Getting comfortable with chaos
30th May 09
Posted in creativity, culture
Posted by Ben Malbon & Heidi Hackemer
I’ve just finished an awesome article in ‘New York’ magazine by Sam Anderson called ‘In Defense of Distraction‘. I say finished. I mean barely finished. I’ve been reading it for four days.
Illustration by Glen Cummings/MTWTF (Photo: John Day/Getty Images)
The truth is, it took me waaaaay too long to read the piece. Not because it’s not a really top quality dissection of the attention crash, its causes, and ramifications – it is – but because almost every sentence I read contained a phrase, name, concept or idea that I wanted to get more information about. I barely finished a single sentence in one go. I spent more time on Google than on the New York magazine site.
My colleague Heidi (@uberblond) also took a crack at it. In her desperate attempt to not meander off into conceptual undergrowth, she opened a new tab with a Google search every time a thought hit her. At the end of the article, she had racked up almost twenty tabs of where her mind wanted to go. It turned out we both struggled to finish what is a really excellent, highly readable article on a subject we’re both really into. Not good. Some would say pathetic.
In Anderson’s piece, David Meyer, one of the world’s leading experts on multitasking & cognition describes this phenomenon in bald, almost harrowing terms. He sees our distraction “as a full-blown epidemic—a cognitive plague that has the potential to wipe out an entire generation of focused and productive thought.”
This struck a chord with us, although we were both barely paying enough attention to the piece first time around to register the thought. Only when we compared notes did we recall skim-reading that quote as our bit-addled brains struggled to process thousands of concurrent potential search terms at once. Our mutually pathetic attempt at pointed concentration got both of us thinking: if two averagely-smart people can barely concentrate on something that *really* interests us, what does that mean about our ability to think creatively? Hmmmm . . .
Image by Kevin Dooley, Flickr (CC)
Well we haven’t got any smart answers to that one, but fortunately, as we both took so long to finish the piece, in the meantime something on this theme snuck in and offered an interesting counter-argument. A recent piece in Wired magazine by David Allen, ‘How to be creative amid chaos‘, proposes using the disordered reality of over-stimulation, continuous partial attention and multi-tasking as a liberating force that can feed, not stifle, creativity. Allen muses on how, perhaps, the skill of the next generation might lie on mastering how to extract meaning from this cacophony. He cites the example of Evan Taubenfeld, a guitarist and producer in a rock band.
He was telling me how he’s learned to produce an album most effectively. Some of the best ideas for his songs happen while he and his band are working on another one. Now he has a whiteboard in the studio. They’ll be in the middle of one thing, suddenly get inspired about something else, and stop to capture it. Evan said it’s chaotic, but once the band got used to it and trusted the process, they were way more productive and more creative than ever. Before he realised the power of capturing thoughts as they occur, and building in just the kind of structures that he needed to foster and support the process, he experienced lots of wasted and frustrated energy, with much less output. Trying to exert the “discipline” of staying focused on one song at a time stifled his creativity. The coolest thing about the new process, he said, was that making music was fun again.
We thought this was cool, and inspiring. And we’re now less worried about not finishing pieces we start. Far from trying to install some form of order around the cacophony, maybe we should jump into it? Maybe we resist order and accept that it’s from within that craziness that we might craft and find creativity?
You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star. (Nietzsche)
TLDR
… but seriously, I think the producer’s approach is well known within traditional fine arts circles. Distractions lead you down great side roads that turn into large endeavors on their own. The real difficulty I find in the commercial production world is you can’t afford to have those distractions or have the liberty to meander down those side roads.
Also, try reading the article with a 3 year old gnawing at your ankles.
Ben & Heidi,
Halfway into the article, I was ready to jump down here and point you to the David Allen piece, saying pretty much exactly what you said in the following paragraph. Ironically, I somehow mustered the strength to overcome my attentional corner-cutting and actually read the paragraph.
My point is, we all do it. We skim – I often refer to this as the “culture of skim” — and we do it because, in most cases, it’s an efficient compression mechanism for ingesting very much by digesting very little, a way to handle the constant influx of information we’re being bombarded with. Our brains are wired for this on the most fundamental level — we have all sorts of cognitive schemata, mental shortcuts that help us put things in a category more quickly, mental scripts that help us predict how events will unfold. When we see a leaf breaking off a tree branch, we know it will inevitably fall. So we don’t wait for it to, we keep on walking.
