A lot of noise about a lot of noise and distractions ...

I'm a liberal arts guy (German major, English and Philosophy minors) who works in IT, and has for ... wow, a quarter of a century.  I'm not a tech guy or a gadget guy, despite appearances.  I have a smart phone and I have a tablet which I use mostly for reading and the occasional work emergency.  I have a digital camera that I used for years, but only because my film camera got too old.

Mostly, I'm a problem solver, not an engineer.  I never had a GPS until it came built into my phone. I have a fitness app, but I very passively let it track things and hardly ever give it input.  We have a DVR, which is probably the smartest piece of technology in the house aside from our laptops, which we use for amassing way too many books, music, and random photos, most of which count as art.  The rest count as goofy humor.  Oh, and writing.  I'm finally making myself do most of my composition on computer, rather than longhand and then transcribing.  Even now, the most authentic or difficult things aren't real unless they pass through a pen first.

What else ...? Oh, right - our washer and dryer are stupid; our toaster, coffee maker, oven, refrigerator and toaster oven are stupid.  My old pickup is stupid and my wife's old-ish car is ... well, not very bright.  Thomas Jefferson said "That government is best that governs the least." I agree with Tom and say this about technology: "That technology is best that interferes the least."  The tools are for convenience and time savings, not an end in themselves.

Even with my antipathy toward omnipresent technology, toward a nascent "internet of things" I catch myself lured in. I sit down for thirty minutes of social media and wake up two hours later, still tweeting.  I search google for one thing in my research and stumble out of a labyrinth of related searches sometime after nightfall.  I watch one cat video and ... well, ok, I usually stop at one or two of those.  Our biggest issue is having the TV on.  We can watch 90% of any new release or rerun anytime and anywhere, but that doesn't mean we need to have it in the background everytime and everywhere.  We're doing better. Most evenings, the TV goes off by 9pm, if it was on, and we read and listen to music and even manage to chat.  

It's all around, even for us minimal/late adopters.  Now there are DVD players for all of our children in all of our cars (speaking collectively) and even WiFi and hotspots in selected models of cars, pleaseseeyourdealerforacompletelistofvehiclesandoptions.

When I'm having trouble writing, it's usually because I'm having trouble getting out into the woods or the desert in my head, out into a space where thoughts don't bump into texts and phone calls and tweets and responses to blog entries.  It's easy to say "Hmm ... I could look that up ..." and then I'm off on a wasted day.  That phrase is the quintessential gateway drug for me.  "But ... I just wanted to do a little research before I ..." actually managed to accomplish anything for the day.

What does help a lot is using the technology to avoid the technology.  On my tablet, I have, oh, I don't know, probably a thousand images from thirty photographers, artists, and sculptors.  When I start to chase gnats, they bring me back to what is big and what matters.  Same for the books on the tablet - they re-ground me in well-plowed and fecund fields.  Assuming I go to the one or the other, and not off to reddit/funny or a host of other distractions, I'm good.  They remind me of what I really want, which isn't an endless string of snacks, but a banquet.

So, mostly, all of that is noise about all the noise of daily lives.  But that's really my point, or part of it.  There's a lot of noise between the self and the silence, and it takes me, anyway, a while to work through.  It's always worth it when I get there, though.