Whilst scrolling mindlessly through my Instagram feed yesterday I came across an advertisement for a neat gadget: the Astrohaus Freewrite. It reminded me, at first glance, of those little toy "computers" that were all the rage when I was growing up. Laptops for kids, with a teeny-tiny screen, a keyboard, & access to so-called educational games. In one promo video for the Freewrite a couple of the creators are featured, talking about their invention. It doesn't seem coincidental to me that these men, who looked to be in their 30s, probably grew up with those same Vtech laptops.
Though the design is pretty sleek & basic and boasts a keyboard that is far more familiar to those of us that grew up learning how to type on desktops instead of laptops, what caught my eye was the advertised purpose of the device: to provide writers with a "distraction free" writing tool. It can connect to WiFi so that projects are uploaded to the cloud, but aside from that the Freewrite is pretty low-tech compared to the ubiquitous tablets & Macbooks.
When I was a kid my mum worked at a daycare as a bookkeeper. She was pretty old school, even when others were pushing her towards abandoning her logbooks & printing calculator. She also had a typewriter, one that automatically moved so you wouldn't have to manually push the carriage over (though that was a lot of fun, too).
I loved that thing. I loved putting the paper in & typing away. Letters, numbers, punctuation marks. Since I wasn't able to read yet none of it made sense - just streams of symbols - but I felt important, professional when I got to use it. I loved the sounds it made; the clacking of the keys & the inked typebars thwacking against the page at a rapid pace. The whole office, at that time, was abuzz with sounds - the typewriters, the printing calculators, the fax machines, the ringing telephones, the photocopiers. To someone sensitive to noise it must have seemed like an insufferable place to work with its distracting orchestra cacophony.
By comparison the offices of today must seem as quiet as a place of worship. People don't chatter on the phone anymore when they can just send a text. Touchscreens have eliminated the tapping sounds of yesteryear. Even those devices with keyboards are far quieter than their ancestors. If anyone likes to listen to music while working they just wear noise-cancelling headphones or barely perceptible earbuds so your neighbor in the next cubicle doesn't even know that you're deep in the land unsolved murders podcasts. Comparing these two settings, the one my mother used to work in in the early nineties & the one my dad works in now as he approaches retirement, it would seem obvious which contained the fewer distractions.
And yet it's not that way, not at all. This isn't news to anyone. Not to you who are reading this while sitting on the toilet or passing time waiting in line at the grocery store, & certainly not to me who is sitting in bed on my Macbook with my iPhone next to me & my Nook on my nightstand & soothing music playing from my iPad in my iHome while my youngest child naps. How much willpower does it take me & you to write a whole page without once looking away from your document, to respond to a text or scroll through Facebook or check a news alert? It's harder for me to do that than just about anything else, to be honest. As much as I'd like to tell myself I'm not addicted to my devices...I am.
But maybe that's the thing. It's not the devices I'm addicted to - it's the distraction.
I write longhand in basic notebooks, the kind I used to take notes in during class in high school & college. I do this for a few reasons, & one of them is to avoid the distractions that come with writing on a laptop. But, truthfully, I still get distracted: by my phone, by the laundry, by the kids, by the need to clean something. I yearn for those distractions to take me away from the thing I should be doing: writing.
We're surrounded by modern conveniences. Smart fridges & HE washers, robot vacuums & voice assistants. But are we any more efficient? Are we really getting more work done? Or are we using the time to sit around & play whatever app is en vogue? Or are we letting ourselves be overtaken by the so-called necessary chores? We're allowing ourselves to get distracted. Despite synced calendars & apps that encourage good habits, here we are.
How we got to this point is not simply a result of the rapid evolution of technology, & I don't believe that if we suddenly unplugged ourselves that this distraction issue would be resolved in a matter of weeks. It's deeply rooted at this point. I love the idea of the Freewrite; I love that people are becoming more mindful of their short attention spans & inability to avoid distraction, but even this neat gizmo isn't going to change it, at least not as significantly as some might hope.
So, for those of use writers, what do we do? Do we go back to typewriters, like some people have? Do we compose our poems using only paper & pen? Do we buy something like the Freewrite? I don't know what the answer is for you or even for myself. But I'm glad that it's a question people are asking themselves & a problem they're looking to solve. I'm hopeful that with this awareness of our addiction, reliance, whatever you want to call it we are taking the first steps to break away.