This sort of cognitive practice works when it comes to the newsy side of culture — we skim headlines, we get the gist, we move on. But the tricky part is that there’s a fine line between harnessing the brain’s efficiency mechanisms and cheating ourselves out of deeper content. There’s a danger of missing those moments when a gust of wind picks up that leaf and swirls it into the air into a beautiful dance that has no utilitarian value — we don’t “learn” anything from it — but is so aesthetically and experientially indulgent that it still enriches us somehow. In essence, this “skim mentality” works for concrete information, but doesn’t work for the abstract world of art.
If I have to be completely candid, being in the business of “cultural curation,” I occasionally share things with my readers — short films, articles, books — that I haven’t experienced in full myself. This, of course, makes me feel like a complete fraud a lot of the time. But I’m trying to learn to trust my judgment and, more importantly, to trust that I’ve evolved a sort of schema that allows me to quickly and efficiently determine whether something is “culturally significant,” then pass it on to the people who will most benefit from experiencing it in full. In a way, we’re all curators of culture — perhaps not everyone does it in an information-sharing context, but the very act of consuming content requires that we develop those same schemata, that same trust in our own judgment. Because if we really had to spend the full amount of time required to explore the full breadth of interestingness out there, there’d be no mental resources left for our own original creative output. So those schemata are an efficient way to build up our mental catalog of inspiration and knowledge, which is the same pool we draw from when we come up with original ideas. Because there’s really no such thing as true “originality” — it all comes down to combining existing concepts in creative new ways, allowing ideas to cross-pollinate and effect what we call “innovation.”
Ironically, I’m well aware that most people won’t read this comment in its entirety. But this is the whole point — that’s okay.
Thanks for your comments, and your really insightful additional thoughts Maria. Glad you made it to the bottom. I’ve just flown out to Beijing and the flight provided a rare nine hour spell of not being on line to enjoy a film, read a book and watch a documentary, without checking Twitter, email or consulting Google once. Quite a treat. One of the strange outcomes of being in China is that the video of Kraftwerk doing ‘The Robots” has disappeared, but I trust it’s still on view in countries where that kind of film is not so threatening.
For those that want to watch here’s the link (I think):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHEoMpMvz7A&feature=related
Funny. I got here because of Maria’s tweet
. And I am a skimmer too, and sometimes forward /retweet her findings to others, without reading everything in detail…
You do start to wonder how many people are just forwarding as a means to indicate it is a potentially interesting piece to read, rather then reading the piece itself.
Rene, that’s exactly what I wonder. But, at the same time, isn’t this pay-it-forward model the only way for content to actually reach those whom it will be most pertinent to? The people for whom a piece of art, or fresh business insight, or a little-known scientific fact, will be completely transformational and will inspire something profound in their own work. Even if this happens for just 1 person in a pass-on chain of 100, I still think it’s worth it.
Maria love the thoughts about how the passing culture, even when lacking a thoroughness by the passer, has the potential to spark a fantastic flight of inspiration on the part of the receiver. I hadn’t thought of it that way (probably because my Tweetdeck kept dinging at me) but I think there’s something really lovely about that notion, something rooted in an ageless chain of inspiration that we see in the arts and thinking.
What I worry about and what draws me to these attention studies time and time again, is the potentially reduced capacity of us as receivers to process in-depth information (once a tantalizing bit captures our fancy) in a way that is meaningful. It’s Sunday so I’m going to forgo the thoroughness of a reference, but in one of the articles a scientist spoke to the fact that our brains are undergoing a transformation in processing information that hasn’t been seen since man discovered tools – people that are growing up in this stream of bits increasingly don’t have the discipline to process more complex arguments and thoughts despite the fact that they are more accessible than ever.
What is the benefit of tools like Twitter if these tools “dumb us down” and ultimately make it difficult for us to process the very information and inspiration that it’s trying to impart? What is happening to our brains? Is this a good thing? Do we give up some Wagnerian discipline to enjoy some of the Twitter-like fruits of life?
Heidi,
Don’t get me wrong, I’m just as concerned about the cognitive – not cultural – implications of this whole skimming phenomenon. Ironically, I actually wrote my undergrad thesis on multitasking and how it dilutes the way we process information.
