In an effort to understand my own distractedness, I’ve started focusing on what is being researched, written and said about the topic. Now I wonder what the concept of emotional process in society would say about this and the human ability to meet the monumental challenges we face.
Constant news alerts have many of us at non-stop attention, scrolling online for the latest headlines or reaching for our phones when we’re standing in line or conversation gets boring. Have you ever been around a table with journalists or other super-connected folks when the bing of a news alert sounds? Then you know that no conversation is too fascinating to keep everyone from immediately checking their phones.
Beyond the news, platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Reddit foster outrage among audiences that keeps them coming back. Research indicates that casual readers and viewers who have no inclination to participate come away angrier and more argumentative when exposed to that content.
Can that help explain why, in Massachusetts, former U.S. Attorney Rachel Rollins verbally threatened strangers for a minor insult? Can our distraction and penchant for novelty and outrage help explain why we are susceptible to the charms of a public figure like Donald Trump? I know that news organizations like the Washington Post and CNN suffered big enough losses in readership and viewership to force layoffs after Trump left office.
Social media sites are now well known to be addictive. It was recently reported that Facebook based its algorithms on how slot machines work in order to hook people to the site.
According to the book Deep Work, author Cal Newport writes that organizational managers are so tied to answering emails they have no time or focus for the work they were hired for — something I can personally attest to in my career. It makes me think of David Sloan Wilson’s reference to the global economy as a super organism in whose service we work, rather than an economy that supports humans.
Writer and former Apple executive Linda Stone calls this “continuous partial attention.” It has been shown to raise cortisol levels and impair the human ability to focus. This is all well known and supported with mounting evidence, but the addiction is so hard to break that journalists and others write and podcast about their efforts to disengage. They blame their Twitter and news alert habit for being unable to read books or long-form journalistic pieces. Digital sabbaths, trading smart phones for “dumber” flip phones and barring screens from the bedrooms are strategies users employ, with mixed success.
Digital tools are, of course, incredibly useful for research and communication. They can extend our minds, as science writer Annie Murphy Paul writes. But we are fixated by technology designed by people to capture and sell our attention. It keeps our emotions inflamed and heightens our anxiety. Even journalists confess to avoiding the news because they find it too distressing
It all makes me wonder how Bowen theory can help us think about this moment. Can a democracy survive with a sizable proportion of the population in thrall to an algorithm designed to capture their attention no matter the costs to society? How can an anxious, distracted population think deeply about climate change or threats to democracy? Is there a way to report the news that promotes reflection and moves toward solutions, rather than hardening people in their polarized positions, as research tells us even straight, factual reporting can do?
Dan Papero recently suggested that if enough small, human communities could mount responses to climate change, they together could create a tipping point in a helpful direction. Is there a kind of journalism that could promote that tipping point?
(By the way, I’ve deleted my news apps and silenced my alerts. It has been three weeks now and it feels as though I’m inhabiting a new, more spacious world.)
Barbara,
Thank you for posting your well-informed questions. My favorite part of your essay is the last, parenthetical sentence! And it is perhaps the most important sentence. “It has been three weeks now and it feels as though I’m inhabiting a new, more spacious world.” I want to hear more about it.
Laurie
Thanks for the comment, Laurie. A world without news alerts — that’s my information drug of choice; for others it’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or other apps — is a world with time. Scrolling headlines, as it turns out, is time consuming! So I am less harried. It’s a world where I can hear my own thoughts or have the luxury of thinking nothing because I no longer put on a podcast while I make dinner or do chores. It’s a more sensual world, where I pay attention to the color of the pepper I am chopping or the smells of the soil I’m digging in my garden. By carefully choosing what I allow to enter my mind and limiting its quantity, I can think more deeply about what I do read or hear. I am less reactive. As beneficial as this is, however, I still catch myself flipping mindlessly through the New York Times and jumping to other sites. I’ve spent a career working with the news media one way or another, and it’s easy to convince myself that I just must read, right away, about the CNN chief losing his job. But I now know that’s delusion.
Barbara,
This is such an important subject. Thank you for bringing together many factors that go into creating the state of distraction that has become part of our way of life. It seems far removed, but your article reminds me of Frans deWaal’s concept, triadic awareness. The chimpanzee must be alert not only to the state of her own relationship with each colony member, but also aware of the relationships between all of the others. In the shifting relationship system of the colony, one’s status could be at risk if one misses an important cue. This is another way of understanding the force for togetherness.
In a society in which we are surfeited with information, it takes consistent, intentional work to sort out what is relevant from what is just noise. I see links here between your work, Laurie’s work on stress and social rank, and Erik’s work on inner quietude.
So interesting that you bring up Frans deWaal. I was thinking about his work when watching “Chimp Empire” on Netflix. It is a fascinating multi-part documentary on competing chimp societies in Kibale National Park in Uganda. Maybe you saw it. I was struck by how alert the chimps were seemingly at all times, and how many complexities they must juggle. It made me want to reread some of deWaal’s work. As Laurie’s work suggests, status matters and we humans are also always attuned to information that indicates status shifts, threats and opportunity to step up. Maybe that’s part of why we are so apt to scan for novelty and thus are susceptible to the non-stop, incremental changes offered by digital technology. With all of us on hyper-alert, inner quietude is both valuable and hard to achieve.
Great piece Barbara. How do we eliminate the noise and stimulation of everyday life? To some degree, it is about regulating the input. When does the input become overwhelming and interfere with thinking? When is use of the internet a way to relate to a bunch of people who think like me or to take advantage of an outlet to oppose people who think different? How does one regulate their reactivity to a polarizing figure such as Trump? He became a special focus before he was even nominated and got tons of coverage in response to his behavior. I signed up for the Times when he was elected. In some strange way, the writing seemed to be better then, particularly the articles about Trump. He made a lot of people (myself included) pay attention. I wonder if reporting on maturity level could level some of these polarizing people and subjects. Most of us do not take our immaturity to the White House or other very public arenas. So we don’t have the whole world evaluating our mental fitness. The reaction of the group ( for and against) influenced his behavior and in turn it became increasingly more unregulated.
Good points and questions, Ann. Noise and stimulation are ubiquitous, so I need intentionality and focus to regulate what I take in. I have to be on the lookout for reversion to bad habits. News has always been part of my work, and I thoughtlessly expanded my receptivity to it as availability grew from daily newspapers and nightly newscasts to 24-hour broadcasts and then incessant, online alerts. This sounds crazy (and is!), but my final rundown of the day came from Bob, a former newsman, when he made is last scan of the headlines as I was drifting off to sleep. When you think about how even factual reporting can harden people in their camps, it seems like we all had a role in creating Trump. Maybe he is the fruiting body of the undifferentiated, hyper-alert mass that is our social organism.
Fascinating about the news app diet. Higher DOS would be more in control of attention, better able to define self to social media. I’ve done this with news that is preoccupied with fear.
In a small way, I try to do with news what I did with family, be aware of the full spectrum of viewpoints. I suppose that process is more interesting to me than any one viewpoint.
Thank you, Erik, for reminding me about the variation in possible responses to demands on attention and relation to DOS. What do responses to social media and digital technology look like with more mature individuals and societies? How much is immaturity fed and sustained by online content? I wonder if we haven’t yet lived with these applications long enough to figure out an appropriate relationship with their powers and perils.