Are we "woven" or "wired"?

Woven: Reflections on the Wonderfully Weird Web, Part 3

Hello gentle-people,

I am having surgery this Friday and will be in intense recovery for at least the first two weeks. I may continue to write during this time, but I am allowing myself to hold my posting schedule more loosely in the coming weeks.

If you’d like to support me during this time, I have a MealTrain account for gifts of food and money to put towards necessities. You are also welcome to Venmo me @ “rosejpercy” or Buy Me a Feather. Every little gesture means so much to me, and I deeply appreciate your care and kindness.

Today’s reflection is written with some appeals. It includes a few “did you know?” questions—I couldn’t help it. The issues that led me to the conclusions I have made in this quote felt pressing enough to demand a different tone from me. This post additionally reflects on a lot of research, so it is understandable to feel a bit overwhelmed by it and need to take it in one chunk at a time.

[Woven: Reflections on the Wonderfully Weird Web is a series that weaves together stories of how I have been shaped by the internet. This series comes with reflective questions to help us think critically about our engagement with digital media and develop better practices of care for ourselves and others we are in community with online. You can explore more in this series here.]

Photo by Lucas van Oort on Unsplash

Can I have your attention, please?

Undivided attention is a gift. One I feel many of us don’t know how to give. Did you know that having constant interruptions and distractions impacts your ability to think creatively and plan strategically?¹ Did you know your mind needs to wander a little, taking a break from constant stimuli in order to access your ability to make connections between ideas?² These are just a few facts I’ve learned from a book called Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—And How to Think Deeply Again by Johann Hari. Hari almost has me thinking I should’ve renamed this series “Wired,” instead of “Woven” since he reflected on two of its definitions: we are constantly plugged in, and we are constantly on edge.³ In fact, some are calling us “the anxious generation.”

I watched a video called “We are the anxious generation.” by feminist scholar Alice Chapelle on YouTube.⁴ Chapelle analyzes a book by Jonathan Haidt called “The Anxious Generation.” Haidt blames social media for the source of young people’s plummeting mental health. However some researchers think it’s more complicated and social media is just one of the many things leading to poor mental health outcomes, citing the climate crisis, mass shootings, and financial instability as some other sources. Chappelle herself lands on social media serving as an amplifier for society’s problems. While I agree with Chappelle, I think there are many ways that social media is designed to do harmful things to our minds and consequentially, our bodies.

Which brings me back to Stolen Focus. Hari names us as being in an “attentional pathogenic culture,” which he describes as “an environment in which sustained and deep focus is extremely hard for all of us, and you have to swim upstream to achieve it.” Hari is not the only one who believes that deep focus is getting harder to achieve. Jenny Odell, author of How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy also affirms Hari’s outlook on the privilege of it all. Calling them “gated communities of attention,” she describes an inequality that keeps some of us plugged in while others have the luxury of diversified attention and space for contemplation.⁵

Our undivided attention is a gift. Our need to wander is a necessary relief. Our agency to access deep focus and choose what we pay attention to is continually disappearing behind a wall of privilege.

So, given all of this: are we woven or wired? Do we even have a choice on which one we get to be?

woven: network of mutuality

I have another confession to make—As I said, this series will be lined with confessions because I am confronting places where the internet has shaped me and I would prefer to take the route that emphasizes that as an ongoing journey for me.

ChatGPT helped name this series.⁶ I told it what topics I planned to write on for this series and introduced the concepts of A Gentle Landing to it. I asked it to consider what bird metaphors might be used as a possible title. One of the words that stood out to me in the list it created was “woven.” It sounded good and felt like an affirmation, so I went with it. I haven’t decided yet how I will engage AI in this series, but I know I want to practice transparency when I use it. I know I want to be paying attention to how access to it is changing me and the world around me.

