Why time is running out faster (1/3).
How what we use drains our attention.
Like all good stories, it starts with an uncanny truth:
The older you get,faster your life goes in front of you.
Of course at the time I was a child, and that seemed like some sort of foreign language to my ears, but fast forward 27 years in the future and I have some nostalgia of how slow a month could feel, when now the reality is when you realize that the year has passed already.
“Shit”.
My parents were right, but they were also right for everybody. The older I am growing up the more I realize that we all are just on an insane race with time where it seems that most of us are faced with this challenge.
However, what worries me the most and that previous generations didn’t have, was this enmeshment of technologies in our everyday life.
Yes you would say, people were worrying about books and newspapers in the past and nothing bad happened, but, as Nassim Taleb would tell with his famous tale of a turkey being fed during 1000 days, getting fatter and fatter everyday and thinking how lucky and cared she was, until the day of its death. Each days were not one day more to live, but one day less.
Scary right?
Technology is, and has been a gift to us all, individuals and society alike, but as much there always have been some dark side accompanying it I think the scale and addictiveness of what tech is achieving today is incomparable and many people that I follow and admire, like Kevin Kelly, Jason Fried, Tristan Harris, Simon Sinek have recently talked about tech’ less known dark side.
As Kevin Kelly beautifully said “ There is a constant friction between technology and us, we are both creator and slave”.
Tech always have been a motor of social changes, and today society is shifting very quickly thanks to it, however the perverse effect we are talking here today is time. It won’t change. But the use of our time did change, and how you use your time impacts happiness, relationships, communities and society as a whole.
We are as I like to say in a digital western. As colons in the 19th century that were living in grey areas without “official laws”, we are facing the same situation regarding our digital environment, specially ethics . Regulators by definition are slow to catch, while tech by itself is fast and self-disrupting.
How to protect people from the insidious effect tech can have on us?
This will be the never ending battle of the 21st century.
Because it is only the beginning, and this is why it is important that us, users, parents, colleagues, boss, friends (complete the list), know what we use, which forces are pushing this forward, and what are the trade-offs and the impacts.
Still doubting?
There has never been a better time to have this conversation guys, Virtual reality is coming and the Internet of things (IOT) as well, promising to offers a lot of new solutions, but also new headaches, with a closeness to reality never attained before and an infinite list of connected devices.
When it comes, I doubt you will still listen occupied in your VR headset.
Simon Sinek recently blew up the social space with an interview regarding millennials that is totally true, however not new on the content. Nonetheless, I see that we have reached a tipping point where people’s mind are feeling this discomfort and everything connects in their mind.
(Watch from 03:15 to 7:20 min.)
My goal is to show you the forces at hand that steal your time and make your day disappear like smoke, so you can make informed decisions about what’s important to you. We users, (even more than never) send feedbacks to the market, that will adapt in return, so showing that We, are still awake and that we care is key. Same hold true for the food we eat, the environment we live, or the communities we live in.
Because right now according to some research it has been found that we actually check our phones +150 times a day as an average , touch it +2600 times and keep it on average less a meter away from us 24/7, day and night.(Source FB research group)
Who do you think is the slave now?
Part 1 — How our tools are enslaving you.
In its humbling beginning, Tech was a sharp stick of wood, may be a silex that you had polished. It was a big deal at the time, but it represented the essence of human existence that could be summed up like this.
“What me, human being haven’t been gifted by nature, I will create what I need and shall thrive!”.
The rest well, you know how it goes. From some tiny hordes, we came to populate the whole world and create some amazing stuff along the way, especially these last hundred of years, and, decades.
The interesting and most amazing part was that, during our whole history, mankind has created tools enabling us to do more physically, and it has been in these last decades that humans have created tools that potentialize our thinking, and are now much more capable than us.
These tools, hardware and software became extensions of our brains, where we now stock informations we no longer need to remember on a continual basis — Phone numbers, contacts, pictures, agenda and others.
We have all become librarians, and things got even better now that you can save all your things in the cloud and synchronize everything. In theory only, because who haven’t had any fails with its synchro?
If you are a normal person (in a western world),you probably have a smartphone and a laptop, may be a tablet, and an Iwatch if you wanted to be early adopter, plus, let’s not forget the computer you have at work, and the work phone if you are an executive.
