I have been holed up in my bunker of an office for the last 36 hours trying desperately to complete a dissertation based on Action Research findings and learnings and it is breaking my heart. I just can’t seem to get into it – I have collated all the data into meaningful info, I know what I want to say but I physically just can’t seem to get it down on screen.
I have checked the same football website at least 12 times this morning, it’s not as if its a transfer window, nothing happens that quickly in football, I know this but I compulsively keep opening up the browser tab.
I used to be able to do this, set out a plan for writing a document over 10,000 words and more or less stick to it and even have a nice reflection period at the end to spruce it up before feeling that immense satisfaction of physically or digitally submitting.
Over the weekend I tried all manner of tactics so I could just get the bleeding report done;
I plugged out the DSL connection from the root. I reasoned I needed to check my Gmail for a file so it definitely had to come back online. Number of Gmail searches done since plugging back in? – none
I installed a productivity metre on my browser just to see how unproductive I am – which just started a mad cycle of despair where I would try to beat how unproductive I was hour on hour. I am convinced StumbleUpon is the morphine of the digital age. Really great when used correctly but in instances like mine, I am just ‘shooting-up’ useless, non-relevant stuff through my eye sockets into my all to eager distraction-riddled brain. Why do I need to know that the ancient Greeks used the term ‘Celts’ to denote all foreigners not just a particular breed of people… but I have still haven’t scribbled anything of relevance in anger yet.
I went to the room in the house that can’t possibly get broadband and ended up playing solitaire. Solitaire! Solitaire! Solitaire is for mad people who talk to their cats, not for a guy who is supposed to be writing a dissertation on SME Management Techniques.
As I lurch from despair to mild insanity (I actually started to talk to myself in the fourth person – “we should be really getting worried now”, “we are not going to get anything done if you keep looking at dubious videos staring ex-footballers” ) I realise that this is probably a symptom of the age we are in.
There has been numerous debates rumbling on over the last few years about the Web’s propensity to rob us of our concentration. In a recent post “Is Facebook Geared to Dullards?” (a bit harsh I thought), Nick Carr a proponent of deep thought and reflection reported low users of social networks “possess an intrinsic motivation to think, having a natural motivation to seek knowledge,” and those heavy users of social networks “don’t like to grapple with complexity and tend to content themselves with superficial assessments, particularly when faced with difficult intellectual challenges.”
Another study carried out by University of Limerick researcher Eoin Whelan on his first-year undergraduate class indicated that the use or misuse of the internet was eroding critical thinking and analytical skills. Two thirds of the student submissions were based solely on information located on the first page of Google when keywords from the assignment were entered into the search engine. Students seem to conclude that the information does not exist anywhere else.
Now this isn’t the problem I face, I have the research done, I have the narrative in my head, I just can’t get it down in a usable format. As I looked at every possible way to avoid blaming myself for this ‘affliction’, I thought maybe it’s an Irish thing. We are so used to conversing and talking things out that maybe we are not natural scribes but then I came across a podcast from Newstalk about Brendan Behan who in my head was a feckless raconteur who would scribble out couplets of brilliance on the nearest fag box or beer mat and put it all together to magically create long lasting renowned classics. But no, he was pretty disciplined. He would get out of bed at 7 and work until 12 and then head out on the town.
This just left me more perplexed so I decided to write a post on it so as to appear as if I’m being productive even though the ‘Dissertation Monkey’ is practically caving my head in with big thumps of guilt. Right, now thats out of my system, I’m off to categorise my CD collection alphabetically first, then by genre and year.It has to be done!
I have been holed up in my bunker of an office for the last 36 hours trying desperately to complete a dissertation based on Action Research findings and learnings and it is breaking my heart. I just can’t seem to get into it – I have collated all the data into meaningful info, I know what I want to say but I physically just can’t seem to get it down on screen.
Ethan Cleary's Homepage 