Distraction Addiction: Welcoming Predictive Search Systems
January 9, 2014
The article on Business Insider titled Here’s How Many Times People Switch Devices In a Single Hour provides insight into the studies being undertaken by both Google and Facebook into following users from device to device. They need to demonstrate to advertisers that the ad one user saw on his laptop at work later caused him to make a purchase from his smartphone. The article states
“A new study from the British unit of advertising buyer OMD shows just how massively important this cross-device tracking has become to monitoring a given consumer’s behavior.
In looking at the behavior of 200 Brits during one evening, OMD found that the average person shifted his attention between his smartphone, tablet, and laptop a staggering 21 times in one hour.”
This study’s findings may not come as huge surprise. An article on Salon titled How Baby Boomers Screwed Their Kids and Created Millennial Impatience argues that the Generation Y is the most distracted and impatient batch of people yet. The article contends,
“According to a study at Northwestern University, the number of children and young people diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) shot up 66 percent between 2000 and 2010. Why the sudden and huge spike in a frontal lobe dysfunction over the course of a decade… What I believe is likely happening, however, is that more young people are developing an addiction to distraction. An entire generation has become addicted to the dopamine-producing effects of text messages, e-mails and other online activities.”
This “addiction to distraction” is often held up by Gen Y’ers as an ability to “multi-task”. But what does it mean to be someone unable to focus? In Buddhism there is the belief that if you are doing more than one focused task, you are not truly alive.
With telework, the workplace is now the world.
We have all succumbed at one time or another to the call of checking our e-mail, Facebook, or Twitter account, but when we are doing it so often that it takes over our concentration, what have our lives become? There is a wide gap between flitting from these exciting distractions and actually gaining some foothold of understanding. And the more we do jump back and forth between tasks, the less likely it becomes that any knowledge is created or stored. The Salon article paints a bleak picture, starting off with the dark Philip Larkin poem “This Be the Verse” (it is hardly “High Windows”) and including this dreary image of the future,
“A Distracted Generation, living in a world of abstraction, thinks it has ADHD but more likely has a dopamine-fueled addiction to social media and cell phones. It would seem we have reached the abyss.”
Little in the world of Gen Y’ers supports long-term goal making. No Child Left Behind students are taught toward a test, and then dump the information once they have passed. Social media and the 24-hour news cycle means everything is forgettable. Even global warming fears must make the very way of life we know seem temporary. The article encourages human bonds to break this distraction addiction. Meanwhile social media giants continue to encourage and lure a dependence on the same addiction. Perhaps Philip Larkin was right when he wrote, “beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs.”
But the distraction addiction creates an appetite for predictive search. Without critical thinking, information control is ceded to the companies giving users what they want before they know they want it.
Chelsea Kerwin, January 9, 2014
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