BROMER | Distraction’s a Good Thing? You Must Be on Krac(auer)

By SAM BROMER

For most college students, distraction is a temptation to be avoided at all costs. We turn off our phones; we [dis]connect; we silently whisper to ourselves in Olin to stop fucking browsing Facebook and people look over concerned, and we apologize; we silently pray that @skullmandible’s series of tweets analyzing the aesthetics of every single Goosebumps book cover ever will become less addictive (but they don’t). But what if distraction could be not only a good thing, but even downright revolutionary? Siegfried Kracauer — or, according to my very accurate autocorrect, ‘Cracker’ — believed that culturally induced distraction had just such a potential. Trained as an engineer and an architect, the German writer, journalist and cultural critic was an astute observer of the everyday.