You should check out SIMM, a large-scale annual study done by Joe Pilotta, perhaps the leading researcher on media and multitasking — you can fill out your information and they’ll send you a PDF of the topline findings: http://www.formsite.com/prosper/info/
The Kaiser Family Foundation also does some interesting research in the field, particularly in Gen Y — here’s a starting point: http://is.gd/mgQH
In any case, while I’m reluctant to endorse the “dumbing down” viewpoint — that’s, no pun intended, an oversimplificaiton — I think perhaps this cognitive change is simply a step in the evolution of our brains. I wonder how Kevin Kelly would relate this to The One Machine — is the ability to compress information more efficiently, at the expense of quality (can we call this cognitive low-rezing?), getting us closer to this universal cataloging system of human knowledge?
Ben, Maria,
I skimmed through everyone’s comments (joke!) and I agree that this phenomenon is fascinating. I too often share things with my Twitter group that I didn’t deep dive into myself relying instead on my familiarity with that source or a quick skim of the headline and concluding paragraph. I confess it does make your own opinion feel cursory and compromised. Yet there are upsides as Maria suggests. And, in fact, I don’t think we really have a choice. The wealth of information now available and the speed with which it arrives and the likelihood that this will only increase, suggests that “skimming” may well become the norm. I agree there are costs – the loss of subtlety and nuance in dialogue or leisurely experience for the pure pleasure of it – but it is a useful tool in its own right. The mind effectively becomes a keyword search tool that shares information with others who have demonstrated interest in the same words. As Maria says, one benefit is that “skimming” almost unwittingly enhances the creative process. I am convinced creativity at its core is the art of bringing two previously unrelated things together. “Skimming” accelerates the collisions and as a function of the increased amount of information being processed, allows for more collisions to occur. The only challenge then is taking (not finding) the time to articulate those new ideas so that someone else can “skim” them (drats!). We are, in a sense, becomes slaves to the information we so desperately sought ten years ago. But I can’t help but think an increasingly connected global community will find needs and uses for that skills set that couldn’t be found without it. Our growing collective consciousness has us all functioning increasingly like synapses firing away at each other. Such exchanges and intimacy are great when they enhance our sense of shared humanity. What they take away from our sense of selves is up for the individual to control which is why social media will increasingly become tools for filtering tools as much as they are tools for connection. I have a suspicion that most things in life end up mirroring what we find in nature and the prospect of a global brain comprised of 7 billion skimmers seems fascinating (even if that means we are only talking to ourselves!). Till then, here’s a distraction joke my daughter told me this morning.
Q: How many ADD people does it take to change a lightbulb.
(You say, “I don’t know”)
A: Want to go bike riding?
Travel safe, Ben, and thanks Maria, Simon
Apologies for the typos. I “skimmed” my spell check.
I agree that “chaos increases collisions” and in some people those collisions are a source of frustration and dilution of experience, and in others it leads to the transformative power of creativity. I think most of us will learn to adapt, and we will soon see a renaissance of creativity that we can’t even yet imagine. But that’s me : )
The second interesting part of the comment stream is around this notion of skimming via keyword search and then passing along. As I observe my own behavior, I notice two trends — I skim for words in my “set” of words that always pique my interest (i.e. creativity, thinking, advertising, social media, etc.). But then I also skim for words that jar me because they are concepts that I don’t see or think about often. So it is when the two sets “collide” that I often get the biggest flashes of new inspiration. By imposing *some* order to the chaos but letting go of the rest I find I now have quicker and more insightful breakthroughs than ever before in my life.
Thanks for the conversation, all.
Lisa, what a fascinating insight about the two “ingredients” of creativity — the set of the expected and demanded (the stuff we are “into,” what we have expertise in or knowledge about) and the set of the unexpected and transformational.
I actually have a similar theory about the two kinds of curiosity that construct creativity — “planned curiosity” (the things we make an effort to learn about, what we are already interested in) and “incidental curiosity” (something intriguing we stumble upon accidentally, something that piques our interest and makes us probe further, discovering unexpected inspiration in the process.) The intersection of the two is when I think true creative genius occurs.
Which, by the way, often makes me question the very concept of a “creative education” — all due respect to the best art and advertising schools, but these are all exercises in “planned curiosity” only. That’s just one half of the story. The same goes for artists who sit around and wait for “the muse” to strike, essentially relying on “incidental curiosity” alone.
