This post is the sixth chapter of my book “HOMO CELLULARIS: OUT OF FOCUS”. Click here to read the previous chapter.
Main Ideas: While tech allows us to be in all places at once, it keeps us from being truly present in the here and now. This hurts our relationships with friends and families, and causes a crisis in which individuals have no work/life balance.
1. WHERE ARE WE
Where are you right now?
It’s a less straightforward question than you might think.
To answer it, we have to start at the core and move slowly outwards. First up, you have a physical location – the room that you are sitting in right now. Surrounding this are more layers – a home and a street. A neighbourhood and a city. Beyond this is your country, your continent, and your planet.
As we move farther out the layers become more abstract, but they are no less where you are.
Even more abstract than this, yet somehow more immediate, are all the nonphysical locations that you are currently a part of.
These include, for you, this book. It is a nonphysical space that you are inhabiting right now.
You are probably in more nonphysical locations than this. Beyond the horizon of this book, you may have a computer screen open, and beyond that there’s a TV in the background.
Almost certainly you have a smartphone somewhere nearby.
Every now and again you make a switch from location to location.
You feel hungry and go grab a snack in the kitchen, leaving the book on the table. Or your phone buzzes, and you check into your Messenger App to see and respond to a message from a friend. Or something in this book reminded you of something you wanted to research and prompted you to go to Wikipedia.
Like most people, your day is a constant shuffle between physical and nonphysical locations. At all times you operate within more than one of these places at once. It’s not absurd to find yourself in a room in New York, having a conversation with someone in L.A., while passively watching a movie that takes place on Mars.
At the same time, you are living in the future: making plans and predictions for your day to come, maybe getting some calendar alerts about an upcoming meeting. And don’t forget that you are also in the past. Facebook reminds you where you were a year ago today. You “like” the image and then hop again somewhere else.
You might feel like a superhuman. And why shouldn’t you? You are like Sam Beckett of Quantum Leap – sojourning boldly across dimensions.
You aren’t limited by space or time. You can be everywhere at once. There’s just one hitch:
Your brain is terrible at this.
It can’t truly be everywhere at the same time in the way you would like it to be. This is because there is a disconnect between our capacity to be everywhere, and our capacity for focus. As one expands, the other diminishes.
The amount of physical and nonphysical spaces that you can simultaneously exist within may indeed be infinite. But our focus – our ability to zero in and truly inhabit one of these spaces – is a finite and fixed resource.
2. PROCESSING ERRORS
The extent to which we can focus is limited by what Shlomo Benartzi, Professor of Behavioral Economics at UCLA, calls “the bounded brain” in his book The Smarter Screen.
Our tech is supposed to help us triumph over our limitations. And in the same way that we have outsourced our memories to our devices to expand their inherent power, we have done the same with our focus.
We have done this to correct a perceived weakness of our physical mind – which is that it can only attend to one or two things at a time, and that it tends to get distracted.
Imagine that you’re getting coffee with a friend. You’re about to say something when suddenly, behind you, a glass breaks. You glance around, see the waiter running towards the crash site with a broom and dustpan, and then turn back to your friend.
“Where was I?”
You find that you have forgotten what you were about to say. It’s infuriating.
Our devices don’t share this weakness. A tab will stay open, long after we have moved onto another one. Our browser history will recall last night’s train of thoughts exactly in the order they came to us.
Digitally, we can spread our focus farther and wider. But all of this information must still be processed non-digitally in our minds. And here we have the same limited capacity for focus that we would have in the non-digital world. The only difference is that now we are asking our minds to handle an even greater workload.
What happens, then, is a bit of a paradox.
Our devices, in theory allowing us to focus on a greater number of things at once, overload our attention spans and reduce our competency when it comes to processing information.
So, how many places are you in right now? The answer may be well over a hundred. But in how many places are you actually present? Are you truly tuned into the room you are in? Are you present with the people in your own home?
Perhaps not. Most of the time you are too focused on your screen.
But are you even focused on the screen?
With your focus outsourced, you find that you are not really focused on anything.
3. THE DOPAMINE CYCLE
We know that screens, and our constant attendance to them, have reduced our powers of attention and focus.
Our devices are highly excitable – shrieking out a shrill notification and vibrating every few minutes. In outsourcing our focus to these devices, we have become a mirror of them. We too, in our own way, beep and buzz when we get a notification.
