Avoiding Internal Typewriter Distractions - YouTube<br /> by [[Joe Van Cleave]] <br /> accessed on 2025-08-28T11:08:56
Typewriter distractions<br /> - troublesome mechanical issues<br /> - need for finger strength - poor imprint
Well-tuned standard typewriters are excellent for minimizing distractions, especially internal ones.
Joe Van Cleave thinks the 5TE Smith-Corona electric typewriters are the best of their class.
Large horizontally oriented typewriter mats can be useful in that they create a buffer zone that covers the carriage movement and helps to prevent one from accidentally putting their beverages in the way of the carriage.
The State of the Culture, 2024<br /> by [[Ted Gioia]]<br /> accessed on 2025-08-18T08:53:09
The fastest growing sector of the culture economy is distraction.
Local writers host ‘typewriter revivals’ by [[Algernon D'Ammassa Las Cruces Bulletin]]
trans-financial capital. Now we cannot regulate market anymore, and that's why everybody is so frustrated with politics because it doesn't matter whether you vote left or right. The power is not there. The power is in the power of capital to move around and to basically punish you if you do anything that goes against their interest.
for - adjacency - trans-financial capital - political polarization - powerlessness of two party politics - culture wars distraction - Yanis Varoufakis - SOURCE - Youtube Ma Earth channel interview - Devcon 2024 - Cosmo Local Commoning with Web 3 - Michel Bauwens - 2025, Jan 2
Step Back In Time At The Mesa Typewriter Exchange by [[Phil Latzman]]
Typewriters? In 2024? Are You Nuts? by Jesse M. Slater for [[Raconteur Press]]
A short, but relatively solid typewriter 101 story for someone looking for a distraction-free writing machine. Certainly not completist, but enough to get your toes wet.
Slater uses his typewriter for a first draft, then edits the second draft as he re-types it into his computer to have a digital copy for further editing and distribution.
The benefits of using a typewriter to write novels and poetry. by [[Classic Typewriter]]
08:00 New information gives dopamine. Distraction arises from too many information that is goal irrelevant.
1:05:00 going to dark places, not media & technology
when you when you sort of take a step back and look at that part of the distraction and the 00:14:47 chaos that Trump and these GOP trolls deliver it's it's a wonderful Boon for the oil and gas industry and the Koch brothers and the guys that fund these campaigns and the federal Federalist 00:14:59 Society you know that's owning the Supreme Court they want to keep doing business as usual and the easiest way to do that is to have this big chaotic GOP that ignores climate change and to play 00:15:11 into what they want is the mainstream media not focusing more on climate change let alone making those two connections and a lot of mainstream media is scared to make that connection because oil companies are paying the bills 00:15:23 and CNN and every other network
05:00 consumption as running away from suffering
For example, one study at the Carnegie Mellon University’s human computer interaction lab took 136 students and got them to sit a test. Some of them had to have their phones switched off, and others had their phones on and received intermittent text messages. The students who received messages performed, on average, 20% worse. It seems to me that almost all of us are currently losing that 20% of our brainpower, almost all the time. Miller told me that as a result we now live in “a perfect storm of cognitive degradation”.
20% performance loss due to context switching. I would love to study the original research on this…
We also know that theaverage length of TV soundbites has steadily declined over the lastseveral decades (Fehrmann, 2011). During the U.S. presidentialelection in 1968, the average soundbite — that is, any footage of acandidate speaking uninterrupted — was still a little more than 40seconds, but that had fallen to less than 10 seconds at the end of the80s (Hallin 1994) and 7.8 seconds in 2000 (Lichter, 2001). The lastelection has certainly not reversed the trend. Whether that meansthat the media adjust to our decreasing attention span or is causingthe trend is not easy to say.[17]
Ryfe and Kemmelmeier not only show that this development goes much further back into the past and first appeared in newspapers (the quotes of politicians got almost halved between 1892 and 1968), but also posed the question if this can maybe also be seen as a form of increased professionalism of the media as they do not just let politicians talk as they wish (Ryfe and Kemmelmeier 2011). Craig Fehrman also pointed out the irony in the reception of this rather nuanced study – it was itself reduced to a soundbite in the media (Fehrman 2011).
