PoP Book 06.2s MidRes - Flipbook - Page 33
7.02
Disappearing
Play of any sort doesn’t really work without full immersion; without allowing
yourself to disappear completely for decent chunks of time. But let’s be
clear, choosing to melt into the realm of play is not the same thing as
being consumed by the time-sink of brilliantly engineered devices. It’s all
about drifting off into close worlds of thought and action, and stopping
looking back at yourself to see how it appears from outside. People still
disappear for bits and bites of unselfconscious play time, sure, but less
like they used to.
‘Over the last few years I’ve had the uncomfortable sense
that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my
brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the
memory. My mind isn’t going — so far as I can tell — but
it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think.’
Nicholas Carr, The Shallows
I know. You’ve heard it all before. The endless alarm bleats from the health
and family sections of every media channel. And for each of those doomy
set of stats about how the technium 226 is remaking people’s brains, there
was probably a counter-story the next week saying the figures show it’s
all chattering-class alarmism. Just like television didn’t make the world one
7.03
big goggle-eyed moron, the benefits of the always-on world may outweigh
the downsides. One fact remains, however: all technology is used before
7.04
it’s completely understood. There’s a lag between the uptake and the time
when its consequences are fully clear. We’re currently living in that lag,
7.06
7.05
all the time. A non-stop lag that results from a very important kind of play
which morphs into a very relevant game. This is technologists and engineers
playing the game of attention capture.
7.07
•
So, let’s think about the history of this game.
In the 1930s, as economies crumbled, the powerhouse new industry of
advertising seemed to have nowhere left to go. Posters and newspapers,
the old channels to people’s minds, couldn’t generate enough revenue.
How were the alluring messages going to continue hitting their targets?
Play Fuel / Disappearing
Section 07
Technology and marketing have always been the best of friends and
luckily, once again, technology had a novel answer. Radio sets were
7.01
175
Play Fuel
Second only to curiosity, concentrated attention is what all highly creative
people recognise as setting them apart. They’d never have managed
all the hard work otherwise. Being fully open to the drift of imagination,
and then being able to cinch the focus tight. This is the mental play
The Play of the Senses
7.18
dynamic. And, because the playing mind is always looking for novelty,
creators regularly develop strategies for avoiding distraction.
forgets
‘The poet, above all else, is a person who never
and
certain sense impressions, which he has experienced
which he can re-live again and again as though
their original freshness…’
with all
Stephen Spender 251
activity,
You probably remember that if you concentrated on an enjoyable
still.
or got lost inside it as a child you could make time stand strangely
Remembering this shows how experiencing deeply alters your whole
relationship with reality.
Novelist Marlon James is very disciplined, and cuts himself off completely
when he’s working on a book. The choreographer Twyla Tharp knows
her own tendency to drift as well. ‘When I commit to a project, I don’t
myself
expand my contact with the world; I try to cut it off. I want to place
in the
in a bubble of monomaniacal absorption where I’m fully invested
task at hand’.254 And laser-focused Tiger Woods demonstrates better
of
‘cocoon
a
entering
for
than anyone the real talent of all great athletes
concentration’.255
childGalway Kinnell knows attention was the most important aspect of his
hood play, and just as crucial to the poetry he makes now.252 His treasure
a kid,
remains the ability ‘to go out of yourself and into other beings.’ As
he and his siblings would rush to the basement, with nothing planned,
there
and a whole alternative reality would open up. ‘We just went down
a ‘transand I fell to that world.’ It was the first time he really experienced
the
cendence of consciousness’. ‘When my mother’s voice came down
one
stairs telling us it was time to go to bed… It was a shock to me… that
or two or three hours had passed… I was really in the trance of another
world when I played that game.’ Years later, when he started writing,
he’s
he connected with the same state; and when he’s deep in the words,
literally in other worlds.
7.20
•
7.19
mind
Well, drifting off into la-la land is one thing, but the perfectly playing
can also lock into focus as it chooses. Photographer Platon Antoniou
makes intense and searching portraits of world leaders and celebrities,
which punch out from any gallery walls and magazines they cover.253
disEven if you don’t know his name, I bet you’ve seen his pictures. He
a
covered the creative energy of attention very early on: “When I was
old
kid, I would always sit and draw in the square. I used to draw all the
chair
that
in
sit
would
man
old
The
slow.
men and ladies. It was calm and
powers
for five hours.” When you sit still and really look, he says, your
of observation ‘go through the roof’. “You tap into the human condition.
That’s a very powerful thing. And it’s those amazing details of humanity
that you start to understand.”
Play Fuel / The Play of the Senses
184
Play Fuel / The Play of the Senses
185