The popularity of smartphone devices, then, is not only driven by smart design and great functionality. These are the reasons why smartphones are excellent tools, but they are not the reason we’re obsessed with our smartphones.
So what’s the real reason?
Smartphones, it turns out, are addictive.
According to an article on Psychology Today, titled Why We’re All Addicted to Texts, Twitter and Google, our phones are actually rewarding us with hits of an addictive chemical every time they snatch our focus away from something else.
The chemical I’m talking about, dopamine, is supplied by your own brain.
Dopamine is associated with the brain’s reward system. When you’re hungry and eat a snack you get a little hit of dopamine to reward you for feeding yourself. Dopamine, in addition to stimulating our appetite for food, water, and sex, is also active in intellectual pursuits. When you become curious, dopamine is there urging you to crack a book or do a google search.
When it comes to the internet, the space between desire and its gratification has shrunk to a fraction of a second. In other words, we don’t need to do a lot to get that hit of dopamine. Every “like,” notification, and text brings us another small reward. This makes us pursue the reward more and more, which keeps us ever locked into our screens for longer periods of time.
Our minds leap to receive new information that comes at us through our screens. But in this act of leaping, the mind is quick to drop whatever it was occupied with before.
For this reason, we are less effective at completing tasks when we have an unread email or notification on our phone. We are champing at the bit to find out what the latest headline is, who liked our photo, or who sent us an email.
As Benartzi puts it, “too much information creates a scarcity of attention,” and when there is a scarcity of attention, “we can pay attention only to what’s right in front of our face.”
4. THE DINNER TABLE CRISIS
According to a poll from Common Sense Media, 50% of teens feel addicted to their phones. Almost 80% of teens reported checking their phones at least once per hour, and 72% reported needing to immediately respond to texts and other notifications. This is to say nothing about the addictedness or non-addictedness of the parents themselves, which I would guess is also quite high.
This has led to what many parents I know experience as the “dinner table crisis.” No one can put their phones away for even a minute, because the thought of an unanswered text or notification causes anxiety. The result is that the dinner table – once the place where families came together and focused on one another – is now seating individuals who can’t focus on anything.
This exasperates parents, but for kids it’s a bit different.
They grew up in this digital world. They may not see a valid reason for prioritizing one physical location (the dinner table) over all the other non-physical locations they are in. While dinner table texting may seem rude to adults, it may feel rude to teens to not respond to each notification from a friend.
5. NOWHERE AT ALL
“Because the mind has limited thinking capacity,” Benartzi says, “it can pay attention to only so many things at once [and] we often fail to notice important details of the world.”
In other words, when we are focused on something, we only gather X% of the details.
Exactly what that percentage is depends on our own personal capacities as well as the complexity of what we’re focusing on.
Our focus can expand in one of two directions: laterally or vertically, which means that we can focus a little bit on a great many things, or focus in great detail on one thing. When we export our focus to our devices, we make gains in lateral focus. Our focus is spread wide, and reaches out to cover the entire planet.
What we lose is the ability to vertically focus. We never “exhaust” an idea, a place, a moment. We never enter into something deeply. When we get bored we move on. We never find out what’s on the other side of boredom.
Never staying in one place, we fail to gather more than the first details that jump out to us.
Sometimes, also, it’s not boredom that carries us away but a sense of necessity.
A day spent with family is marred by the pull of work emails and texts.
Each one only takes a moment of our time to respond to, so we barely notice how they accumulate. We end up feeling like dogs tethered to hundreds of leashes, with hundreds of people tugging us in different directions.
The result in teens, as parents know, is that sort of glazed over, backlit apathy one witnesses at the dinner table.
In adults, however, the feeling is one of pronounced dread and guilt.
We feel that we are never present enough for our families, which would imply that we are overly present at work.
Ironically, though, we feel the same guilt at work. We are not present enough there either.
“What’s scarce in the 21st century?” asks Benartzi.
The answer is focus.
If we are not truly at work, and not truly at home, then where are we?
We are in a million different places, which is to say, we are nowhere at all.
“Dance like no one’s watching!” -Cliché
This post is the sixth chapter of my book “HOMO CELLULARIS: OUT OF FOCUS”. Click here to read the following chapter.
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