The mobile has become an essential tool for any creature of the 21st century.
It is enough to see from a distance the meeting of a group of friends to verify that it does not take long, after the formal greetings and the gestures of affection, for each one to immediately return to their respective pots (as if life depended on it).
What really matters no longer happens out there, in the world.
Or better yet, it only really happens if you end up going through those screens where all the knowledge is concentrated, the precise and necessary references of each matter, the composition of things, the order of nature.
It is often said that these devices
are distracting
people, and take them away from what is relevant, but the philosopher Alessandra Aloisi allows herself to mistrust this topic and wonders if they are not rather "ways to capture and saturate our attention in advance".
The new technologies allow us to receive notifications in real time and wherever we are from anywhere in the world and subject us to a situation of
continuous and omnipresent conversation
that, says Aloisi, "reduces the pauses of silence and distraction, monopolizes our attention, channeling it towards in the short term, and marks the times of our reactions and responses, which are shortened depending on the speed with which the communication itself occurs”.
Wow, we're caught, and just as mobile phones do more than open horizons, what they do is close them.
And, more than making us grow, they make us tiny, irrelevant, predictable, put us in molds and manufacture us in series: ideas, emotions, arguments, projects, hobbies.
Aloisi suggests that they have ended up hijacking our attention and that, precisely for this reason, “a distracted gaze” is needed.
It is not, however, about becoming apocalyptic and launching furious imprecations against those gadgets that have made our lives easier and that are enormously useful in resolving the most diverse issues.
What really matters is
The Power of Distraction,
the book that has just been translated by Alessandra Aloisi and that goes through the work of different philosophers, writers and artists to show the true importance of letting oneself be carried away by the flight of a fly.
Pascal, Montaigne, Voltaire, Leopardi, Locke, Saint Augustine, the mathematician Poincaré, Proust, Bergson, Rousseau, Deleuze... He goes from one to another, pulls different threads, establishes complicity, shows resonances of some works in others and, ultimately, , reflect on the importance of distraction.
"But sometimes at the moment when everything seems lost to us," writes Proust in
Time Regained,
“the signal arrives that can save us;
we have knocked on all the doors that go nowhere, and the only one through which we can enter and that we would have searched in vain for a hundred years, we stumble upon it without knowing it and it opens to us ".
That is why it is important to be distracted, to unknowingly stumble upon the fundamentals.
“This is why what is essential and decisive reveals itself more easily to the distracted individual”, says Aloisi, “who does not see what everyone sees nor listens to what everyone hears: like the still inexperienced child who sees things by first time, the absent-minded is more struck by the difference than by the similarities.
So, you know, if you're glued to your mobile and see a fly go by, don't hesitate: follow the fly.
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