Did your phone steal your focus?

Where is my mind?
 
See, I don’t know about you, but I feel like I used to be able to focus on one thing for hours on end, without my thoughts snaking off to other stuff.

Okay, maybe not hours on end, but at least for ten goddamn minutes.

One preoccupation shared by my novels Ghoster and The Last Days Of Jack Sparks is this: what has the internet done to our brains? I love the online world and yet I also fear its power. I fear its ability to warp, reshape or downright damage our puny human grey matter. I fear its potential to make dopamine slaves of us all.

During the mid-to-late Nineties, I was living in London and had a fun Saturday routine. This routine, as you may be able to tell, probably developed when I was ‘in-between girlfriends’.

I would get on the tube to East Ham, then head to the marvellous Who Shop there. I would buy a couple of back issues of Doctor Who Magazine, and possibly some other stuff, usually including a VHS tape, then head off to some café or other for lunch. And over lunch, I would read those magazines from cover to cover, with few or no distractions going on in my head.

Happily, The Who Shop still exists! I must return, for a heady dose of nostalgia. This week, though, I did recreate some of my old routine. It wasn’t a Saturday and I wasn’t in East Ham, but I am ‘between girlfriends’, so at least something remained constant. While visiting Brighton’s wonderful indoor retro market Snooper’s Paradise, I found a whole load of back issues of Doctor Who Magazine for £1 each. And I thought, “Ah, let’s try the whole Who Shop/lunch thing of yesteryear! How many issues will I need for lunch?”

Seeing as DWM was a slimmer mag back then, I bought two, picking issues with Cybermen on the cover, because I love Cybermen. Issues 97 and 98, for the curious. Then I headed a few doors along to the lovely vegetarian café Wai Kika Moo Kau, ordered an all-day breakfast and settled down to read Issue 97.

Here a timeline of how that went:

PAGE 3
This is the Contents page. I actually switch off my phone. Oh yes indeed, that’s how seriously I’m taking this leap back through time. I also manage to resist the ingrained urge to press my forefinger down on the page to click where it says Turn To Page 26. So far, so good.

P4-5
Letters page. One letter, from Jeffrey in North Carolina, is all about the evolution of the Cybermen and mentions their home planets Mondas and Telos. My brain pipes up with, “Hey, those look a bit like Monday and Tuesday, don’t they? Maybe there’s a days-of-the-week joke in that – ooh, maybe one you could tell on Twitter dot com!” So I stop reading and mentally go to work on the gag, while absent-mindedly sipping my tea. And now I’m switching my phone back on. I’m heading over to Twitter to post the joke. Pray for me.

P6-13
Truth be told, these pages aren’t incredibly gripping, but in any case I’d hardly know, because I’m switching back to Twitter to (a) see if anyone found the Hilarious Cybermen Planet Joke hilarious; and (b) adding a second pun-based joke-tweet to the mix, just for good measure. Sweet Jesus. ”BLOCKED AND REPORTED,” my fellow DWM writer Benjamin Cook tweets at me, and he’s almost certainly within his rights.

P14
This is the On Target page, all about the Target Books range. Cor, nice. I’m into this. As I start to read, I realise I should switch my phone off and keep it off. However, my brunch hasn’t arrived yet and I want to take a photo of it. I have no photos of any of the ‘Who Shop lunches’ I ate in the mid-to-late Nineties and yet this photo inexplicably feels important. So the phone stays on.

P16-17
I literally miss an entire piece about the making of Revenge Of The Cybermen, because now I’m thinking about this piece I could write for this newsletter. “Ah yes,” I muse, “I could turn my lack of focus into the main article for this Sunday’s newsletter!” This does, at least, mean that I’m no longer concerned about what to write for the newsletter, but once again it also means I’m not reading this damn magazine properly.

P20-23
A Q&A with Colin Baker. Brunch arrives and so I take the photo for this piece that my brain is now somewhat preoccupied with dreaming up. Suddenly I’m aware that I should try and remember the process of reading the magazine and the distractions that struck me. So instead of simply enjoying my lunch and reading a magazine, I’m now the star of my own documentary. A Tinder notification certainly does nothing to improve my focus.

P26-29
An interview with Who director Michael Briant. I’m annoyed with myself by this point, and so turn the phone off again. Finally, I am eating a nice lunch while reading a magazine. Why does this somehow feel like an achievement? I still find it hard to fully focus, though, because I’ve had quite a testing week on a personal level. Twenty years ago, it’s arguable that I probably had fewer distracting issues to think about and also less work stuff, because I was ‘just’ a rock journalist. Oh, for those simpler days. Still, I do read this Briant interview in full and to the end. It’s a good one, because the man helmed great stories like Robots Of Death.

P35-38
Another relatively in-depth piece about whether Doctor Who is unsuitable for children. Right up my alley! And I do read this… while being slightly distracted by the time, because I need to be back home working in about half an hour.

And that’s the end of the magazine. Turns out I didn’t need two issues after all, thanks to all the online dicking around. So I switch the phone back on, obviously, and cycle through the loop of email, text, WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and, yes, Tinder, before paying my bill and heading home.

Yeah, that was pretty far removed from my simple experience of the mid-to-late Nineties, back when I had a phone that may not even have been capable of text messages! Back in those days, the odd phone call might have interrupted my reading, but that would have been about it.

So, here’s the real question. Which version of the ‘Who Shop magazine café’ experience was better? I feel like I enjoyed it more back then… but did I really? As Doctor Who producer John Nathan-Turner once said, the memory cheats. Perhaps I felt lonely in that café in 1997. Disconnected from the world. While I do have a memory of overall contentment, I can’t remember for sure.

Social media certainly means never having to be alone – and there is a real, undeniable pleasure in being able to share what you’re doing with others, whether in a jokey tweet or an article for a newsletter. But there should also be pleasure in simply doing stuff for yourself, by yourself, only for yourself. If a tree falls in the forest… do you really have to tweet a picture or video of that event, in order to fully appreciate it? Me, I’d probably be happy to have not been crushed by a falling tree… but you can bet I’d probably write about the experience here, or perhaps make a YouTube video about the whole affair on a new channel called Jason Arnopp’s Terrifying Near-Death Experiences.

My novels may come across as damning indictments of social media and the online world in general, but really they’re explorations. Scary question marks. Cries for help, even.

Where are we going with all this hyper-connectivity – and wherever that place may be, will it be better than the place we came from?

Are we happier now? If not, then how exactly do we feel these days?

Where are our minds?

My novel Ghoster, which deals with some of these thoughts in a scary fictional way, is out now. 

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