Distraction Culture

Mood swings

So, here I am writing about the potential that technology has to distract us, and I still struggle sometimes to apply the self discipline I know is needed. Easter weekend furnished a good example: after a very heavy month of work I badly needed to relax with my family. By Sunday I'd more or less achieved a kind of horizontal mental state - and then made the mistake of checking my e-mail. Which predictably contained a mail (about work) that annoyed me so much I span straight back to the tension zone I'd tried so hard to leave behind. I felt like a character in a video game who stepped on the wrong creature and had to start again.

There's been a lot of talk in the last ten years about mixing work and home seamlessly together. About how this enables us to live better, more flexible lives. I do wonder: both bring their highs and lows which tend to be different in quality and I sometimes think it may be better to compartmentalise these.

Or else maybe we should demand work places that accept we are "always on" to our home, as much as a home where we are increasingly always on to work?

GNH

Of course one of the excellent things about digital is the ease of connection from topic to topic - so when I was researching the Richard Mabey book (see my previous entry) I came across a magazine called Resurgence and this article about Bhutan, where they have adopted Gross National Happiness as a measurement of prosperity, in contradistinction to Gross Domestic Product.

" The term Gross National Happiness (GNH) was coined by Bhutan's King Jigme Singye Wangchuck when he ascended the throne in 1972. It signalled his commitment to building an economy that would serve Bhutan's unique culture permeated by Buddhist spiritual values.

Today, the concept of GNH resonates with a wide range of initiatives, across the world, to define prosperity in more holistic terms and to measure actual wellbeing rather than consumption. By contrast the conventional concept of Gross National Product (GNP) measures only the sum total of material production and exchange in any country. Thus an international conference on Gross National Happiness, hosted by the Bhutan government in the capital city of Thimphu in 2004, attracted eighty-two eminent participants from twenty countries............Such critiques are not new. Back in 1968 Robert Kennedy lamented that the GNP also grows because of the sales of rifles and knives and "television programmes which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children…(it) does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play."

Bhutan is also interesting for having experienced a blight of social problems through the recent introduction of television.