Soundbites have decreased in length over time.
What effects are driving this? What are the knock on effects? What effect does this have on the ability for doubletalk to take hold? Is it easier for doubletalk and additional meanings to attach to soundbites when they're shorter? (It would seem so.) At what point to they hit a minimum?
What is the effect of potential memes which hold additional meaning of driving this soundbite culture?
Example: "Lock her up" as a soundbite with memetic meaning from the Trump 2016 campaign in reference to Hilary Clinton.
“focus mode,”
The idea of a "focus mode" or "distraction free mode" is exactly the wrong framing for writing. You don't want to focus on the nothing and emptiness of a page or a screen. You want to start by focusing on an idea and preferably many ideas. Do this first and then proceed from there.
Even so, new inventions have always influenced literary production, as Friedrich Nietzsche, who struggled with a semi-spherical typewriter, once lyrically observed: “The writing ball is a thing like me: made of / iron / yet easily twisted on journeys.”
Probably overbearing, but this is also the exact sort of thing a writer faced with a blank page is apt to focus on as they stare at the type ball in front of them. Their focus isn't on the work its on the thing immediately in front of them that isn't working for them.
I was suddenly deluged with ads for “the world’s thinnest tablet,” which promised not only to replace pen and paper but to help you “Get Your Brain Back.” The company’s Lovecraftian promotional ad, which has racked up nearly three million views, begins with a hissing demon-child clinging to her iPad and proceeds through an animated hellscape complete with attention-sucking brain tubes and notifications circling like sharks. The narrator quavers an ominous warning: “We have to modify technology, or else it will modify us.”
Given the diversions of modern digital life, perhaps the best way to do one's writing is to do it at the moment of reading the actual references. Often while reading, one isn't as apt to have their attention diverted by the vagaries of life, instead they are focused on the thing at hand. It is while one has this focused attention that they should let their note taking practice while reading take over.
Even if you are distracted, you can at least maintain focus on a single line of text and your thoughts related to it and write them down in either a summary sentence or with a few related ideas which are sparked by the initial idea.
(This note is such an example.)
Then one can start and complete a small idea at a time and then letting them build over time and space, then recollect them to create a piece which then doesn't need to be written and painfully created, but which may only need an outline structure and some final polish and editing.
PrameelaApr. 15, S. E., 2021, & Pm, 2:00. (2021, April 15). As a Ph.D. student, sharing my perspective on social media felt scary—But it’s worth it. Science | AAAS. https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2021/04/phd-student-sharing-my-perspective-social-media-felt-scary-it-s-worth-it
Poland, G. A., & Jacobson, R. M. (2011, January 12). The Age-Old Struggle against the Antivaccinationists (world) [N-perspective]. Http://Dx.Doi.Org/10.1056/NEJMp1010594; Massachusetts Medical Society. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMp1010594
Usher, E., Golding, J. M., Han, J., Griffiths, C. S., McGavran, M. B., Brown, C. S., Sheehan, E. A. (2020). Psychology Students’ Motivation and Learning in Response to the Shift to Remote Instruction During COVID-19. [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. 10.31234/osf.io/xwhpm
drain more of our mental resources while we are reading
In the abstract, the study cited points to "dual-task effects of fulfilling the assignment and working with the computer resulting in a higher cognitive workload".
Although this load may decrease with people getting more and more familiar with computers (and computers getting more and more intuitive), it is also the case that more distractors are available too.
This reminds me of a webinar hosted by Hypothesis in which Amanda Licastro mentioned Cathy Davidson's book "Now you see it" to talk about "Productive Multitasking". In the view that Amanda presented (at least what I understood of what she said), multitasking and distractions are unavoidable, but we can canalize them productively through web annotation, for example -instead of switching to Facebook and disconnect from what we were reading.
Is internet freedom a tool for democracy or authoritarianism?
