The Medium Is the Message II

Advice for the distracted creative

Five years on from the onset of the first COVID lockdowns, it’s worth reflecting on a grueling half-decade for the film industry. As lockdowns shuttered movie theaters and brought productions to a halt, they also changed content consumption patterns as people remained at home, streaming video to their personal devices. Then, AI emerged as an apparent rival to human creators — which was followed by a lengthy writers’ strike, changing production patterns as the streaming boom fizzled out, and, most recently, devastating Los Angeles wildfires that massively disrupted the industry. The combination of these various forces has altered the entertainment landscape, probably permanently, and have left many struggling to adjust.

As co-founders of a nonprofit that mentors creatives, we’ve weathered these storms, advising writers as they’ve adjusted to new reality after new reality. Despite the breakneck pace of change, we’ve remained resolutely optimistic about the future of the story art, an enduring form of creative expression. We have always told stories to make sense of our experience — and our greatest stories, from Homer’s epics to Beowulf to Shakespeare’s plays, have remained cultural touchstones for centuries, even millennia. Story is woven so deeply into the fabric of human experience that, as neuroscience continues to demonstrate, our brains are wired to be receptive to it. The particular forms of storytelling may evolve, as they always have — but storytelling is not going away.

When our writers ask for guidance in navigating an unpredictable, uncharted marketplace for new content, we help them in practical ways to rework their writing samples, hone their pitches, or reboot their story concepts. And we routinely give one piece of advice that some find counterintuitive — put away your phone, at least while working. Many younger writers often push back, trained to believe that a phone, and the world of connectivity and self-promotion it enables, are vital to success in a rapidly evolving industry. FOMO, or the fear of missing out, is strong. Nobody wants to miss a potentially career-changing call or text, or feel “out of the loop.”

But we do ask writers to consider what their phones may be doing to their focus. Younger people, often on their phones late in the evening and during the night, are sleeping less than ever before, and undersleeping can lower IQ by up to 10 points. Multitasking can lower IQ by a similar amount. So, if you’re already sleep-deprived while “writing,” and on top of that you have 25 browser tabs open in the background and notifications pinging your phone or smartwatch, your focus is radically compromised.

The video above from the Wall Street Journal shows how our electronic devices help to keep two areas of our brain — the parietal cortex, which responds to distractions, and the frontal cortex, which aims to keep us focused — in almost continual conflict. As it explains, the frontal cortex’s power to focus can become exhausted as the parietal cortex processes thousands of micro-decisions or distractions each day. This leaves us feeling cumulatively overwhelmed and ground down. Even checking email frequently through the work day can leave us feeling stressed and mentally saturated. Computer scientist and author Cal Newport, in his book A World Without Email, cites a study carried out by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, who monitored 40 employees at a large company over 12 workdays. On average, the employees checked their email 77 times per day—with one person checking over 400 times daily. The average was once every six minutes during the work day, with the heaviest user checking almost once per minute.

It is admittedly the case that many of today’s professionals today “work” by flipping from device to device, emailing, texting, video conferencing, Slacking, doing social media. Such compulsive multitaskers routinely describe themselves as “slammed” — but how much of this is actual work, and how much is performative busyness? Tellingly, many business leaders move at a slower, more deliberate pace. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff practices Zen meditation and routinely disconnects from the Internet. Legendary investor Warren Buffett only recently obtained an iPhone — set up personally for him by Tim Cook, with limited functionality — and Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett’s $1.1 trillion company, has not changed its website design in over 25 years. Tom Patterson, CEO of men’s clothing company Tommy John, checks his email just twice a day.

Some enlightened executives have come to appreciate the enormous toll that ceaseless interruptions take on focus — but what an “always on” culture does to people’s creative intelligence is even more insidious and damaging, leaving our minds no longer free to wander, daydream, or explore ideas. Reaching for our devices at the slightest onset of boredom or emotional discomfort, we lose access to those modes of thought that previously allowed creatives to deeply immerse themselves in ideas and imaginative worlds. We deny ourselves what Jennifer Egan most values — the access to our subconscious and the ideas that we can unlock there through deep thinking and prolonged longhand writing — in favor of skimming along the surface of things, scrolling through always-replenishing social media feeds, and tapping responses into half a dozen chat apps. Psychotherapists suggest that people may use devices as they abuse substances, to block out difficult memories or complex emotions — and yet sometimes those very memories and emotions are the cornerstones of our art.

Few would deny that smartphones can be contextually useful. Banking apps let us transfer funds and pay bills with ease. GPS lets us comfortably navigate an unfamiliar area. Two-factor authentication keeps personal information safe from hackers. We have music and informative podcasts at our fingertips. But here’s the rub: the more we use our devices, the more we habituate ourselves to using them. Over time, we rewire our brains and even our muscle memory, laying down neural pathways that accustom us to repeatedly and compulsively check our phones even when we have no useful task to perform. One recent survey found that Americans check their phones 144 times a day — an average of once every six minutes during waking hours. And this continuous presence of the phone, never more than a few minutes from our minds, deeply affects our focus and creativity.

So-called multitasking (which is more accurately task switching) significantly impairs memory and concentration. Talking on a hands-free device while driving impairs concentration on the road to a similar level as driving drunk. Predictably, receiving notifications on a phone while performing routine tasks made participants in a study perform worse than those who were not distracted — but, more dramatically, marketing professor Adrian Ward at the University of Texas at Austin found that study participants experienced reduced focus, memory, and cognition when a phone was placed on the table in front of them, even when that phone was powered off. Our brains, the neuroscience shows, are locked in that constant battle between trying to focus on the task at hand and scanning our digital environment constantly to keep up with a steady stream of work obligations, news, and social updates.

