Читать книгу The Digitally Divided Self: Relinquishing our Awareness to the Internet - Ivo Ph.D. Quartiroli - Страница 10

I moved back and forth between information processing and consciousness processing – from the awareness of technology to technologies of awareness. Information and my mind fed each other in a vicious cycle, making it difficult to stop and turn my gaze back toward inner silence. The mechanism of information incites us to stay within the feedback loop.

My subjective inner exploration was important not only for knowing my inner self, but also for clarity and a broader understanding of the outer world. Freeing my mind from conditioning and acquired beliefs proved effective both in my daily life and for a deeper understanding of reality. (Despite common misconceptions, spiritual paths are paths toward reality and clarity.) Beyond the conditioned mind we can see reality in a sharper way.

As every meditator quickly learns, many of our choices only seem to be “ours.” They are, in most cases, the result of early-life messages – either explicit or unconscious –which structured our minds. Those knots can never be untied if we don’t work on them with our attention and full presence.

Uninterrupted conscious attention along with silent time to look into our inner world are exactly what is rendered arduous by the technological society which, to use a term dear to Mauro Magatti (2009), sequesters our attention. The modality of the Internet, regardless of the actual content we are giving attention to, tends to split our attention – among websites, instant messaging, email, social networks, pictures, videos, software tools and more. With the growing speed of computers and the Net, everyone can keep several windows and websites open at once, jumping rapidly from one to the other.

Links themselves – the cement of the Internet – useful as they are, can be distracting. We approach even the best, most interesting and in-depth information with the same divided inner modality. Marshall McLuhan’s awakening phrase “the medium is the message” is true also for the Net. Being more than just another medium, the Net can be considered the summation of all media, and its impact on our inner and outer lives is accordingly stronger than any preceding media.

But we can always be masters of our attention, right? True, but the efforts to direct our attention and maintain it becomes harder with the growing presence of the Internet in our lives.