Blog Post #6: Sam Anderson’s Complex Argument

In Sam Anderson’s piece “In Defense of Distraction,” Anderson’s main claim seems to be “… the problem of attention has migrated right into the center of our cultural attention.” In translation, the lack of attention people are providing has not only begun affecting the individual but almost the entire human population collectively. However, as you can see, Anderson’s writing style in this article is very complicated and can be more easily understood through summary and analysis. In my opinion, his writing style was also very negative, almost satirical at times, and then would suddenly switch to feeding us information that is relatively important to the article. This information would be thrown at us all in one paragraph with little other commentary from the author except to introduce the quote. Overall I don’t think this style of writing, for me at least, was what was needed to get his point across.

Anderson tries to complicate his argument that attention has reached a status of epidemic. Though I personally don’t fully understand the reasoning behind it, the complication could be to confuse the reader into agreeing or to show both side of the argument and then exploring the possibilities of both sides. The very first paragraph begins with a lot of run ons that just list things. Yes, these things are examples of what he is referring to (in this case Anderson is referring to all of the different kinds of “distractions” there are. For me this beginning paragraph set the mood for the whole piece; criticism mixed with dry humor. In my opinion he was being unnecessarily negative and it was almost irritating at times. On the first page of the piece alone he jumps between telling the reader a list of about twelve distractions that could keep the reader from reading the piece, telling them to focus specifically on not focussing on the picture on the page, listing the different “distractions” we have created over time, and telling us Herbert Simon’s wisdom on the topic (attention is in fact being absorbed by information). Keep in mind that was the first page and the piece is 13 pages. He then begins explaining how every technological advance is supposedly linked to some apocalyptic catastrophe, statistics on technological advances, and then discussed his interview with David Meyer. The many different focuses has made it difficult to develop understand exactly what Anderson is really trying to get at.