RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – (Opinion) There is just no question that the technology that has made the smartphone ubiquitous has changed the world.
Whether the change is for better or worse is disputable. My own take is that there is some good news – all those apps that make life better, faster, safer, cheaper, and which our readers tell us they couldn’t live without — and plenty of not so good news – that we may be becoming enslaved by all this technology.
A woman riding with me in the elevator the other day was so attention-disrupted by her ‘pings’ that she missed her destination floor. No big deal for the lady in the elevator but it does make you think.
There is little evidence that many people are aware or care about the disruption to their attention that accompanies the ‘ping’ or other sounds that your smartphone emits to get your attention when a new message has arrived.
That’s exactly how smartphone purveyors make their money, getting as much of your attention for as long as possible. And we know it works.
Of the world’s almost eight billion people, experts estimate that over six and one-half billion or 80% have smartphones. In every elevator or other enclosed space, I’ve been in recently, that percentage seems more like 100%.
Somebody invented the smartphone, somebody created Tik Tok and social media. Now all these things are demanding our attention and distracting us.
One of my favorite podcasts, ‘The Ezra Kline Show’ recently presented an hour discussion about ‘attention’ arguably, says Kline, “the most precious resource we have – it’s the window through which we experience our lives.”
Kline and his guest, Johann Hari, author of a new book about attention, ‘Stolen Focus’, fear that the attention “window is fogging” and the program largely and fascinatingly explores why.
As Hari argues, “there’s this growing and strong evidence that we are in a serious crisis of attention — that affects the daily lived texture of your life in the short-term, the medium-term, the long-term, and it affects our whole society”.
He says that the average American office worker now focuses on only one task for only three minutes. And, according to him, “if you receive text messages, it diminishes your brainpower for the main thing you’re trying to focus on by 30%” and “it takes you on average 23 minutes to get back to the level of focus you had before you were interrupted”.
The distinguished California State University psychology professor, Larry Rosen, reports that the “average teenager believes they can follow six or seven forms of media at the same time”. And of course, they are fooling themselves.
What they are really doing is going from “what did it say on WhatsApp, what’s this on Netflix, to, what’s that notification I just got?” They are, says the professor, rapidly juggling between tasks and doing each “much less competently” than they might.
That is heavy stuff and perhaps it is really worth our spending three minutes, or better, more, paying attention to the things that are most important in our lives and seeing if we are giving them more than three minutes of real attention.
How much undisrupted attention are we giving to anything other than scrolling our social media feeds or playing games to kill time? Are we becoming slaves to our devices and is this changing our lives?
In fact, however much we pride ourselves in our multi-tasking prowess, the likelihood is that all our feverish effort is probably blocking our pre-smartphone ability to think quietly and let our minds wander and be creative. Do we embrace the joy of mind-wandering anymore or do we just look at Twitter or play a quick video game?
Before we let the ‘pings’ completely enslave us; we might consider the wisdom of the Kabbalist: “One must be fully present at work and play, during serious and amusing moments, social occasions and whilst alone or even making love.
There is no time when you should not be present, observing and reflecting on what is going on within and without.” That’s hardly possible in the smartphone universe.
More than two years into the pandemic, our smartphones, and other electronic technologies have helped make our lives more tolerable, connecting us as never before to the outside world. That’s definitely the good news.
But we must also beware because they may also have changed our lives and robbed us of our ability to pay attention where it is most needed.
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