The Difficulty of Staying Still

The latest darlings of the financial world are the new players who are promising grocery delivery within 10 minutes. This is as close to magic as one can imagine, one which dramatically collapses the interval between desire and its fulfilment. It also underlines a key feature of our digital lives- an inexorable bias for speed and constant movement, even if, as in this case, no one has asked for it.?

The world is being cast in the mould of our minds, which know no constraints and can move with dizzying speed and inexplicable contrariness between subjects, idle fantasies and desires. The need to be the centre of the world, to get what one wants when one wants it, the ability to move erratically from one subject to another- these are all being catered to by the technologies of the day. The fickleness of the mind, its ‘chanchal’ character is at the heart of the design of the today’s digital world.

Hypermobility is its defining feature- everything around us is moving all the time. On the mobile phone, nothing stays in a state of rest. Timelines move all the time, whatsapp messages arrive in a steady torrent, if we post something, comments and likes begin to trickle, sometimes flood in. Modern life has always been thought of as fast moving, but in the digital world, motion is the default setting.

Earlier, when we read it was we who did the moving. The book or newspaper was immobile and disconnected from any other object in the world. Our eyes scanned a page, sometimes running a mental finger down the text, we flipped the page when we wanted to move on, and when we finished reading we had the option of sitting back and absorbing what we just read.

Today, both the text and our attention are in a state of constant motion. Digital text is fluid as it updates itself constantly. Text comes booby-trapped with active links intent on torpedoing the linearity of our attention. Hypertext encourages us to travel at the speed of curiosity. Even as we locate ourselves in a flowing streaming timeline, the implicit mental model of a river or a stream is misleading. For it suggests a certain linearity, a trajectory of certainty. A river has a set course, and defined banks. Our digital journeys on the other hand leap around from one river to another, they combine more than one stream as we multi-task our way through the day.?

The prefix ‘hyper’ gets pressed into action to describe a multitude effects that follow. In a hyperreal world, we are hyperaware, hyperactive and hypersensitive to any stimulus. In today’s world, attention is the scarcest resource that exists, and we try and minimise the opportunity lost by focusing on one thing by instantly drifting to another. The need to react, to insert ourselves into the fast-moving narratives that are rushing by, produces an anxiety and a state of permanent dissatisfaction, something that is part of the design of social media. As writer Jia Tolentino puts it, “it is?essential?that social media is mostly unsatisfying. That is what keeps us scrolling, scrolling, pressing our lever over and over again in the hopes of getting some fleeting sensation- some momentary rush of recognition, flattery or rage”

On the surface, of course, we are very very still. Hunched over our phones, glazed eyes attached to our screens, fingertips moving lightly over touchpads, we appear to be locked in still solitude. We see the same behaviour, in our bedrooms, in bus stops, in conference rooms while pretending to listen to someone drone on about the difference between goals and objectives- everywhere we perform the charade of stillness while everything is leaping around frenetically on our screens and in our minds.?

We do much less, and yet live in a world of ceaseless motion. The world today is run by eyeballs and fingertips. We have reduced our bodies to its lowest possible unit of functionality. The thumb is the most used part of the body as it relentlessly scrolls through the many worlds we occupy simultaneously.

The simultaneity of production and consumption is one of the reasons why we no longer can separate the two actions. In an earlier time, the act of production was carried by one set of people at a different point in time which then was consumed later by another set of people. On the internet, production and consumption are so closely interwoven that one is constantly switching modes. Read a text, send a post, receive likes, react with an emoji- this kind of interaction is ceaseless.?

The ability to fill up all gaps in time, to never let our attention go hungry, always having some activity to lose oneself to, makes life feel unrelentingly continuous. The absence of fallowness, of time to soak in all that we have been exposed to, produces a state of hyper-attentiveness to elsewhere, a state of perpetually divided attention.

No wonder that our interest in notions of mindfulness and slow living are on the rise. The desire to opt out, to make things stop moving, to let our attention settle rather than scatter is an impulse that will only grow. Implicit in the idea of a digital detox is a mental model of the existing overload of stimulation as a form of poison which needs some form of countering.

Well before the advent of the internet, Jacques Ellul argued?“modern man does not think about current problems; he feels them. He reacts, but be does not understand them any more than he takes responsibility for them. He is even less capable of spotting any inconsistency between successive facts; man's capacity to forget is unlimited”. If this were true over 60 years ago, when this was written, it is terrifying true today. In the world of the infinite scroll, there is no memory, only movement.

(This is a version of an article that has appeared previously in the Times of India)