‘internet addiction disorder’ and respecting attention
There’s a timely piece in the Times about taking a ‘secular Sabbath’ away from electronic distractions. Scoble and Roger Ehrenberg also recently lamented ‘attention thieves.’
I’m guilty too. There are precious few times in which I put away the blackberry: yoga class (@Karma) and dancing. And bed, I suppose. (usually).
Taking a break is obviously a good idea, but doesn’t address the core problem: what we really need are information tools that adequately respect and value our attention, and give us more control over our attention. I think there are three characteristics that many of these old and new applications need to adopt in order to let us focus better without cutting off cold-turkey: context, feedback, prioritization.
Context
Traditionally, we had different physical places, times, and things for different tasks. To work, you went to the office. To read, you went to the library. If you were reading for work, you read the business section. If you were slacking off, you’d read the entertainment section.
We’re now free of such physical limitations, which is wonderful, but the result is that all of the streams of our activities flow to us simultaneously, and are presented to us merged.
We need to be able to set our context, and then have our software be humane and intelligent enough to respect it. Our IM status, for example, has busy / do-not-disturb settings. Such settings ought to be able to be applied across the whole gamut of information inputs, not just IM.
Feedback and Monitoring
Our information tools ought to help us monitor where our attention is going. Tools for analyzing clickstream, such as the early work from AttentionTrust and perhaps Atten.tv might help us see where attention is going. RescueTime is another neat application that lets us see where time/attention is going (or being wasted). And news.ycombinator has a noprocrastination setting that cuts one off after checking too many times. Making the behavioural changes to focus attention and lock out the attention theives is made much easier if software can provide the right sorts of feedback and incentives.
Prioritization
Software needs to do a better job at figuring out what messages are important and justify disruptions, and which can wait. The blackberry does a nice job of letting one configure different behaviours for different types of messages, such as ‘Level 1′ alerts that match a list of senders. But these tools are crude, and make use of little of the data which they might.
Humans are fallible, and media is often designed and evolve to steal attention, because it is valuable. Our software needs to be designed to recognize our finite cognitive limitations, avoid abusing our attention, and help us to stay disciplined.
Now back to real work!
One Response to “‘internet addiction disorder’ and respecting attention”
Posted by: Leif Hansen - 03/03/2008
Great post, especially the thoughts on context. Now that our physical location boundaries are breaking down, perhaps context is a ‘state of mind’ (I am in work mode, etc)?
My name is Leif Hansen (I’m the managing director of Spark Northwest) and I’m one of the two facilitators for the Soul Tech workshop that was recently shown last week on the Today Show.
One of our participants, Ariel Meadows started her 52NightsUnplugged experiment as a result of our workshop, which in turn was mentioned in the NY Times article you’ve sited in your post (Ariel was also on the Today Show for the live portion.)
While I do think there are some practical things one can do (i.e. bracket one’s tech time with breaks, set some family boundaries, set a power-timer on your wifi, etc) our workshops are really more about facilitating a process that helps people to think about how technology is helping or hindering the achievement of broader life/work goals.
Actually, we’ve just put together a 7 step e-workbook that takes people through the same process. The steps and exercises covered in the e-workbook are basically to:
(perhaps first identify what you like about your tech life)
1. Identifying your challenges with tech
2. Identify the needs trying to get met
3. Develop your vision/goals
4. Finding your focus
5. Finding solutions
6. Turning ideas into actions
7. Sticking with your plan (can be hardest)
I think if people would really take the time to think about what they want from life, and how technology is helping and hindering their moving in that direction, it would be a tremendous first step.
Unfortunately, most of us would rather just turn off our minds, and click on some entertainment. Neil Postman called it “Amusing Ourselves to Death”.
Good luck and keep us posted on your process!
Warmly,
Leif
http://www.SparkNW.com
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