Another thing I do when I write a series is consider the definitions and etymology of the words I use. I am considering the definitions of “woven” and “weave” as I discover what more I could affirm in this series. (And what a pleasant surprise to see “web” mentioned in the etymology!) I will be marinating on these many meanings as I write, but today as I consider our interconnectedness. I am remembering this quote from Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail:

“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

If you want more evidence about what Jenny Odell calls the “gated communities of attention,” look no further then the fact that some Silicon Valley elites don’t let their children use smartphones and/or social media. In fact, many Silicon Valley parents raise their kids tech-free or send them to tech-free schools.⁷ One of my most eager highlights in Hari’s book comes from chapter six, “The Rise of Technology that Can Track and Manipulate You (Part One)”:

“One day, James Williams—the former Google strategist I met—addressed an audience of hundreds of leading tech designers and asked them one simple question: ‘How many of you want to live in the world you are designing?’ There was a silence in the room. People looked around them. Nobody put up their hand.”⁸

It sounds like some of us are wired into a world with those who are unable to affirm we are woven. Rather than be “caught in a garment of mutuality” with us, they have designed products that they themselves are resisting being bound up in. What does it mean for us that the truth of our woven-ness is denied by those whose jobs are to keep us wired while they opt out? What is lost to the world because of this?

“If we are accountable to and interdependent with our community as an environment, we must also acknowledge that we have the capability to disrupt or harm our eco-system with behaviors that forget or disrespect our interconnection. This means staying, even when it is hard, and transforming our relationships instead of pretending that we can sever them. We cannot.”

— Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “this is what it sounds like (an ecological approach)”⁹

I have told you all that I am no stranger to a social media break. I used to call it “fasting” to take time away from the apps when I felt like they were beginning to grab hold of me in ways I didn’t like. I remember people laughing at my techniques for disengaging, thinking it was too extreme to delete the apps from my phone or to deactivate accounts when I needed a break. I have been laughed at for signing out on the weekends and letting people know I was going offline. I’ve been told, “all you need is a little self-control” and it’s not “that hard” to resist checking your social media accounts.

I have since learned, from Hari and others, that the struggles I’ve described affect more people than just me.¹⁰ I have learned that the engineering that goes into these websites and apps rely on research on human behavior that are highly manipulative. I learned somewhere that the majority of people with cell phones don’t even change their notification settings.¹¹ Most people get a ding for every email that comes to their phones. Each of these little interruptions adds up to “a world of broken time and attention” that lives in the legacy of the telegraph.¹² Those of us who try to intentionally counteract the default settings of our phones and apps to minimize their interruptions are in the minority.

But there is too much at stake for this to continue to be true. There is a world of crises longing for our engagement and it’s going to take sustained attention to address them. Attention is the key to a life of fulfillment, satisfaction, and joy. But our ability to access communal expressions of attention is continually being challenged. Perhaps because there is no revolution without consistent communal attending.

But how do we get to sustained communal attention? I am not sure. But I believe a good first step is to affirm that we are woven. A possible second step might be to realize that means our destinies are caught up in the same web—or “network of mutuality.” Thirdly, we could stop looking at our individual abilities to be wired or not and turn our attention to the mediums that seek to bind the majority of us in ways that deny our agency. We could turn, with undivided attention, with an attention formed in unity to pressure the designers of these tools to consider more humane designs that give us back our lives.

attention and agency

Lately, I have been thanking you all for the “gift of your attention,”¹³ in part because of all this reading I am doing that affirms the value of it. I do not take it lightly that there are people out there who have only a slim margin for rest, who find these words make an impact on them during the time they can spare. I write for what I have called in the past a “whistle of liberation,”¹⁴ the most narrow space of relief we can often find. I hold with me the tension that Substack is just one social media platform vying for your attention, and I am just one of its many users. But I hope to be mindful of my well-being and yours when I write here. I hope to bring something of value. I hope to help you find that whistle of libration wherever it appears.

In her book, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, adrienne maree brown affirms the link between training your attention and the emergence of a sense of agency. She arrives here after grief led her on a journey of finally beginning a meditation practice.¹⁵ She affirms that cultivating mindfulness can help us break out of patterns of responding to crisis after crisis from a reactionary place. Much like the researchers Hari interviews, brown understands our attention as a necessary part of dreaming up solutions and arriving at new practices.¹⁶ Reflecting on how meditation has helped her arrive at a sense of what I would call “woven-ness,” she affirms:¹⁷

“This is the path of emergent strategy—the more I listen the more I understand the interconnectedness of the world, and my place in it, in my insignificance, my wholeness, and our collective potential and beauty.”