One life, three to five devices. What does it means?
It means that beyond your existing life To-do list you already have, like children / spouses / housework / friends & family / dogs and others (which its quite some busyness already!) you have to manage at least 3 more devices that have more cognitive power than you and with of course where the information you store is going to be different regarding on the device.
- On your smartphone you are probably going to have to manage apps / pictures / contacts / notes / podcasts.
- On your personal computer you’ll probably manage space around important documents like budget / legal and taxes paperwork / work you brought from home and a bunch of stuff you prefer to use on your computer rather than on your phone.
- On your work computer well, you know best than me, but for sure it’s very important.
To sum up, we have now more devices than ever, where we need to manage and retain specific informations on top of our busy lives, while in the same time we have never been trained in organizing systems of such volume of informations.
I call this a breadth and depth problems. What we posses stretch our cognitive abilities in every directions, depending on our preferences of managing, storing and organizing informations that are unique and different while each of these devices is more powerful than ever, able to store more things, in many different formats (Audio, video, text, images, Gif, Links etc…).
The only limit to this was the physical memory space of each devices, but not anymore.
Nowadays the cloud promises you to store limitless amount of information if you can pay.
How cool is that?
But wait, the coolest thing is now, cloud brought with it a small world of revolutions with it, internet based platforms, where you actually have non-stop living eco-system (also called complex systems) of connected people that interact 24/7.
What devices represented for our brains, social platforms represent it for our identities.
Our identities are now fragmented between each of platforms thanks to the possibility of going niche the web offer.
Here is an excerpt how we can categorize social media platforms:
Twitter = What I think
Facebook = What I want the others to think about me
Instagram = What I see / do is cool
Snapchat = What I am doing when I am with my friends
Linkedin = What I have achieved and how good I am
Plus others of zillions of others social platforms, designers, developers, travelers, cookers, online fantasy games etc etc..
Or as the excellent Stratechery blog described a while ago -
“Hey, wait a minute! Don’t forums also were living platforms?”
Yes! but the trick is that now these platforms have massive scale, read your data to feed you up with content that have a high rate of interesting you because your friends /network also found it relevant. (more in part 2 about that).
And as the saying goes = “the more people they are, crazier the party”.
More people using it means more content being published, shared, more chances that you have people you may know, that you find like minded people etc, ad infinitum.
So, getting back to our concept of breadth and depth we reached an infinite potential, where the only limit is you. I mean not you, because you wished to have 9 lives to do and know everything that is happening, or not needing to have to sleep in order to get track of everything. (don’t laugh, I have heard it many times, and I myself had these thoughts crossing my mind).
No, your only limit is your time which is limited at 24h and your cognitive resistance in handling so much stimulation. Unlike video games, there is not cheat to increase the time limit.
Most of people have already having difficulties in taking care of the mess we have in their homes, in from of them.(Just look at the numbers of book sold helping us to organize it), so how the hell are people supposed to manage their digital identities and life?
We live in a multichannel age, where our cognitive forces are being fragmented in millions of trivial acts that push us to the limits if we let it enter.
An as Jason Fried represented it beautifully in a recent blog post, this fragment our attention.
We are now managing our own lives, our digital brains and multiple digital identities.
This leaves you a bit schizo? Me too, but there is more!
In our tech paradise, Moore’s law calculated that computational power will double every 18months to two years, promising us more power tech able to sustain even more powerful internet platforms / apps etc..
Do you see where it is leading? It promises us more amazing new things to do, permitting us to put more things in our plate, have another digital social platforms etc etc.
Don’t you think we are reaching a threshold?
The app store celebrated the 2 million apps on its store recently last year. (13th june to be precise)
You have an app for everything, but it is widely known in the industry that chances of your app being used is close to zero, even more after the launch.
It looks like something like this:
That is a challenge accepted by the industry, but which need to be tackled if you want to remain in the game. So if you are a tech company looking for profits and more valuation what do you?
You try to reduce these numbers as your top#1 priority, right?
How?
By creating habits.
And that’s what we are going to see in chapter #2.
Thanks for reading. Next episode clicking here.
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Alex ❤.
