A Small But Growing Group Of Silicon Valley Heretics Are Disconnecting Themselves From the Internet (theguardian.com)

The Guardian reports: Decades after he stayed up all night coding a prototype of what was then called an "awesome" button, Rosenstein belongs to a small but growing band of Silicon Valley heretics who complain about the rise of the so-called "attention economy": an internet shaped around the demands of an advertising economy. These refuseniks are rarely founders or chief executives, who have little incentive to deviate from the mantra that their companies are making the world a better place. Instead, they tend to have worked a rung or two down the corporate ladder: designers, engineers and product managers who, like Rosenstein, several years ago put in place the building blocks of a digital world from which they are now trying to disentangle themselves. "It is very common," Rosenstein says, "for humans to develop things with the best of intentions and for them to have unintended, negative consequences." Rosenstein, who also helped create Gchat during a stint at Google, and now leads a San Francisco-based company that improves office productivity, appears most concerned about the psychological effects on people who, research shows, touch, swipe or tap their phone 2,617 times a day. There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing toward so-called "continuous partial attention", severely limiting people's ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. One recent study showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity -- even when the device is turned off. "Everyone is distracted," Rosenstein says. "All of the time."

Comments

Wayne's World was ahead of its time

[barrywalker]

https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/c...

Re:But...

[jenningsthecat]

It's hard to turn notifications off and put the phone away, but people gotta start making the effort.

Advantages of being old, contrarian, and largely self-employed - I never turned notifications on in the first place. Unless it's a (fairly rare) phone call or an (even rarer) text message, I don't receive notifications. I collect and check email when I want to - none of that 'push' shit to put my attention under someone else's control. I don't do social media; but even if I did, I wouldn't receive notifications very often, because both data and WiFi are turned off until I explicitly require them to look something up or to check mail. I can see that it may be difficult to 'unplug' - but it sure as hell was easy to not plug in in the first place.

This often gets framed as a technological issue, but it's really a sociological and psychological one. People need to re-learn that their true self-worth isn't contingent on being available and attentive to everyone and his dog on a 24/7 basis. They also need to learn that somebody else's unavailability is simply that - it isn't rejection.