Right when you said "idiot box" was when I trailed off into my own idiot box. Because I could relate to that and it brought back memories. Totally beyond my control. Just happened.
The moment I lost focus was actually the moment I focused more, yet that was several prior moments processed in an instant. So, there's plenty of concentrated time to be found in those moments of losing concentration.
That's interesting.
Everything else was flow, where the mind is hopping word to word. While being fed the information, there's not much focus involved. Just following the rhythm, doing what we're trained to do, when we read. All we're doing is building a picture in our minds, one word at a time. If you lose your place, it's still there.
And I doubt this entire episode would stand out at some point in the future, when this all happens again. So was this truly worth my time?
I'll say yes.
Yes, this is interesting - because while the mind wanders just as often, it wanders on a kind of backbone of inspiration. Scrolling Instagram etc, it just wanders, aimlessly, generating little coherent, nor actionable. I think there is a reason that the commenting on social media is so lame, and it comes down to the content itself, and the way people consume the content.
Not much stands out at the time it was consumed, but I do think that reading an article has more chance of making an impact on the memory, or driving a thought that leads somewhere, because it gives the time to think a little. That constant scroll doesn't come with the same level of thought involved, if any at all. And, with such low investment to consume, why comment at all?
Like window shopping with empty pockets. Start talking to the products and people will think you're weird.
If something is eye-catching and one does leave a response, another comes along to ridicule how much time was spent writing a comment, or something along those lines. I can't point to any studies but I picked something up along the way about how often intelligent individuals become targets on social media, due to their natural behavior, and tend to shy away from participating.
The constant scroll you speak of doesn't build one picture. Barrage of stimuli.
The act of reading is a constant, mindless scroll, forming one picture, or several pictures that belong together. Collage of stimuli.
At the end of the day, those platforms make a lot of money, by design, off the minds of people in a trance. If they stop to think, they're not window shopping.