The Distraction Addiction

Picked this up after hearing the author, Alex Pang, on a very intriguing episode of Buddhist Geeks. Maybe it just hit me in the right moment - my life had paused in a little eddy of Dharma Lite (“Hmm, maybe I should meditate again or something?”), and the ever-gushing torrent of INTERNETTTT OMGGGG (i.e. my techlove). Anyway, it really hit the spot in that sense.

Unfortunately, I have to agree with some of the other reviews I've seen here: it's a bit rambley, a bit meandering, and could have been edited down to something a lot shorter and snappier. In particular, I'd often end up confused (and a little impatient!) after I'd find myself deep into a long, seemingly irrelevant digression into:
- Psychedelic drugs in ancient civilizations
- The path around Darwin's house in England
- These cool VR researchers, doing cool psychology experiments (including that famous one about people behaving different when they get sexier-looking avatars)...
- ...this digressed even further into a note about stereotype threat! Yo, I love stereotype threat, I be droppin' it at aaaalll the parties, but - what!? why?!
- Some unexamined, uncritical press release copypasta about the (IMHO, controversial and not so great) One Laptop Per Child program (talk about development bloat!).

How does all this relate to our eroding attention spans amid myriad tech distractions, and the ways we can claim our brains back? I DON'T KNOW. I couldn't make heads or tails of it, and often found myself plowing through these bits, waiting for the point to emerge. Pang does do an OK-ish job of tying it all up in the very end, but it still felt like many of those pages could have been paragraphs.

That said, there are some nuggets of very interesting issues in here; particularly his adapting Abraham Heschel's ideas on the Jewish sabbath to our digital age. Indeed, that's what he talked about in the Buddhist Geeks podcast, that's basically why I bought the book, and that's what I ended up liking most about it (I know, I know). Other very interesting bits included the (slightly fanboy-ish and unfortunately outdated - some of those apps are dead or different now) overview of “Zenware” (i.e. Freedom, WriteRoom, Futureful (?)), and the Buddhist monastic responses to it. Also, when Pang is on his game, his writing can be smart and funny.