THIS DISTRACTED GLOBE
“Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat in this distracted globe”
The ancient Persians invented horse blinders with the purpose of narrowing the horse’s field of vision to keep it focused on what is directly in front of it while limiting it’s exposure to the environment around them. This blocking of the periphery helped to prevent unpredictable distractions which could ‘spook’ even a mild-tempered horse in certain environments. This benefited the coach/carriage drivers and, ultimately, the bystanders.
It seems that we’re being driven (or should I say ridden) by Big Tech and their ability to implement those same blinders on us.
I like to draw similarities in the “verticalization” of our screens. We see in landscape. This provides context, scenery, settings. You can fit a wealth of subjects — animate and inanimate — into a horizontal frame. Vertical, on the other hand, is primarily advantageous to showing people.
When phone recording habits and content consumption habits tilted vertical, we also stopped noticing the scenery, stopped contextualizing as much, and it became all about the person, the performer, the influencer. We watch with blinders on.
As society scrolls endlessly in vertical-oriented feeds, we continue to spend a certain amount of time each day with these blinders on. We are distracted beings, a distracted society, and we lose the ability to think objectively about our surroundings as we bury ourselves deeper into these digital silos. (Please don’t ask me for resources, there are plenty at your fingertips.)
And thus, enters my vain attempt at addressing these themes through my skill-set. I bought the domain distractedglobe.com over 20 years ago in a young moment of self-proclaimed brilliance. I didn’t know what to do with it, but I knew I’d figure it out one day — that, or some wealthy startup or media mogul would pay me an absurd amount of money for the domain. Alas, I got to hold onto it and use it for the reasons I suspected as I saw the current trends develop so many years ago.
Distracted Globe is intended to be an editorial and creative offshoot of Going Home Pictures. While GHP produces branded content, commercial work, and client-driven stories, Distracted Globe is where we explore our own creative questions — through films, essays, and experiments — about media, technology, and modern distraction. This is the evergreen home for documentary short projects — two of which are presently in either pre- or post-production stages — and hopefully a growing platform for conversation about how we reclaim presence in a world of constant noise.
While I may not have the power to rip all the blinders off, I hope to remind audiences, “while memory holds a seat”, that so many lovely people and experiences exist beyond them.