Distraction as a Commodity
The ‘new economy’ is not clicks, views, or information, it’s your distracted attention.
How many times have you “quickly” opened up Instagram (or your app of choice) to see if there’s new activity? Then 30–45 minutes later, you’re reading a random article after opening 5 more apps?
If your answer is DAILY, you are not alone.
And no, you did not master any sort of time travel.
Over the past 2 decades, we’ve seen the explosion of mobile phones, information, faster computing, cheaper memory, and the like. The sheer number of stimuli that’s constantly accessible through our tiny devices is incomparable to any time in history. And as Moore’s law continues to hold grown and computing continues to expedite, one thing has remained constant: TIME.
Tiziana Terranova sums the dichotomy of information vs. time (attention) very well in her essay Attention, Economy, and the Brain
If information is bountiful, attention is scarce because it indicates the limits inherent to the neurophysiology of perception and the social limitations to time available for consumption.
Tech companies are very aware of this and they’re vying for your time. Apps and the like are carefully designed to bring you back via emotional (internal) and computational (push notifications, alerts, etc.) triggers. It’s no surprise that these companies hire people with psychology (Zuckerberg was a psychology major) experience along with data scientists to hyper-analyze ways to incrementally increase the amount of time you spend with them. Haven’t you noticed the recent trend of bottomless scrolling of feeds? It’s all tailored to keep you browsing.
Ready for a scary stat? A 2013 survey found that we check our phones 150 times per day. That’s basically once every 6½ mins. And better (or worse) yet, a more recent study shows that the average smartphone user spends 2½ hours each day across 76 unique sessions.
And many of us make it easy for them! We keep our devices right on us while we work. We opt in to notifications. We’re inviting them to distract us. We want to feel that emotional rush of a buzzzzzz tempting us spend just 5 more minutes.
But why do we do this to ourselves?
There’s a number of reasons why distraction, or our attention, has become the #1 commodity: fear of missing out, information overload, smart notifications, etc.
But what it really boils down to is that we’re human. We’re curious creatures by nature.
Nobody’s productivity efficiency (% of time actually working) will ever be 100% within a given day. Most of us want 5'clock to come sooner rather than later. We know we’re going to have our spells of distraction, wanting to get away from a task at hand. And our devices are ready for that moment of self-control gone awry.
So is productivity plummeting?
It’s been proven that continuous distraction or habitually changing tasks (multi-tasking) does more harm than good to your productivity. Your “quick 5 minutes” on IG, morphs into 30 and time is lost— you’re distracted and it takes yet another 10 minutes to get back into the groove of whatever you’re doing. A small distraction often equals a larger distraction.
So are the workforces of the future going to be unproductive, information hungry beings?
I am worried, especially for the younger generations. But my honest opinion is that it’s too early to correlate any direct impact. It’s also, as of now, too ambiguous to calculate. Especially factoring the gains in productivity through year of year technological advancements.
The next time you pull out your phone for no specific reason. Stop and think.
Is it worth it? Did you earn this distraction?