Fellow writers who often fall victim to distractions: keep plugging on, whether you're plugged in or not.
Though the design is pretty sleek & basic and boasts a keyboard that is far more familiar to those of us that grew up learning how to type on desktops instead of laptops, what caught my eye was the advertised purpose of the device: to provide writers with a "distraction free" writing tool. It can connect to WiFi so that projects are uploaded to the cloud, but aside from that the Freewrite is pretty low-tech compared to the ubiquitous tablets & Macbooks.
When I was a kid my mum worked at a daycare as a bookkeeper. She was pretty old school, even when others were pushing her towards abandoning her logbooks & printing calculator. She also had a typewriter, one that automatically moved so you wouldn't have to manually push the carriage over (though that was a lot of fun, too).
I loved that thing. I loved putting the paper in & typing away. Letters, numbers, punctuation marks. Since I wasn't able to read yet none of it made sense - just streams of symbols - but I felt important, professional when I got to use it. I loved the sounds it made; the clacking of the keys & the inked typebars thwacking against the page at a rapid pace. The whole office, at that time, was abuzz with sounds - the typewriters, the printing calculators, the fax machines, the ringing telephones, the photocopiers. To someone sensitive to noise it must have seemed like an insufferable place to work with its distracting orchestra cacophony.
By comparison the offices of today must seem as quiet as a place of worship. People don't chatter on the phone anymore when they can just send a text. Touchscreens have eliminated the tapping sounds of yesteryear. Even those devices with keyboards are far quieter than their ancestors. If anyone likes to listen to music while working they just wear noise-cancelling headphones or barely perceptible earbuds so your neighbor in the next cubicle doesn't even know that you're deep in the land unsolved murders podcasts. Comparing these two settings, the one my mother used to work in in the early nineties & the one my dad works in now as he approaches retirement, it would seem obvious which contained the fewer distractions.
And yet it's not that way, not at all. This isn't news to anyone. Not to you who are reading this while sitting on the toilet or passing time waiting in line at the grocery store, & certainly not to me who is sitting in bed on my Macbook with my iPhone next to me & my Nook on my nightstand & soothing music playing from my iPad in my iHome while my youngest child naps. How much willpower does it take me & you to write a whole page without once looking away from your document, to respond to a text or scroll through Facebook or check a news alert? It's harder for me to do that than just about anything else, to be honest. As much as I'd like to tell myself I'm not addicted to my devices...I am.
But maybe that's the thing. It's not the devices I'm addicted to - it's the distraction.
I write longhand in basic notebooks, the kind I used to take notes in during class in high school & college. I do this for a few reasons, & one of them is to avoid the distractions that come with writing on a laptop. But, truthfully, I still get distracted: by my phone, by the laundry, by the kids, by the need to clean something. I yearn for those distractions to take me away from the thing I should be doing: writing.
We're surrounded by modern conveniences. Smart fridges & HE washers, robot vacuums & voice assistants. But are we any more efficient? Are we really getting more work done? Or are we using the time to sit around & play whatever app is en vogue? Or are we letting ourselves be overtaken by the so-called necessary chores? We're allowing ourselves to get distracted. Despite synced calendars & apps that encourage good habits, here we are.
How we got to this point is not simply a result of the rapid evolution of technology, & I don't believe that if we suddenly unplugged ourselves that this distraction issue would be resolved in a matter of weeks. It's deeply rooted at this point. I love the idea of the Freewrite; I love that people are becoming more mindful of their short attention spans & inability to avoid distraction, but even this neat gizmo isn't going to change it, at least not as significantly as some might hope.
So, for those of use writers, what do we do? Do we go back to typewriters, like some people have? Do we compose our poems using only paper & pen? Do we buy something like the Freewrite? I don't know what the answer is for you or even for myself. But I'm glad that it's a question people are asking themselves & a problem they're looking to solve. I'm hopeful that with this awareness of our addiction, reliance, whatever you want to call it we are taking the first steps to break away.
Fellow writers who often fall victim to distractions: keep plugging on, whether you're plugged in or not.
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