Review: Bored and Brilliant

[Manoush Zomorodi. Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self. New York: Picador, 2017.]

Some time last year, the realization crystallized for me that I don't experience much direct loss of explicitly designated work time due to social media or other online activity, but it does tend to eat up rather a lot of my time that is not thus designated – it fills up lots of little corners, it shapes leisure, it offers possibilities and, in the inevitable way of such things, it takes away others. Now, I'm generally quite scornful of the moral panic that often surrounds the ways in which computers and smartphones have reshaped our lives. I was a somewhat slow adopter of Facebook back in the day – my eleventh anniversary of joining was last week – but I'm not bothered morally or practically by spending lots of time online. To others of my generation and older who grumble about youth today walking down the street with their face in their phone or using their device to remove themselves from a social situation, I generally retort that I did exactly the same things when I was young except with books (and still do now when I can get away with it, frankly). And if my time is reorganized because of devices compared to what it was 20 years ago, well, so what, that on its own is neither good nor bad, and generally speaking, said devices don't get in the way of me doing what I want to do.

Except.

Excpet they do, I noticed in my realization last year, get in the way of me staring off into space, either on its own or with a pen in my hand. I do that way less than I used to. And staring off into space outside of the bounds of explicitly designated work time is a pretty core activity for someone who is a writer and otherwise maker-of-things. This is a lack that I keenly feel.

Earlier this year, I read about this book: The subtitle "How spacing out can unlock your most productive and creative self" may signal enthusiastic buy-in (untempered by any critical perspective) to the cult of neoliberal self-help, but it also spoke to my concern about lack of time spent "spacing out." Last month, I bought the book.

This past week, I was feeling pretty lousy. Particularly early in the week, life was pulling me in lots of different directions, my anxiety levels were quite high, I had lots of external obligations, and I wasn't left with much time that I had much say over – I was busy, and I got done the things I needed to get done, but I managed to do hardly any work on the long-term writing projects that are what I really want most to be doing. When that happens, it always makes me miserable. And I returned to my realization of last year that my explicitly designated work time doesn't tend to suffer too much from the intrusion of online distraction (unless I'm otherwise in a bad headspace), but consumption of online media *does* take up rather a lot of my non-work time, energy, and attention. Which as far as I'm concerned is fine, in and of itself, and most of that time could not be magically transformed into prime work time anyway even if I wanted to go the all-work-and-no-play route, but...could I be using it differently, in ways that still fit with how that time is genuinely constrained, but that would leave me feeling better about things even in a week of high external demands? Might making time to stare into space instead of into my Twitter feed be part of that?

The author of *Bored and Brilliant* is a journalist who hosts an NPR radio show and podcast on technology issues called *Note to Self*. (I've never listened to it.) The book is based on a week-long experiment that they did with a sizeable group of listener-volunteers, giving them a different challenge each day that would alter and thereby make them more aware of their smartphone use. I think something like 20,000 listeners participated in that initial experiment, and the book builds from there. The author is very clear that this is not meant to be anti-tech and it is not meant to get people to stop using their smartphones, but to help people develop tools to be more aware of how they use their technology and more deliberate about making those choices. The science behind the subtitle is based on the fact that when we are "mind-wandering," we are using our brain differently than when we are engaged in some kind of concrete task, and time spent mind-wandering can be crucial to developing new ideas and engaging in figuring things out in our lives and in our work in creative (if not generally terribly directed) ways.

The parts of the book that were about being mindful of choices about time usage and about intervening in various ways into one's own practices felt useful and interesting, or at least a mix sufficiently rich in useful that it felt worth reading. I mean, worrying about how I spend my time has been one of my main preoccupations since I decided to experiment with being a writer twenty years ago, as the proportion of words devoted to exactly that concern in the 10 to 12 shelf-feet of filled notebooks in my office would make (boringly) clear. And as a source of new insights into that ongoing area of reflection, I'm glad I read this book. It prompted me to recognize ways in which my time flows, unthinking, towards screens that I wasn't previously aware of. It got me thinking in new ways about how I might want to engage more strategically with online media. And I think it will have some impacts on my use of devices and will perhaps, I hope, maybe, if I'm determined and lucky, help me win back some time for staring off into space. (And maybe a bit more time for reading books, as well.) There is occasionally some puritanism that appears in how the book talks about these things, but it wasn't present so strongly that I couldn't read things into what I think is a more useful frame of competing interests and desires – I don't like the narrative of excess corrected by restriction, in large part because so much of how I understood myself and the world in my early years was framed in those terms. I much prefer to recognize that I get X out of one pattern of choices and Y out of a different pattern and doesn't Y really meet my needs and desires more effectively?

Anyway. The practical stuff was useful to me, but I didn't love a lot of the explanation and grounding that the book provided. I mean, it's not badly written, and I think it makes skillful use of the sources that it cites. But what it can do is limited by its choice of sources.

And by that, I mean this: The book is written in a style of popular nonfiction clearly informed by the author's background in journalism. It largely cites studies (and authors of studies) that examine technology use through positivist experimental social, psychological, and sometimes medical science of various kinds, as well as people who are prominent in the tech industry and people who have written popular nonfiction about the impacts of technology on our lives. It does not cite very many people whose ways of making knowledge are grounded in the humanities or in social sciences that are other than postivist experimentalism. And I think that's a big weakness. Now, I'm definitely interested to know what experiments about technology show – I'm glad those are included. But citing *only* those kinds of sources means, for one thing, that it doesn't cite people who can talk about other ways that the shape of our lives have changed over the last 30 years, which means not talking about how neoliberal changes in the organization of work and leisure beyond just our smartphones may have a role in all of this.

Perhaps more seriously, it means that it doesn't bring in the voices of those who might be able to critically unpack the conventional narratives that we have available to us to talk about technological change. So even though the book makes clear that it is not meaning to be anti-tech, in drawing on the kinds of sources it draws on, it can't help but treat what-was-before as normative and what-is-now as implicitly deviant. The kinds of experiments this book draws on so heavily cannot help but make that kind of presumption in how they are designed, I think, and whatever *this* book's intention, a lot of the scholars and authors it cites situate what they do in the context of already-dominant narratives of the dangers of technology. And that means that, as often as not, the text ends up reinforcing moral panic-style readings of tech's impacts, even when I think the author genuinely doesn't mean to. More than that, it means that sometimes technology and/or individual fallible habits get blamed for particular outcomes, when maybe more of the blame should be placed on the social organization of our lives and workplaces and families and communities under capitalism. Also, I would love to have seen critical but generous engagement with first-person accounts from the older range of people who are young enough to have grown up in the smartphone era talking about how they navigate all of these things, especially marginalized (queer, racialized, disabled, etc.) youth who have creatively used tech in their struggle to survive in a world that doesn't want them to – I'm sure they have things to teach the rest of us, and perhaps ways to help us parse out different-and-possibly-a-problem from just different, which I don't think this book does very well at all.

I also look a bit askance at the ways in which this book treats so much of this as new. Sure, smartphones and social media mean that my obsessing about my time usage has different details than it did in 1998. But the basic questions about the life you want to live, the things you want to make, the experiences that you want to enjoy, the dynamics of self that pull in this direction and that, and the practices of self-fashioning that can cajole a reluctant self into the shape that you want it to take are no different now than then. At least not for me, anyway. It's not about my phone, or it's only a bit about my phone; it's mostly about me-in-the-world.

Anyway, given what this book sets out to do, and given where I'm reading it from, I suppose it's not surprising that I appreciated at least some of the tools and insights it has given me to think about how I use my time and how I might use it differently, and that I was simultaneously skeptical of its approach to social analysis.