Doesn't he have form of some sort or other?

[oursin]

The name Johann Hari rings some sort of bell, and it has a certain crack of doom in it?

Your attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen.

You, dr rdrz, know me by now, and that I am a hedjog who looks askance at a lovely rosy vision of the somehow unified consciousness of the past (was that TS Eliot?), that Past when Things Were Better and we lived more in harmony with ourselves and nature.

And I think of the late C19th woezing over tit-bitty journalism - fun facts and listicles and so on, detached from any context.

And ads in magazines and books of my youth saying 'Have YOU got a grasshopper mind?' and offering remedies.

And I think it might have been Langhamer's book on women and leisure pointing out that women's work in the household was often a round of distraction, or at least bouncing between tasks and stopping the baby falling into the fire; and the reason stories and articles in women's mags were of the short length they were was so that they could be read in those brief moments while e.g. the potatoes boiled.

And of the Edwardian school children who learnt so much better once they got school meals and treated for nits and fleas.

As for those people not looking at the view but taking selfies: has this not been a plaint since the rise of cheaply available cameras and commercial film-processing?

I don't know what he's doing on social media/the web, but I observe a lot of intelligent and witty and creative interaction, I get a sense that people are out there writing and creating and researching and Doing Stuff, and indeed, Helping One Another. I will concede that this may be a rather niche corner of T'Internetz.

I.e. I would probably have guessed (and I would have been right) that my Twitter feed would be screaming WOT at the notion that there is an “untold history lesson” of what happened over three centuries of witch-hunting in the UK - described in the fine old 70s feminist spirituality woowoo term as 'the burning times', when, in England, anyway, no burnings took place and it was by no means a major site of the European witchcraze (Scotland, however...). This is not an untold history, and where are these people getting their sources? Margaret Murray??? (Visions of Professor Ronald Hutton beating his head on the desk.)

On distraction/not distraction, certainly there were people who needed to focus, for a period (sometimes long hours) so as not to fall into the machinery, or be eaten by the wild animals they were hunting, mess up the accounts they were copying (though I recall one of Sara Caudwell's mysteries turns on Hilary Tamar identifying a not unknown issue in manuscript transcription, of copying the same line twice instead of two consective lines...)

- and then they were exhausted.

And - to reiterate a theme that has come up here o so many times before - those individuals who were able to fall into an undistracted 'flow' state in most if not all cases were able to do so because somebody else, wife or other female relative or servants - was dealing with domestic distractions.

I will also allude to those discoveries that were made because somebody got distracted by that weird thing that was not the thing they were supposed to be attending to.

Comments

[troisoiseaux]

Your attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen.

Wow, I got an entire paragraph and a half into this article before I rolled my eyes so hard I'm worried I sprained something.

[oursin]

'So up himself he can see the underside of his tonsils'

[kore]

-- Wait, THAT guy? Mr "I edited Wiki articles and lied about it"? Mr "I was totally wrong in 'Everything you know about addiction is wrong' and spread junk science in a TED talk"? Mr "And then for a second act I did it again with anxiety and depression"? Why is anyone still listening to him about anything?

[rydra_wong]

Oh, wow, I looked at the Wikipedia entry and somehow I had not seen Dean Burnett's thread about what went down re: the Guardian and Hari's depression book:

https://twitter.com/garwboy/status/1352648404980162566

[kore]

And yes, this did end up in the surreal situation of me, the freelance self-taught science blogger, explaining journalistic standards and ethics, to the trained people running a major media platform.

Damn, that is epic. What a good thing he did for so many people (I just ignored Hari because his addiction book was so, so wrong -- had no idea he told people to go COLD TURKEY off meds).

I also just opened a bunch of Brain Flapping (what a title!) columns to read, which I'm sure will be much better for me than obsessing over covid stats.

[azurelunatic]

That thread makes it abundantly clear that this Hari clown is not even right once a day.

[kore]

He's not even a broken clock! He's like a busted digital clock flashing "88:88"

[bibliofile]

I had just started reading his book on depression. I think I'll stop now.

[kore]

Oh dear. Yeah, I really truly wouldn't. He absolutely just makes shit up from what I know.