That’s precisely why I think there’s tremendous value for this culture of skimmed cultural curation — it affords us the time to explore our planned curiosity while leaving the door ajar for those gusts of incidental curiosity that help us break from plateaus, shift gears and take our creative process in a fresh new direction.
It’s beyond question that technological/social tools in all their forms are diluting our ability to concentrate. But I feel that the comments above, while insightful, are missing two of the key factors in creativity and how the new forms of communication are likely to impact on it.
The first is that creativity is essentially comparative. If Basshunter had lived in 1820 and produced the same music, he would have been a towering genius (and thoroughly inexplicable). However in 2009 he’s utterly ordinary (and hopefully forgettable). For artists (commercial or not) to be interesting its important that they follow interesting paths in life, and are exposed to interesting influences that make them different from everyone else. Many experiments confirm the relationship of recent input to creative output, and this was very amusingly and vividly illustrated in the Derren Brown episode where he tricks a pair of advertising creatives into producing a concept that he seeded in their minds via the taxi journey from their office to his. The trouble with Chaos then, is that although it increases any one person’s exposure to random information, it does the exact same thing to everyone, with the effect of smoothing out experience and making it more uniform across the population. If everyone gets their stimulus randomly from the same key start points (google, digg etc. etc.) then uniqueness becomes much more rare.
The second is that inspiration is a small part of the picture, and execution matters at least as much. Focus is far more important in executing well (not least because of the focus required to learn the necessary craft). So, again, it seems likely that wandering attention will mitigate against the creation of quality content.
It’s possible, for these reasons, that the stand-out creators (both individual and corporate) of the future will therefore be rejectors of networks to some extent. Companies who rely on their creativity might be well advised to think about how to buck this trend instead of how to embrace it…
Jacob, you make some great points here. I’m particularly drawn to your final comment about the need for ‘stand-out creators’ to separate themselves from the network. Inevitably there’s historical precedence here (when is there ever not…). The german author, Thomas Mann writing a century ago, believed “one must die to life in order to be utterly a creator”. He wasn’t alone: a swathe of modernist writers, musicians and artists from James Joyce to Jackson Pollock have either believed or operated on the basis that they could only be capable of original output by isolating themselves from the life they observed around them.
There has to be a place for counter culture, it’s just a question of when and where it comes into its own. And it’s not for everyone. (I am sure you chose the words ‘standout creators’ carefully, they are a rare breed). Right now, however, networked behaviour is still a (relatively) new phenomenon, which I’d argue we need to be encouraging the majority of people and organisations to adopt, not the reverse. Given the degree of change we face right now there is enormous value in knocking down walls and collaborating to discuss, debate and hopefully solve universal or industry-wide challenges and opportunities as we see them. All of us are better than one of us in this sense. Personally, I also enjoy the open-mindedness, speed of thinking and innovation that collaboration seems to bring along with it. So long as we remember to hang onto our individuality along the way, access to greater diversity of influence probably makes us both more interesting and helps to keep us sane. Even Mann concluded: “Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous – to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.”
For what it’s worth, I also agree there comes a point in any creative process when it’s time to focus. The ‘Gen Z’ behaviour David Allen describes in his (great) article to my mind is actually a coping strategy to enable focus, not run away from it. I’d add I think it’s less about a singular episode or particular task (although I accept the execution stage is when focus / the application of craft skills is particularly important), but rather a *series* of punctuation points that need to take place from the very beginning to the very end of the process.
(apologies for loooong post)
Historical precedent indeed! I’m going to go way off-topic here, but want to follow this thread of argument. Have you ever seen Adam Curtis’ astounding “Pandora’s Box” series? It details how various 20th century regimes adopted metaphors from science and technology as governing principles. Game Theory for US cold war strategists, mass production for the Soviet Union and even Hydroelectric power for Kwame Nkruma in Ghana.
The thread that runs through the series is that humanity has this persistent tendency to take its latest technological advance as being emblematic of the way the world works and therefore worthy of widespread and general application. (See also Freud’s steam-engine like analogies for the human mind) The series shows that it is not usually the core science or technology that has negative effects, but rather this reapplication of it to other fields e.g. the Soviet Union’s treatment of society as an engineering problem.
