The Iconist

Life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece.

—Nadia Boulanger

See if this all-too-common scenario seems familiar: You’re trying to have a focused video chat with a coworker in another city, but there’s a call to your mobile phone on hold, and then a Facebook status alert flashes on the screen, making you wonder if you have updated your social networks. From there, your mind wanders to whether your DVR is recording your favorite show, and if you’ve checked in with your spouse lately, or spent any time with your kids—let alone called your parents—or met up with that college friend you’ve been promising to get together with, or paid any of the e-bills coming due on your bank account this month . . . All those messages distract you, to some degree, from each person or activity. Each engagement suffers from hijacked and decreased attention.

The immediate and important ideas, people, and interests in your life still get your focused attention, but you likely perceive them far less clearly because of all the added distractions. When there is something necessary to our immediate survival—something that turns on our fight-or-flight impulses—we will be highly perceptive and take in everything around us. But most of the time we communicate in small increments like email, texts, instant messages, and quick mobile calls. All these ever-growing micromessaging platforms from Messenger to WhatsApp and beyond have created a huge cultural shift, causing us to communicate, more than ever before, in brief spurts.

In the 1980s and ’90s a tech executive named Linda Stone worked for both Apple and Microsoft in the field of emerging technologies. By 1998 Stone had come up with the phrase “continuous partial attention” to describe the new human experience of how most of us are so overwhelmed by input that we’re paying increasingly less attention to our environment and all the messaging that comes in, to the point where we don’t fully engage with anything anymore.

I’ve just opened my email and there’s nothing out of the ordinary there. It’s the usual daily flood of schedule, project, travel, information, and junk mail. Then I notice . . . I’m holding my breath.

—Linda Stone on the phenomenon she called “email apnea,” a temporary absence or suspension of breathing, or shallow breathing, while doing email

What’s fascinating is that Stone did this study during the burgeoning days of the internet, almost a full decade before the tumultuous barrage of social media that now continually interrupts us. So if it was true that getting attention was hard in the mid- to late ’90s, what does it say about the attention spans of those we are trying to talk to today?

Source: “Cell Phone Usage Worldwide, by Country,” Infoplease.

Source: “Three Technology Revolutions,” Pew Research Center, retrieved February 2014.

We have been transformed abruptly in only fifty years. This change has occurred almost instantly, and the change is especially striking if you look at how dramatically it has altered all of our lives so rapidly. Of course, the Second Industrial Revolution (mass production, the invention of the electric lightbulb, the assembly-line engine, and the advent of cars) also changed us. But the internet is different in how it has affected us internally, in ways we don’t fully understand. We can see machines like cars and electric lights in front of us. We cannot “see” the internet and its effects are far more profound. From where we were fifty years ago to now is a flip of a light switch in terms of the passage of time.

We are culturally trying to catch up and figure out how this brave new digital world is affecting all of us.

We all want ways to lower the volume. But in our quest to reduce the onslaught, we turn yet again to technology—spam folders, DVRs, pop-up blockers, satellite radio, and subscription-based news feeds—to screen out the junk we don’t want to see. In essence, we’re creating a merry-go-round of technological interdependence: we develop technology to make our lives easier and more effective, then we get overwhelmed by it, and we develop new technologies to screen out the ones we originally created.

How many times has a friend or family member not heard what you said because they were distracted by technology? It’s a cliché. We all know people tend to fixate on their devices when they are texting, browsing the web, or scanning social media feeds. Before you know it, they’re deep in an electronic trance. The satirical news website the Onion hilariously but profoundly highlighted this disconnect in a piece posted on Christmas Day in 2013. The headline read, “Relatives Gather from Across the Country to Stare into Screens Together.”

Source: International Telecommunications Union Key Information and Communication Technology Data, 2005–2017.

The Onion went on to quote a fictional twenty-eight-year-old as saying, “It’s just great to get home for a while and spend some quality time not speaking a single word to my relatives, whether that’s by sipping hot cocoa with my sister while we both check our emails, or by gathering the whole clan for a nice holiday meal where everyone is fixedly looking down at the text messages on their phones—’tis the season, you know?”

While the “fictional” article pokes gentle fun at our technological obsession, we definitely notice when people around us mentally check out and lock into their gadgets, detaching from the world around them, which includes us. How can we possibly get the attention we need to thrive with consistency in a ridiculous world like this?

In our contemporary society we have become used to receiving small bits or micropieces of information as the normal way to perceive information. This means that our technological world is encouraging shorter and shorter attention spans. But as all of this microinformation pummels us, we have simultaneously, on some level, become desensitized to the messages constantly coming at us, because there are just too many of them.

The result is a tricky and cumbersome albatross that we have become unwittingly accustomed to shouldering. We rely on microbursts (advertising as well as text messages, email, and other short-form communication)—but at the same time, we subconsciously repel it reflexively. The ubiquity of DVRs and ad-free satellite radio services reveals our true feelings about advertising. You can also see it with simple spam filters and other advertising-avoidance technologies, which have swelled into multibillion-dollar industries. We are repulsed by being overpromoted to.

Even with this, certain media (like print magazines, billboards, etc.) can’t be caught with spam filters. That means we solve the problem of too much information by developing our own internal ad blockers. Most of us are now simply numb to many ads. We’re not only distracted; we’re desensitized. Also, we associate most unsolicited media messages with too much hype or dishonesty, and we react with disinterest or repulsion—we don’t take notice or we look away.

What is the flip side of that reflexive overload survival mechanism? Well, we now filter out so much information that we wind up missing out on materials and experiences that could be valuable to us.

If Einstein were alive, he’d wake up tomorrow and spend the first couple hours of his day digging out his inbox and getting a bunch of Slack notifications. And we wouldn’t have relativity.

—Drew Houston, founder and CEO, Dropbox

Our brains often don’t distinguish between a microburst that’s carrying useful information and one that’s purely promotional. In our minds, we’re overwhelmed and we check out. At some point during the rise of social media and mobile devices, we became more resistant and desensitized to all types of micro-communication in our environment—including the individual voices that we actually need to hear.

As we have gotten accustomed to shorter and shorter pieces of information, it has become difficult for us to concentrate on more complex, large bodies of information. So here we are: socially conditioned to the point where we are used to taking in tiny bits of data, while at the same time using our mental spam filters to subconsciously repel short or tiny bursts of data.

The effects of this catch-22 are maddening to marketers and almost catastrophic in the field of education. The paradox also has a huge social impact because our filtering mechanisms make it harder and harder for us to listen to one another in our day-to-day lives, both personally and professionally.

This problem is further intensified by the fact that complex, intricate pieces of information are necessary not only to communicate our ideas but for our world to function. Doctors, nurses, engineers, scientists, artists, and business managers all need to share and receive complicated information to innovate, learn, and ensure our society runs smoothly.

As more and more of our time is consumed by this barrage of content that we think is connecting us, we actually have less time in the day to talk to each other in any concentrated way. This is The Iconist’s paradox: we communicate more and more with micro-communication, but at the same time we have become desensitized to it and filter most of it out. Even your close personal relationships could be improved by first just understanding our natural repulsion to content overload. You can choose to take the time to shut off devices and connect in a deeper way.

All of this digital interaction also makes us feel like some task is always left unfinished or not fully examined. There’s always more to do in a world with twenty-four-hour data connections and round-the-clock media broadcasts. But the greater cost is this: your ability to be seen and differentiate yourself has been seriously diminished and it happened fast. Mass distraction really does mean invisibility for the individual human. Like drops of rain in the ocean, our voices are being diluted.