Many adopted digital lifestyles and devices wholesale before belatedly discovering that reading printed books and writing longhand can carry significant benefits. Students experience better comprehension and retention in studies when they read from a printed book rather than from a screen. Other studies found that university students understand and recall lectures better when they take notes by hand. However, some damaging decisions had already been made — US schools dropped cursive handwriting from the Common Core Standards in 2010, for instance, and widely adopted “ed tech” such as Chromebooks and iPads — meaning that we have taught a generation to regard typing on a keyboard or tapping on a phone as native, and handwriting alien. To this generation, Egan’s assertion that handwriting can help us go deeper into our subconscious minds makes little sense — many have never handwritten anything at length, either academically or socially. We are perhaps only now realizing the cost.

For an aspiring creative, whose livelihood depends on having and articulating original creative ideas, the sobering reality of what phones and other devices are doing to our imaginative and expressive capacity might force a stark choice. We have more than enough science by now to know that “writing” amid a forest of browser tabs and cacophony of pinging notifications only saps the focus and creativity that produces our best work. At best, we are working suboptimally, producing mediocre work instead of good work, or merely good work when we are capable of something great. When creatives attend writing retreats — typically hosted in a scenic locale where they can immerse themselves in peace, beauty, and nature — they often rave about the heightened creative drive they experience. But these opportunities, while valuable, are transitory. People return to their busy urban lives, resume their busy, connected tech habits, and that experience of harnessing their full creative capacity gradually recedes.

A minority of creatives are choosing a different route. Christopher Nolan does not use a smartphone and writes on a computer physically disconnected from the Internet. Novelist Jonathan Franzen stripped the wireless card out of his writing laptop and plugged up his Ethernet port with superglue, making it impossible for him to go online while working. Other authors, including Zadie Smith and New York Times bestselling crime writer Laura Lippman, have credited the program Freedom — which blocks access to distracting websites such as Facebook or YouTube — with helping them stay focused. Figures including Kate Beckinsale, Ed Sheeran, Vince Vaughan, and Talking Heads frontman David Byrne have voiced their distaste for smartphones, with some preferring 1990s-style flip phones.

Others are pushing back as well. In 2022, a group of Brooklyn teenagers rose to prominence after ditching their smartphones and adopting flip phones. Now in college, some of these young people have founded their own nonprofit, The Luddite Club, to encourage their peers to make similar shifts. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has raised global alarm about smartphones and social media with his recent book, The Anxious Generation, which documents their impact on the mental health of teenagers, particularly girls, who are experiencing unprecedented rates of anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation. Haidt urges parents not to give children smartphones until at least age 14 and keep them off social media until at least age 16 — and school districts and legislators are increasingly attempting to limit children's access accordingly.

During our years of mentoring creatives, I have become convinced that writers can can tap into their authentic creative selves only when they remain vitally connected to their immediate surroundings, other people, their audience, and their inner psyche. Ubiquitous Internet connectivity disrupts all these immediacies — sociologist Sherry Turkle notes that our devices now render us “forever elsewhere” rather than immediately present in our surroundings; she also suggests that people now exist in a state of "continual co-presence," essentially experiencing multiple realities simultaneously, such as when a teen is distractedly spending time with a parent while Snapchatting with her friend group.

The danger here is that nothing ever gets our full attention — indeed, Haidt has called our phones “experience blockers” that place a glowing screen between ourselves and our fundamental experience of the world. Having come of age in the pre-Internet age, I can remember conversations with friends that went on uninterrupted for hours, or reading a book all day, barely aware of the hours passing. And I can recall writing steadily for hours until it felt like I had shifted entire trains of thought from my mind to the page. But younger creatives—many of whom have only ever experienced an Internet-based or phone-based childhood and adolescence—risk never fully developing the social intelligence, observational acumen, or personal psychological depth that will enable them to tap fully into their full authentic selves. And that is a tragedy.

Most people, creatives included, can’t spend their lives in a cabin in the woods — but there are still practical steps that creatives should consider. While writing, leave your phone in another room and turn off the Wi-Fi. If possible, get a dedicated “air-gapped” writing computer that contains only essential writing software and never connects to the Internet. For those more determined, consider joining the growing dumbphone movement, comprised of people who, like the Luddite teens described above, reject smartphones in favor of flip phones. One company, Light Phone, even makes deliberately non-addictive phones with grayscale screens and limited functionality such as calling, texting, getting directions, and playing music and podcasts. The company, currently rolling out its Light Phone III, say that the phone is designed to be used as little as possible — and while its detractors ridicule the idea of paying hundreds of dollars for such a feature-limited device, its advocates ask how much it would be worth to get your life back.

Creatives could ask themselves a similar question — how much would it be worth to operate on a full night’s sleep? How much to be fully present in the moment, more attuned to your mind and ideas? We are gaining increasing neuroscientific insight into creativity — that precious process by which language and ideas form and bubble to the surface, sometimes in startling and surprising ways — and we are also coming to understand how we can block and numb that creativity through incessant distracted multitasking on digital devices.

I think back now on how many times I was told that my undergraduate alma mater lacked key resources or was underfunded — but I see now only an environment that was, at the time, rich in books, thought, and deep conversation. The absence of computers on campus wasn’t the problem we were told it was — from the hindsight of today, it was a significant benefit. It’s time creatives think critically about what technology has done to their focus, and begin to reclaim their human creativity and authenticity as the only feasible way to remain ahead of artificial intelligence. More about this in future posts.