Even for an old timer, it’s hard to avoid pitfalls of digital distraction

It’s a problem that I likely share with most of my fellow humans who live in ‘First World’ countries – namely that of digital distractions – whether it be the computer, the smartphone or the television in the bedroom. If I had a ‘tenner’ for the number of times that I went to my smartphone to ring or message someone about some specific issue, only for to be distracted by a notification or a message, then I’d be quite a wealthy man.

What’s a little concerning in all of this is that by the time you have navigated your way through those distraction, you forget what the purpose was initially when you engaged with the phone.

There are theories out there from people who study the psychology of digital distraction, and maybe even IT obsession at times, that constant reliance on technical devices dulls both our IQ levels and our ability to concentrate on a specific subject for more than a few minutes at a time.

Reliance on Google definitely nurtures a sense of mental laziness when it comes to things such as to who won the All-Ireland football final in 2002 or the FA Cup Final of 1973. [That latter one is a sore topic for old Leeds United fans like myself!].

Even now when it comes to checking articles or columns that I write, there is at times an unhealthy reliance on the auto spell check in Microsoft Word. Just take the example of the words ‘now’ and ‘not’ if they got mixed up. “The man is not in jail” as compared to, “The man is now in jail”. Potentially catastrophic from a libel point of view, if one was reporting on a court case.

In my own little world of literary meanderings, there’s a word that I commonly mis-spell first time around and that’s ‘superintendent’, more because of clumsy fingers than anything else. But do I bother to insert the ‘d’ instead of the ‘t’ manually or vice verse . . . oh no . . . the spell check picks it up, and it’s a case of a click rather than a correction.

There are some people who maintain that this new world [well maybe not so new anymore] of technological tangents actually makes us masters of multitasking. So, there I am writing a story and the phone gives a ding to tell me of someone pulling in or pulling out of the presidential race before a message comes through about the signing [nearly wrote singing and ‘spell check’ would be no help there] of a soccer player in the UK, whose name I couldn’t pronounce not to mind remember. And then I return to the story, but in those two minutes of distraction, my train of thought has completely gone off the track.