Dear Amritsar,
I never thought I had a problem with attention. I mean, I read Harry Potter and the Endless Adventure, all 3,278 pages of it…except for the…less well written bits…which, okay, made it more of a pamphlet than a proper novel. Still. I managed to watch all of Gravity without falling asleep – I mean, it was seven hours long, but it only felt like five to me. Piece of cake. …What?
Hmm…let’s just take it as given that I have a normal attention span.
Then, a month ago, I was reading my email at work when I got a message about the Flubber app for rotary phones; it takes any political argument and turns it into green goo which makes it fly off into space. Naturally, being a conscientious phone user (meaning I’ve already had phones hacked three times…this week), I searched message boards for user reviews of the app. They seemed mostly positive, but on one board somebody argued that if Justin Timberlake wasn’t President, we wouldn’t need such apps. Justin Timberlake was President? He barely registered on my radar as an actor! Naturally, I had to check my news feeds to see if this was true. And, almost as naturally, when I came across it I had to click on the link for the Chicken Scratcher Diet…
Before I knew what had happened, everybody was closing their computers and going home. Three hours had passed! Three hours of my life that I would never get back! Worse! Three hours that I would have to stay in the office finishing the work that I should have been doing! I sent myself to bed without any supper that evening to teach myself a lesson.
Unfortunately, it didn’t take. A couple of days later, I lost two hours to a combination Star Blap: The Battle for a Visually Coherent Galactic Adventure app for my phone, images from a crocheted tribute to Slim Pickens and a fascinating discussion on the ontological necessity of acorns. Soon after that, I lost four hours to a discussion on a generic mommy blog (called A Mommy Blog) of non-lethal ways to stop a baby from crying, which, through a chain of links that I can no longer recreate, ended with a behind the scenes video on the making of the Star Blap: The Battle for a Visually Coherent Galactic Adventure app. Just the other day, I woke up, went to my computer, and didn’t get off it until I went back to sleep. I’m afraid to look at my browser history to see what fascinated me so.
This has gotten completely out of control. So, I have to ask: where do all of my missing hours go?
Oscar Pantaloons
Hey, Babe,
This is a matter of no small debate among cosmologists, cosmetologists and reindeer herders. No large debate, either, for that matter. Nobody seems to want to debate it at any length, if truth be told. That doesn’t mean that we can’t speculate on what they would be saying if they did deign to discuss it amongst themselves.
Speculating is what newspaper columns were born to do, after all.
If you have a science fiction bent, your time is being stolen by aliens from another dimension because they’re running out of time of their own. If you have a political bent, your time is being stolen by the government in order to have more time to perfect the military procurement process. If you have a strange bent, your time is being stolen by fairies in order to weave a shawl for their queen. If these answers don’t do it for you, feel free to speculate on an answer of your own.
I cannot help but, feel, however, that what you really want to know is: what can I do about this? Well. Have you ever heard of a computer programme called Mind Your Business, Oscar!?
Okay, strictly speaking, MYBO! was created for children with attention deficit disorder. That’s why they didn’t sweat the unfortunate acronym. So to speak. It was named after a turtle in an unpublished Dr. Seuss book. Were you named after a turtle in an unpublished Dr. Seuss book? If not, the fact that you share a name with the programme is a complete coincidence. Unless – well, I can speculate on that issue in my free time.
When you perambulate beyond preset parameters on your ‘puter, the programme coos message like: “Are you sure you want to do that? Noooooo. No, you don’t want to do that, do you?” and “No, sweetums, mommy doesn’t want you to do that!” and “Bad! Bad, baby! There will be no supper for you tonight!” The point is not to actually withhold nourishment from the user (which wouldn’t be very effective, in your case, in any case); the point is to shame the user into controlling their online behaviour.
Universal Tactile Nightmares, creators of MYBO!, claim that it has proven effective 79 per cent of the time in trials. Never underestimate the power of shame.
Send your relationship problems to the Alternate Reality News Service’s sex, love and technology columnist at questions@lespagesauxfolles.ca. Amritsar Al-Falloudjianapour is not a trained therapist, but she does know a lot of stuff. AMRITSAR SAYS: Relax. A Web spider is a computer programme that travels the Internet collecting information for indexes like Google. Web spiders cannot enter your ears and lay eggs in your brain. Unless, I suppose, you are an AI that lives in virtual reality, in which case, a little extra insurance never hurts.