I chose this article because its topic speaks to our time. Also, this article has a lot of great links out just in case you want to learn more about the topics the authors speak of.
meditation in the classroom
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00805/full
This study conducted by four psychologists of three different Italian Universities shows the effects of mindfulness meditation on 7 and 8 year olds in Italian primary school. Here's what they say:
we found a specific positive effect of the mindfulness-meditation training in reducing attention problems and also positive effects of both trainings in reducing children’s internalizing problems. However, subjectively, no child in either group reported less depressive symptoms after the trainings. The findings were interpreted as suggestive of a positive effect of mindfulness-meditation on several children’s psychological well-being dimensions and were also discussed in light of the discrepancy between teacher and children’s reports.
The study was shown to, "improve children's cognitive, emotional, and social abilities...", particularly with children who had a healthy mental state.
"awareness test"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahg6qcgoay4
http://www.chabris.com/Simons1999.pdf
This is the video of the test that was described, along with the essay ‘Gorillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events’ describing the phenomenon, written by two Harvard psychology researchers David Simon and Christopher Charibus. When the viewers focus on the white team passing the basketball, they experience both change blindness and inattentional blindness. They define change blindness as the lack of detection of large changes in objects or scenes and inattentional blindness as paying so little attention to an object that you cease to notice it entirely.
Their conclusion is that, “we perceive and remember only those objects and details that receive focused attention.”, and without us committing our sustained focused attention on a specific object or event (like looking for a moonwalking gorilla in the middle of a basketball game), then we fail to register it entirely.
This demonstrates the incredible power of distraction. When we are distracted, not only do we find it more difficult to quickly switch back to the task we were doing previously, but by severing our sustained focus on something to check the new notification on our iPhone, we potentially miss really obvious connections. All the more reason to “pay attention to attention”, as Rheingold says.
When you are online, how often do you control your own focus-and how frequently do you allow it to be captured by peripheral stimuli?
As Rheingold points out in the paragraph below, some distraction is ingrained in evolutionary human instinct, like, "jumping at a loud noise or applying the brakes at the sight of a dog in the road...". But this distraction is not what he describes as 'peripheral stimuli'. This stimulus is rooted not in productivity nor rest, but in distraction. A cell phone buzz from a Twitter like or a SnapChat eagerly waiting to be responded to, is a constant sap on our attention.
As he points out later, the human brain can only hold seven (give or take two) thoughts at one time. The near-constant presence of our smartphones and digital devices represent distraction that disrupts our focus on productive tasks. Even as I type this annotation, I'm also thinking about the playlist I'm listening to on Spotify and the three new notifications from GroupMe awaiting my attention. Rheingold takes the view that a smartphone is an incredibly powerful and useful tool, but just like any tool, there's a proper way to use it optimally. This optimization of digital tools includes not just the notification settings of the actual device to manage distraction, but also human agency. Putting your device in another room, or turning it off for an hour is one way we can improve our attention. Mindfulness and equipping a digital mindset is another. Rheingold's overarching goal in 'Net Smart' is to acknowledge the benefits of the Internet age and improve our digital lives without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
“Almost any experience is improved by paying full attention to it,” Ms. McGonigal said. “Attention is one way your brain decides, ‘Is this interesting? Is this worthwhile? Is this fun?’ ”It’s the reason television shows we tweet through feel tiresome and books we pick up and put down and pick up again never seem to end. The more we allow ourselves to be distracted from a particular activity, the more we feel the need to be distracted. Paying attention pays dividends
RAJ: The delight of Life is the signal which indicates the successful completion or Awakening in individual thought. This is because it indicates the amalgamation or connection of the Alpha and Omega—the inside and the outside—the spiritual and material—the Fourth Dimension with the first three as Conscious Experience. I know that this is very difficult for you to put up with, because you feel there are more pressing needs, but if you will bear with me a little longer, it will be worth your while.
Awakening is complete when you delight in Life. Delight indicates union of spiritual and material, the inside and outside, the 3D and 4D.
Paul finds it very hard to accept this, he is distracted by his present financial challenges.
Isn't this (focus on 3dRef) what keeps us bound to the illusion?