guardian and the New York Times at the end of the day. I will quite often go on read one or two articles in the NYT, and always the regular, funny and very pointed opinion pieces by Gail Collins or Maureen Dowd.
It is usually at this point that hand will go up. “But you’re missing the news. How do you know what’s going on?” To reinforce this concern, I explain I still use an old-fashioned flip phone, further evidence I am out of touch with what is happening right at this minute! I then explain my major source of news is The Economist, but, of course, by the time I am reading about an event there, it is already ‘old’. That offers me a segue into talking about reading. I read paper copies of both The Economist, which is my major source of ‘old’ news, and The New Yorker.
I explain I rely on The Economist, as it provides something that is increasingly rare, facts. By the time a story appears in the magazine, their journalists have been researching, and what appears is often markedly different from the story that was splashed on the news media in ‘breaking news’. Just so: breaking news sells media time, but real news is important, the result of careful, often painstaking analysis and fact checking. For me, The Economist meets that need.
As for The New Yorker, it has to be one of the best ways to keep your brain stimulated. There’s a copy next to me as I am typing, and here is a list of some of the week’s contents: opinion pieces on the Mueller Report (actually, like many people I am suffering from Mueller Report exhaustion), on the two judges who have dealt with the aftermath of the Lehman Brothers Bank collapse of ten years ago, and on the Fosse Verdun legacy, an archive on the work of that extraordinary dancer Bob Fosse and his wife Gwen Verdon; a review of the impact of Airbnb on cities, especially Barcelona; a story about people hoping to photograph the aurora borealis; yet another article on an especially crazy downhill skiing race in Austria; reviews of books, television, film; poetry and fiction (there is always a short story); and, finally, short humorous pieces and cartoons (oh, those cartoons!!). Zany, unpredictable, and always rewarding!
Finally, I explain I read books, fiction and non-fiction. Right now, I am working my way through all the adventure series written by a teenage girls’ fantasy writer, Tamora Pierce, several detective fiction writers (popular this week is Charles Finch), a book on cosmology, and a book about the profession of medicine in the US today. I guess reading books is my version of watching television, relaxing, engaging, and at the same time giving me a privileged insight into the lives of others, the thinking of researchers and novelists. If I am talking to a group interested in innovation or entrepreneurship, I explain that this helps me think about people, how they live, what they seek, and how we can create better opportunities for everyone to lead a more fulfilling life: well, that sounds a bit pretentious, but understanding others does help shape what you do!
What I don’t so much about is the most important outcome from that review process that started thirty years ago, and that is how important it is for me to have time to think. Uninterrupted time away from the screen, sitting in a chair, sometimes listening to music, and sometimes enjoying the quiet and doing nothing, except allowing my brain to slowly mull over ideas. It is how I write my blog: develop an idea, type some early thoughts, think, add, and eventually edit the resulting mess into something readable. While I was trying my hand at writing detective novels, I adopted the same approach. In the middle of doing nothing very much, that was the time when useful ideas appeared, plot twists developed, or a chapter gained shape and purpose.
Of course, it is easier when you are no longer working full time. I can sit and listen to music (once again, I am slowly working my way through all of the Beethoven string quartets, playing each one maybe ten times over the course of a week: I am just about to start listening to Opus 127). I spend time on my week’s commitments in teaching, business meetings, mentor sessions, visiting in-laws, but I always make sure there’s time remaining to be busy doing nothing.
It was when I read Busy Doing Nothing, an article in The Baffler, that I was provoked into composing these reflections. Megan Marz’s commentary was inspired by a book by Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, on taking steps to ‘slow living’.[i] It is one of a spate of recommendations and reviews about breaking digital dependence, both for adults and for children.[ii] Why are we so dependent on the technologies we then go on to decry as ‘wasting time’? Quite clearly, it isn’t as simple as that. Yes, when you see someone playing Candy Crush (or, to be more up-to-date, Candy Crush Friends Saga), they are not working, although some might say they are taking time out to keep their minds flexible and active! More to the point, for much of the time a digitally engaged person is checking emails, newsfeeds, responding to alerts from friends and websites.
Megan Marz quoted from Melissa Gregg, whose 2018 book Counterproductive focusses on the importance people give to always working, a task she sees as the consequence of productivity schemes moving out from work to affect all areas of life.[iii] Even when we set up our morning ‘to do’ list, she suggests we immediately feel productive, a task completed. But paper to do lists are from the 20th Century: now the apps on your smartphone create a sense of purposeful activity, tasks help you feel busy, and save you from thinking about whether what you are doing is useful.
If this was just about the need to feel active, to being productive, it would be one kind of problem. Perhaps we could redefine what we might be doing to meet that same pressure. Reading books can be seen as ‘productive’, and you can always keep a list to demonstrate the level of productivity achieved. I have to confess I am doing exactly that this year: my excuse is I can share my list with friends, and this might encourage them to try new authors. However, I can’t hide the fact a nice long list at the end of the year will look very … productive! But surely, we all want thinking time, too, not just lists of the work we’ve done, or listing Candy Crush as developing dexterity skills that will be very useful in our more everyday business activities.
In fact, I think there is another, rather more concerning issue at stake. Time on the screen is distracting, not just distracting you from the events around you (as you walk in front of a car), but distracting you from thinking about what you see. That was my concern when explaining how I managed my time: too much time taken up with various media means too little time to critically examining what is being presented. A news story breaks, and instantly vivid accounts flood the news services, rapidly followed by experts telling us what has happened and what it means. Once the last scraps of drama have been extracted, that story is replaced by another, and the events that were so pressing three days ago slip out of focus, quickly forgotten.
