I just spent a week at an intensive writing conference, involving about 6 hours a day of discussion, writing and critique, plus readings and time for socializing. Possibly because the participants had to submit work to be admitted, everyone there offered interesting writings and comments. There was very little fluff.
This felt like a big contrast to the real world. Very few regular folks think and speak about writing the way writers do, so if people read my work, the comments are usually limited to: “I liked it” and “here’s a list of typos I found.” This is merely an observation, not a complaint, but the contrast at the conference was refreshing.
The practical result has been that I have low expectations when I put something out to read — I can’t really know who reads, reacts, skims, glances, or ignores — as is true of anything that is offered online, as well as many offerings on paper or in conversation.
In fact, we’ve been so besieged by “reading material” or audio information that one of the skills I have developed to an alarming degree is the ability to skim, even things I want to read, and often simply to tune out.
We are enveloped with phone distractions, and buried in advertising which we know is at best slanted and at worst patently false. We are asked to respect opinions that we know to be lies, because of the false equivalency that still prevails among many journalists and self-appointed pundits, involving the “two sides” to every story. I was cured of that decades ago when I read a news article about an expert in the design of execution equipment who wanted people to know that the Holocaust didn’t actually happen, and the newspaper dutifully reported that Holocaust survivors “disagreed.”
Almost daily we hear impassioned commentary about abortion, which Protestant evangelicals were not even interested in until several years after Roe v Wade, when it offered political advantages to a faltering movement. In those days, they dismissed the subject as a Catholic problem. Meanwhile, the Catholics were not so much concerned about the “unborn” as about abortion being an implicit confession of female sin through premarital sex or adultery. I don’t doubt the sincerity of some of these people but it’s hard to buy the impression that they’ve felt passionately about the subject ever since Jesus. And it’s unmistakable that these “pro-life” advocates don’t seem to have the energy to advocate for the already alive. Where there’s an underlying deceit, we tend to tune out.
I don’t want to buy into false equivalencies myself, but there are certainly people who agree with me on some things but are happy to bash me for presumed mindsets depending on what’s popular in social media at the time. Sometimes I’ve been lambasted by those who claim I don’t understand an injustice that I’ve been appalled by and worked against for several decades. It’s sad to see people hammer at the same problem the same way again and again while loudly protesting that nobody is learning their lesson. If someone hammers students with the same lesson all the time and their students are not learning anything, they might just not be a very good teacher. On the other hand, if their students actually are learning the lesson but the teacher refuses to acknowledge this, such a teacher might just not be a very good person. A passionate ideology that turns mindlessly aggressive becomes another cause to tune out.
Facebook and Twitter are emblematic for mindless aggression. They are also places where one could write anything and be ignored, cancelled, or hyped one day, and have the opposite happen the next. I took notice when a Facebook page I respected, populated by writers, trashed someone for appearing to be negative about the wrong person. It’s then that I realized that writers, who I thought could generally read and reason well, were often no different on Facebook than the millions of others on the site (who are also “writers”!) — spending about 3 seconds to read a headline or the first few words of a post, purely to determine who’s on whose side, and then spending many minutes to compose a personal rationale to hoist the flag for their side of an issue, regardless of whether it actually tied into the post, especially if the post included (heaven forfend!) a complex thought. I realized that I sometimes even had to tune out writers.
Personally, going through a painful recovery from surgeries gave me yet more reasons to tune out, as I lacked the patience to parse details such as spouters of fake news claiming that their opponents are spouting fake news. Or people gushing that a snake-oil salesman is a successful businessman. Or pundits positing that an obvious, squirm-inducing lie is acceptable because it can succeed as an effective and clever political tactic, and we can’t argue with success. And by the way, Hitler made the trains run on time.
I did not realize how practiced I’d become in tuning things out until I got to the writing conference, where there was virtually nothing worth tuning out. I had a lot of trouble focusing on listening to people read their works. My mind wanted to skim, but you can’t skim a live reading, nor can you skim a live person who’s talking to you.
I had to make myself concentrate in the moment on what someone was saying, and to be present enough to absorb a few swallowed or mumbled words without losing the drift. I had to keep my mind from diverting itself with related thoughts or imagery or personal concerns, because leaving the moment made me lose ground or even lose my grip on the whole reading.
It was an unexpected benefit of the conference, and very timely. Just today, my younger son told me about having to talk to a caterer who never seemed to be able to tune in to what was being said or what he was doing on his invoices, until after four phone calls, they got things sorted out. I suspect the “tuning out” problem may be a virtual pandemic these days.
Is anybody working on a vaccination for it?
To quote you: "A passionate ideology that turns mindlessly aggressive becomes another cause to tune out." This is a very good description of a personality trait that I posses but my personality is not the subject here although I will elaborate a bit in a moment. I would like to explain that I share this quote to ensure you that your articles do require a moment of attention to complete and absorb whether I agree with your idea of the reality or perception of the subject or not. Now my recent love for understanding and learning music has become a passionate ideology, to use your term and I may be running off friends with this aggression to share the thrill even to the point of suggesting to friends that they subscribe to you emails to really learn music more in depth than an on-line instructor could teach. Even the mention of the word "theory" or a phrase like "you get the minor by simply flatting the third" can be so rejected by the target audience that I am leaning I have probably just too much passion for sharing my joy of discovery in music. Yes I do get "tuned out". I love your music writings with the learning ideas that REALLY WORK. Thank you Mr. Ed.