[rydra_wong]

Awwww, Matthew Sweet didn't get to beat up Hari:

https://twitter.com/DrMatthewSweet/status/1479125910896975877

Presumably because Hari has seen the clip of Sweet murdering Naomi Wolf live on-air over "death recorded."

[oursin]

I know, right?

[oracne]

those discoveries that were made because somebody got distracted by that weird thing that was not the thing they were supposed to be attending to. THIS has actually happened to me lately, I think.

[luzula]

Completely off topic: I don't suppose you know how old the practice of using dance cards at balls is? I did find a master's thesis on the topic, but it's more interested in how they are designed and how they go out of fashion. Earliest mentioned examples are from the 1760's, and my fic is set in the 1740's.

No need to do any research for my sake, this is just if you happened to know anything about it. How dare scholarly articles not address the things I need for my fanfiction...

I thought Google Ngram might help, but nope, according to that the term began to be used in 1920. And the OED's earliest example is from 1895, which is also weird.

[oursin]

I remember doing a bit of digging about this for somebody a while ago and finding it was later than one supposed - mid to late C19th, as a general practice, is my recollection. But I will see if I can find out anything more specific!

[luzula]

That late? The master's thesis I skimmed definitely had English examples from the 18th century. But considering how ornate those examples are, maybe it was not yet in common use below aristocratic circles?

[oursin]

I will see if I can access any fashion/society periodicals.

[oursin]

So I've skimmed various likely periodicals from this list - which mostly have to be searched on basis of the individual volume on Hathi Trust/Google Books - without success. I've checked the catalogue of the John Johnson Ephemera of the Bodleian (no joy in spite of the other amazing stuff there). I've also done a quick swing at The National Archives 'Explore', which includes collections in other repositories: and that pretty much confirms what I found in the newspapers, that references to dance-cards really only start appearing c. 1860, in diaries, correspondence, kept as memorabilia, etc. The V&A has one from 1840, but French, and I'm wondering whether it was more of a Continental thing.

Etiquette manuals???

[luzula]

Thanks so much for taking the time to look into it for me! I will thank you in the eventual author's notes. : ) I had really thought it was a thing that came in earlier, but I guess I won't have dance-cards in 1740, then.

[oursin]

Another possibility suggested by a dive into the archives of the Victorian Studies list is that originally they would have been erasable ivory tablet-style things rather than paper.

[oursin]

A very quick delve into the British Newspaper Archive suggests 1860s when mentions in reports and adverts for printing start appearing, but I'll pursue.

[ithiliana]

Thanks for the fascinating read -- and a friend of mine just posted a link to the original article which means I need to share the Wikipedia article and the Burnett Twitter Thread (as someone who ended up on the national suicide hotline after I thought it was OK to go off my anti-depressant med, encouraged by a GP, then faced a whole bunch of Crappy Life Events, I have Strong Feelingz about the Hari take on things!).

[castiron]

women's work in the household was often a round of distraction, or at least bouncing between tasks and stopping the baby falling into the fire

Yep. Having and rearing children has done more damage to my ability to focus than any social area on the Internet.

[sister_luck]

Ha, I was prepared to roll my eyes when I saw the title of the article in my Twitter feed. When I saw the author's name I had the niggling thought it was familiar (and connected to something iffy) - turns out I was right! Thanks for putting it all together

[violsva]

There is at least one medieval manuscript on which the copyist wrote "massive hangover" in the margin. I doubt he got all that much copied that morning.

What I find funny about the whole "modern distractedness" idea, is that the times in the past when I personally was most able to concentrate on reading for hours on end, or on drawing very detailed pictures, were when I was in fact supposed to be doing homework or paying attention to a class rather than to a book.

[silveradept]

Goodness, that feels like the older-style "Internet Addiction" articles from the time when it was feared that all the small children would no longer be able to perform any detailed task of any length at all because they would be all upon Internet forever. When it was dial-up, rather than broadband. And it turned out the children were perfectly fine, for the most part, and so the attention very quickly shifted to other populations that they believed were vulnerable, somehow, to flightiness or being unable to do the important work of raising the family or making sure the Great Man could do his work unabated.

(There are many a discovery that comes from someone going "huh, that's weird. I wonder why?")