For investigative journalists, this is a major issue, because their insights into an event often take days if not weeks or months of careful work. By the time they reveal the complexity they found, we may miss their report entirely, unless that analysis throws up another newsworthy item.
The recently released Mueller Report (redacted, of course) is a wonderful case study. The Attorney General’s four-page letter sets the scene, Fox News explains Trump is totally vindicated, which he then tweets, and the excitement subsides. Some journalists read the report carefully, and eventually more of the complicated elements of the investigation are revealed, some of which achieves the status of ‘new’ news. Sara Huckabee Sanders, the White House Press Secretary, lied. Excitement for a day, confirming what some of us already knew: she’s really the White House propaganda officer. Three days later, that story has largely disappeared, most people can’t remember what she lied about, and most don’t even care she almost never gives a press briefing. A great deal of other material is being examined, but many insights are banished to the back pages. All we know today is that President Trump has moved from claiming Muller’s report ‘vindicated’ him to now complaining, in a recent tweet, the special counsel’s investigation was “‘composed’ by Trump Haters and Angry Democrats”.
While we’re living fast, an article by Michael Luo suggests there’s yet more to concern us, that the current system for delivering news online is broken. His diagnosis is scary: “at both legacy news organizations and those that were born online, audience metrics are everywhere. At the [New York] Times, everyone in the newsroom has access to an internal, custom-built analytics tool that shows how many people are reading each story, where those people are coming from, what devices they are using, how the stories are being promoted, and so on. Additional, commercially built audience tools, such as Chartbeat and Google Analytics, are also widely available. As the editor of newyorker.com, I keep a browser tab open to Parse.ly, an application that shows me, in real time, various readership numbers for the stories on our Web site.”
It gets more depressing as you read on: “For digital-media organizations sustained by advertising, the temptations are almost irresistible. Each time a reader comes to a news site from a social-media or search platform, the visit, no matter how brief, brings in some amount of revenue. Foer calls this phenomenon “drive-by traffic.” As Facebook and Google have grown, they have pushed down advertising prices, and revenue-per-click from drive-by traffic has shrunk; even so, it continues to provide an incentive for any number of depressing modern media trends, including clickbait headlines, the proliferation of hastily written “hot takes,” and increasingly homogeneous coverage as everyone chases the same trending news stories, so as not to miss out on the traffic they will bring. Any content that is cheap to produce and has the potential to generate clicks on Facebook or Google is now a revenue-generating [opportunity]”.[iv]
In the middle of all this, some intrepid reporters are exploring what can be done to stop digital devices taking over our lives. Jia Tolentino, a New Yorker journalist, tried controlling the use of her iPhone, cutting her home-computer social-media allowance to fifteen minutes, and blocking Twitter and Instagram altogether for a month. Somewhat anxiously enjoying time away from constantly monitoring her digital devices, once the month was over, she took stock of what had been achieved. “I had not become a different, better person. I had not acquired any high-value leisure activities. But I had felt a sort of persistent ache and wonder that pulled me back to a year that I spent in the Peace Corps, wandering in the dust at the foot of sky-high birch trees, terrified and thrilled at the sensation of being unknowable, mysterious to myself, unseen. I watered my plants.” [v] Yes, she also began to let all those interruptions back into her life. I wonder if she will write again in a year’s time and tell us more about how she then reflects on her experiment?
Does the fault lie with the technology device manufacturers? Should they have the responsibility to help us to rediscover slow living, just as carmakers had to put seat belts in their vehicles for safe driving? Recently Apple developed a tool to help users limit their screen time and control use of some services. However, over the past year it has removed or restricted at least 11 of the 17 most downloaded screen-time and parental-control apps offered by other providers, and in some cases, they apparently forced companies to remove features that allowed parents to do such things as control their children’s devices or block children’s access to certain apps and adult content. In other cases, it simply pulled the apps from its App Store. Those banned believed this was because their apps could hurt Apple’s business. “Apple’s tools, they add, aren’t as aggressive about limiting screen time and don’t provide as many options. Their incentives aren’t really aligned for helping people solve their problem,” said Fred Stutzman, chief executive of Freedom, a screen-time app with more than 770,000 downloads before Apple removed it in August. “Can you really trust that Apple wants people to spend less time on their phones?”” [vi]
There used to be a saying: take time to smell the roses. I didn’t get far on tracking the phrase, but it was supposedly a quote from “cowboy humorist” Will Rogers back in the 1920s. Can you find out more? Just a minute, did I just ask you to undertake some online research? Apologies. Don’t bother, please: I’ve just been explaining too much screen time destroys slow living. I meant to discourage you from being constantly productive, not to ask you to do more!
[i] Busy Doing Nothing, Megan Marz, The Baffler, 8 April 2019. Jenny Odell’s book was published by Melville House in April of this year.
[ii] As a matter of interest, this is where I stopped my first bout of writing, and started to think through this blog!
[iii] Op Cit
[iv] The Urgent Quest for Slower, Better News, Michael Luo, The New Yorker, 10 April 2019
[v] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/29/what-it-takes-to-put-your-phone-away
[vi] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/27/technology/apple-screen-time-trackers.html
