I've worked on several different kinds of projects recently that have become almost addictive. In working on these projects, getting to the point of having a finished product has been the result of hours of thinking, rethinking, and "tinkering".
Two of the most recent projects have been using iMovie to make a movie about Nova Scotia and making a Music Concrete project using Audacity. In each project, at first there is a learning period where time is spent trying to navigate the program and to see how it works. There is plenty of trial and error during this period. It is a time of experimentation and intent thought where frustration is eventually replaced with excitement over small successes. Frustration makes me even more determined to figure out how to get the results I want. Fortunately, in the programs I've been using it has been easy to go back and restore my work if the results are not what I intended (which happens a lot!) And, with the Music Concrete project it has been very helpful to save the project under different names if I'm not sure which version of my project I like the best. I can always open a former version and modify it. There are plenty of surprises during the experimentation period, some of which are very useful.
As I get more familiar with how the program works, I feel more competent and that is when the project becomes most addictive. Viewing and listening to the project over and over and making changes, sometimes very slight ones, become a seemingly endless pursuit. I find myself enjoying the feeling of being engrossed in the process. It seems as if only ten or fifteen minutes have elapsed, but when I look at the clock several hours have flown by. It is as if time has been suspended. I often realize, when I have reached this stage of competence, that there is an easy and efficient way to do something that I spent a lot of time on. (For example, when I was adding music to my movie, I realized that I could have used the manual fade in/fade out for each track I included instead of working on trimming the clips to start and end in exact places. After trimming the clips for timing, I used the fade in/out features and got the results I wanted.)
I am conscious of the fact that my projects will be viewed by others once I have uploaded them to my website.
I'd like to make an analogy between the addictive nature of using technology and the life of a musician. When I start working on a new piece of music, especially one in a style that is less familiar, there is a learning period during which I'm navigating through the music and experimenting. Deciding on the mood, character, and sound I want to project take time and mental focus. Fingerings and bowings change, I revise, sometimes revisiting former versions. Once a level of competence has been reached, the practice becomes more sophisticated with even more experimentation as the piece is shaped and brought to a place where it is ready to perform. I lose myself in the music and time is suspended.
I am conscious of the audience that will eventually view and hear my performance.
Csikszentmihalyi [1991] describes the state of being engrossed in one's activity as "flow". A state of flow is attainable when a balance exists between the challenge of a task and one's skill level. If the task is too easy for the individual, boredom results. If the task is too difficult, then a person becomes anxious and frustrated. Obsession with a technology project and making music are activities in which one can lose the feeling of time elapsing. In both pursuits, one can enter the state of flow that Csikszentmihalyi describes when competence and the challenge are in balance - that is when the addiction of the process is at it's height.
See the following source for more information on flow:
Cszikszentmihaly, M. 1991. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper & Row.
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