The "Distracted consciousness" differs from the Marxist idea of "false consciousness" in as much as the individual suffering from this state of distraction is no longer fully aware of life around them: they have become a human doing, no longer a human being.
Excerpt taken from 'The Girl with No Mobile Phone', by author Tom Conrad.
“The girl with no mobile phone had never herself seen fit to buy a mobile phone (in all her life) – being not only against them as invaders of privacy, but moreover, viewing mobile phones as symbols of the wider “distracted consciousness”: a curse now plaguing mankind far and wide. In fact, the girl with no mobile phone constantly witnessed many of her peers fingering away (not the good sort of fingering, either), just another distracted soul startled by the desperateness of existence, looking to fill every single waking and terrifying moment of their life with some pointless textual distraction, instead of just confronting and embracing the stillness, just taking a moment to actually think, reflect and be a human being, not a human doing.”
Alternative use:
‘Like OMFG, dude had been playing GTA5 for five days straight before he got up, left his apartment and tried to jack a car by throwing a musical triangle at them.’
‘A musical triangle?’
‘Yeah the thing that goes ding.’
‘Shit, that dude is distracted.’
‘No shit, he's suffering from the distracted consciousness!’
“The girl with no mobile phone had never herself seen fit to buy a mobile phone (in all her life) – being not only against them as invaders of privacy, but moreover, viewing mobile phones as symbols of the wider “distracted consciousness”: a curse now plaguing mankind far and wide. In fact, the girl with no mobile phone constantly witnessed many of her peers fingering away (not the good sort of fingering, either), just another distracted soul startled by the desperateness of existence, looking to fill every single waking and terrifying moment of their life with some pointless textual distraction, instead of just confronting and embracing the stillness, just taking a moment to actually think, reflect and be a human being, not a human doing.”
Alternative use:
‘Like OMFG, dude had been playing GTA5 for five days straight before he got up, left his apartment and tried to jack a car by throwing a musical triangle at them.’
‘A musical triangle?’
‘Yeah the thing that goes ding.’
‘Shit, that dude is distracted.’
‘No shit, he's suffering from the distracted consciousness!’
by Tom Conrad October 8, 2013