In the digital age, where we are constantly online with multiple electronic devices, the distraction has become our everyday perception mode. Especially since the spread of the smartphone, it is more and more difficult for us to focus on a small text. ...
In the digital age, where we are constantly online with multiple electronic devices, the distraction has become our everyday perception mode. Especially since the spread of the smartphone, it is more and more difficult for us to focus on a small text. Today's media condition seems to make patient reading and consistent thinking more difficult. At the same time, however, we are increasingly expected to flexibly glide from information to information, from text to text, from device to device and do everything in parallel. With the new requirement of "hyper attention," the traditional working methods of the humanities, such as close reading and contemplative thinking, seem to be difficult to reconcile.
It is, therefore, certainly not a fruitless undertaking to recall, in the light of this so-called crisis of ‘Geisteswissenschaft’, the crisis of ‘Geist’ that many intellectuals experienced in the early twentieth century, in the face of the rapid spread of the new culture of distraction. Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer already drew our attention to the phenomenon of distraction as an inescapable modern mode of life and reviewed it critically. The aim of the following discussion, with a focus on these two theoreticians, is to explain the philosophical, sociological and political significance attributed to the phenomenon of distraction.
Although distraction seems to be a physiologically natural and everyday state of mind, our understanding of it is historically conditioned and constructed through different (popular) scientific discourses and practices. To recall what Benjamin pronounces as the basic assumption of his famous investigation into the work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility, namely the insight that the organization of human perception is subject to historical change. We therefore need to ask about the historical background against which the distraction culture flourished in the metropolises of the early 20th century. The beginning of the modern culture of distraction can be understood in close connection with the "new imperative of attention"(Crary), under which a new subject of learning, work and consumption was formed. The distraction culture around 1900 is related to the working mass, whose mechanical work required a great concentration of the split work on the assembly line. Another reason why the distraction was perceived at the time as a dominant experience of modernity is also the rapid urbanization.
Benjamin and Kracauer are among the few who recognize distraction very early on as an indispensable modern living condition. According to them, the task given to our perceptive apparatus can be not solved by the defense of contemplation and immersion because their historical validity has already expired. The thinking strategies of Benjamin and Kracauer consist in recognizing "the human existence in society" as an indispensable fact and deriving from it a revolutionary potential. Benjamin's media theory shows that distraction is not a rush, not a lack of mind, but an active mode of perception to master the new condition of life. The reception in the distraction is thus another kind of attention, in some cases even more active and alert than the ordinary one. The scattered attention is not a degenerate, inadequate perception, but another perception technique that allows another thinking.
Finally, it should be briefly considered whether the increased distraction in the digital era is valid as another form of attention and that a new 'humanistic' methodology can be developed from this.