Obviously, I love this. I love it because it offers an alternative to the individualized approach to solving our attention issues. It embraces our mutuality and interconnectedness. In a world where so many of us feel disempowered by our fractured attention and the realities they form and deform, it is comforting to know there is a path to weaving it back together again—individually and collectively.

🐦‍⬛ Landing Tracks

1. Apps like Insight and Headspace are helpful for starting up a meditation practice if that is something that interests you. And if you can afford to pay their monthly and yearly fees. (Last I checked, Insight is about $60 a year.) If you are looking for a free alternative, I recommend YouTube. There are many good meditation videos but if you want a place to start, I enjoy the meditations on the channel Yoga with Adrienne.

2. I have thought about the fact that online spaces can mediate much of our social lives. Doing a complete digital detox¹⁸ and taking months away from social media for some of us can be a privilege when this is the case. Minding your mutuality and need to stay connected with friends and others, you feel a sense of woven-ness, I won’t recommend a digital detox to everyone. But if that is a route you take, consider how you can take your friends along by engaging with them beyond social media apps. Maybe practice writing letters or sending heartfelt text messages to let your people know you love them.

3. Focus on what you can add to your life versus what you are taking away. Do you want to spend more time reading? Writing? Making music? Knitting? Write up a list of practices you’d love to do that require your attention and creativity and consider increasing a few minutes each week with these activities.

4. Practice letting your mind wander. Try going on a walk and taking whatever natural surroundings you can find. If you’re like me and hate being outside in the winter, try morning pages. Julia Cameron, who wrote about morning pages in her book The Artists Way, describes them as stream-of-consciousness thoughts written down without filtering. She recommends writing 3 pages. I say start with the goal of one page a day and see where that takes you.

5. Something missed by many of the books I’ve read thus far is the structural inequality of internet access called “digital redlining.” I read about this in a newsletter written by cyber anthropologist Ravon Ruffin Feliz called “New Terms and Conditions.” The specific post is called “I is for Internet Service Provider.” I highly recommend reading it as its own landing track that might help you reflect on our mutuality and interconnectedness through a literal system of wires and cables.

6. Help me with a Survey! I am collecting responses to help guide and shape the “Woven” series, which you can read more from here. This survey also has some general questions on your relationship to A Gentle Landing and social media in general. There is no reward for taking this survey, but you will have my gratitude!

1. Hari, Johann. Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—And How to Think Deeply Again. (New York, NY: Crown, 2022)

2. Hari, 96. Hari quotes Nathan Spreng, a professor of neurology and neurosurgery who says "Creativity is not [where you create] some new thing that's emerged from your brain. It is a new association between things that already are."

3. Hari, 16-17.

4. Here is the video by Alice Chappelle.

5. Odell, Jenny. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. 199

6. I arrived at “Reflections on the Wonderfully Weird Web” on my own after I wrote “the enemy's camp: testimony from a stolen life.”

7. See this post from Fast Company about what this means for America’s children in general.

8. Hari, 123.

9. From the footnotes of a poem she wrote called “this is what it sounds like (an ecological approach,” which I discovered from a post written in the newsletter, “New Terms and Conditions” written by by cyber anthropologist Ravon Ruffin Feliz. The post is called “notes on an ecological approach” and it is so good.

10. One fascinating element of this book is how personal Hari made the journey for himself by intentionally spending a few months internet-free in Provincetown, MA. He documents his experience over that time and is honest and confessional about how much the internet shaped him and how hard it was to live without it. He is even honest about how returning to it, after months of beautiful time away, many of his old habits came back. I hope to channel some of his honesty in my approach to this series.

11. This was somewhere in Stolen Focus, I think but I don’t have the page number.

12. Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Television, p. 69. Don’t get me started on how much reading Postman’s description of the telegraph sounds like a predecessor to the microblogging platforms like Twitter.

13. I once wrote this post for Substack on being (a) tender. I think of it now as I consider the importance of our attention as permission to linger.

permission to linger

14. I am quoting myself from “making it work: on a vocation of softness.”and

15. brown, adrienne maree. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 199-200.

16. brown, 199.

17. brown, 200.

18. If you do think you can benefit from a good digital detox, here are some guides:

https://www.calm.com/blog/social-media-detox

https://toolkit.lifeline.org.au/articles/techniques/how-to-do-a-digital-detox