As was the steam engine to 19th century thought, the computer to the 20th century, so is the network (or more specifically ‘open-source’) to the 21st century. It’s a seductive idea, one that seems like it will change everything but will also, precedent seems to assure us, be much abused. In that sense it seems to me that Linux and Wikipedia are entirely good things, and that our kids are probably not going to be irrevocably damaged by IM and Twitter’s effect on their attention. However it’s when our schools, governments (and to a lesser extent, corporations) start ‘open-sourcing’ and ‘networking’ things that were never meant to be that way, that the harm will be done.
Now of course hand-wringing over technological change is as fruitless as wide-eyed extropianism. The truth is that a careful and critical adoption of new ideas is always the best way. We need an eye for what we gain, and also what we lose. And hence my use of ‘standout creators’. IIRC, the standard cognitive studies of group performance show that on most tasks, the group outperforms the average individual member of that group but not the strongest individual member. Similarly, the marginal increase in performance of adding an extra member to a group quickly tends to zero once you get above 8 members in standard studies. There are of course conditions under which groups perform very well, and the larger the group the better the performance, but the rule that ‘none of us is as smart as all of us’ is far from being a universal. In many situations one of us is smarter than all of us.
Networked solutions will very likely increase average performance, especially on tasks where steady incremental progress is key (e.g. building software). But similarly they are likely to decrease performance on tasks where flights of inspiration are key. I hate to quote Jaron Lanier on anything (so 90s!) but he wrote a very good article on this a couple of years ago drawing attention to the dark side of networked behaviour, which he called the ‘Digital Maoism’ and drawing some interesting conclusions about which sorts of activities technological collaboration was useful for.
To return to chaos as a tool for creativity, it still seems to me that techniques for coping with technology’s assault on cognition (and for co-opting its effects into creative working) are similar to groups/networks in that they are likely to have a flattening effect on the distribution – less outliers of disaster and genius and an incremental increase in average performance. A hypothetical uncreative individual could be sparked to a surprising place by random chance but a genius might be distracted from hir towering thoughts by an ill-timed tweet or two. Thus these tools democratise creativity to an extent, but via the exact same dynamic are also liable to create a uniformity which due to the comparative nature of creativity can be the enemy of excellence and certainly of competitive difference.
Chances are that new skills will evolve to excel in this milieu (like having good google-fu…) but they’re unlikely to be technological quick-fixes and more likely to be procedural and nuanced in nature.
[...] dilemma with distraction in reading Anderson’s article in their recent BBH Labs Post entitled Getting comfortable with chaos. The behavior both expressed, however, resulted in linking together multiple ideas around the [...]
I read this article a few weeks back – stole it from a dentists waiting room – thanks dr. shwartz…and i too had trouble staying focused, I think I read the article in parts, page 1 then 4 then 2 then 3…but it seems to be the way Ive been taking in info of late – in factoids/tidbits! And its become my normal state, where as just a few years ago, i was an actual reader! spending hours locked in a room consumed by Wagner or Milton etc –
I find Jacob’s first point something I have been debating with recently- having studied Philosophy and Art History most of my life – the importance of context and foundation in thought. With a world of info-sharing and real-time global discussion, when do we have time to sit and really give time to a thought. And not always thoughts that ‘excite us’ right away, but thoughts that one is forced to be with, and chew on, until that ‘aha’ moment erupts –
To the discussions on ‘curiosity’ – I think the culture of ‘curiosity’ is shifting – now what we are ‘curious’ about is not just a solo walk through the park, but rather it is something we RT, FWD, and post – curiosity today is something we use to show the rest of the world that one is noticing quirks and oddities – a kind of badge in a way –
While this profound data-overload is changing our thought-processing and behavior, I think there is room for backlash! I think coming generations may yearn to be totally detached due to overload?
Really enjoying this debate and the brilliant additions (& frankly, dramatic improvements) to the original piece. Thanks for all the comments so far. We’re learning lots. Keep them coming. B & H
[...] muito mais texto, estou apenas na página 3, restam 5 ainda. E após acabar a leitura, ainda tem um link do BBH Labs repercutindo a matéria. De nada. « Black [...]
[...] Getting comfortable with chaos 30th May 09 by Ben Malbon & Heidi Hackemer [...]