Electronic Attention Deficit Disorder

Tired of Writing about Wokeness. Part Sixteen.

Way back in 1798, a brilliant Scottish physician named Alexander Crichton had a book published: An inquiry into the nature and origin of mental derangement, in which he wrote:

The incapacity of attending with a necessary degree of constancy to any one object, almost always arises from an unnatural or morbid sensibility of the nerves, by which means this faculty is incessantly withdrawn from one impression to another. It may be either born with a person, or it may be the effect of accidental diseases.

He almost got it right: born with it, accidental diseases, or what? He could not possible have known the third cause, but if you are reading this, and it is not printed out on paper, you do know the cause.

The world of electronic text communication in which we live is constructed with a baked-in current DSM-5-TR symptom of distractibility in ADHD, described as “often being easily distracted by extraneous stimuli,” representing a core feature of inattention that interferes with task completion and daily activities.

Huh? Did you read that? Did you grasp it immediately? Or were you distracted? Maybe a notification of some kind came in on your device. Maybe you were trying to read this on your browser and you got a cookie choices message. Maybe you accidentally tapped the screen or pressed a button on your iPhone and went into your lock screen.

ADHD, aka Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder comes in many flavors and colors, and basically involves a kid in school who fidgets (or disrupts) and doesn’t (or can’t) pay attention. But– pay attention, please!– the subtype of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder that I am referencing here is 314.00 (F90) Predominantly Inattentive Presentation.

Of course, if you are not a kid in school and don’t have at least five of the nine symptoms listed for the diagnosis, you can breathe easy: you don’t have a mental disorder, or at least that one. Anxiety, maybe; depression, maybe; Intermittent Explosive Disorder DSM-V 312.34 (F63.81) maybe, but in this Substack post I am only adressing the distractability issue.

Why can’t the bastards (you know who they are, if you have Intermittent Explosive Disorder) just let you listen to the podcast, or read the web page without all the (insert expletive here)?

The ads, right? The podcast ads. Hey, you’ve read up on nutrition. You already know that vegetables are good for you. You might even be eating vegetables when you are listening to the podcast. And then, just before the podcaster tells you why Trump is saving America, or that the walls are closing in on Trump, there is that ad telling you that you can eat your vegetables in pill form (or is it a powder?) and then you will have to put down your fork to fast forward your device, or keep conscientiously chewing your vegetables listening to the damnable ad drone on, not knowing what the next ad will be, possible some kind of “social casino” where you can gamble socially, even though you were convinced as a child that gambling is not good for you, worse even than not eating your vegetables.

And then, finally, your podcaster comes back on. But the mood is ruined.

No wonder you have Intermittent Explosive Disorder DSM-V 312.34 (F63.81) if you have it. Go ahead: look it up. I’ll make it easy for you: here’s the link.

Some time after the World Wide Web went live on August 6, 1991, someone discovered the fact that one can put ads, messages, notifications, and whatnot onto websites and electronically deliverable information that will interrupt the user so as to intrude into his attention span, distracting him from what he (or, get real, she, or maybe even they) is trying to accomplish.

I know that there must be people out there, and I hope that some of them are my readers, who believe that this idea does not come from actual human beings, but from Satan himself, perhaps under the name of Lucifer, Beelzebub, Belial, or the Lord of Dung. I empathize with that interpretation, but I view Satan as only metaphorical. I believe that there was once a human Lord of Dung who dreamed up the cookie choice interruption for your browsing. I also suspect, but could not prove, that the very same Lord of Dung was not working in the literal infernal region, the fourth round of the ninth circle according to Dante, but in the metaphorical deepest region of everlasting Hell, otherwise known as the European Union.

So, what can you do about it?

There are three choices:

1. Take meds.

2. Give up screens altogether. Paper only.

3. Grin and bear it.

Meds? What meds? Americans invented an upper called Benzedrine which cleared stuffy noses, then the Nazis reformulated it as Pervitin to make blitzkriegs more blitzy, then it became a weight loss drug until Ozempic came along, then it became Crystal Meth, and then it became the drug of choice for your kid who fidgets in school (Hey, I’m not saying your kid doesn’t fidget or that he shouldn’t take Ritalin. Maybe he should.)

Give up screens altogether. Well, heck, if you’re reading this, we know the choice you made about that. Maybe some day there will be a leather-bound bookshelf edition of The Collected Works of Jonathan L but it’s not out yet.

Grin and bear it. Welcome to the real world. Or as the Brits used to say before Allahu akbar became more fashionable, stiff upper lip.

If you were able to read this whole Substack post, all 940 words up to now, more power to you. Maybe the gods were with you this time. Or at least Chris and Hamish were.