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The Tech Industry Has Contributed To an 'Attention Crisis', Google Researchers Say (washingtonpost.com)
A new paper written by Google's user experience researchers delves into the reasons that we can't put down our phones, and starts to explore what companies can do about it. It also calls on the technology industry to reexamine the way it ties engagement to success -- noting that capturing people's attention is not necessarily the best way to measure whether they're satisfied with a product. From a report: For its study, Google focused on a small group of smartphone users and kept tabs on how they used their smartphone throughout a normal day. It also dug into 112 interviews from previous research to evaluate how people felt about their phone use. Researchers Julie Aranda and Safia Baig of Google presented the paper at mobile conference Tuesday in Barcelona. Google used the results of this study to help design its "Digital Wellbeing" tools, which are a part of the company's newest Android operating system and designed to help people curb their smartphone use. The paper provides an overall picture of the reasons people feel they have to be in constant contact with their phones -- though it stops short of evaluating the best ways to combat that.
It does, however, take aim at the basic way that Internet companies -- including Google -- have elevated engagement as the best metric to measure success, creating an economy where attention becomes the most important currency. "We feel that the technology industry's focus on engagement metrics is core to this attention crisis that users are facing," the paper says. "... It's important to consider alternative metrics to indicate success, relating to user satisfaction and quality of time spent."
It does, however, take aim at the basic way that Internet companies -- including Google -- have elevated engagement as the best metric to measure success, creating an economy where attention becomes the most important currency. "We feel that the technology industry's focus on engagement metrics is core to this attention crisis that users are facing," the paper says. "... It's important to consider alternative metrics to indicate success, relating to user satisfaction and quality of time spent."
That marketeers have four seconds to catch somone's attention before they move on to — Squirrel!
I don't know if it's the devices themselves or if we raised a generation that we didn't want to let play outside for fear that they would get into trouble or that something bad would happen to them. Is it any wonder that they turned to electronic devices in order to keep themselves entertained and that they never learned to enjoy other activities outside of those devices?
I think that we've replaced a lot of our environments and communities with digital equivalents and they're a very shallow substitute at best. Maybe that will change as the technology improves, but I think it's pretty important for us to remember that we're an animal that spent a lot of its evolutionary history without exposure to this kind of technology and that just like other animals we need some natural light, exercise, and a lot of other things that we might tend to put off as a bit primitive or regard as uncivilized.
When looked at in that way, it doesn't seem strange at all for technology to exert a large amount of selective pressure on the population. Of course a lot of people are miserable or appear to be ill. They're just unfit for this new world we find ourselves in, but there's no need for them to remain that way. Humans are wonderful at adapting the environment to suit them, so there's nothing that says you can't go barbecue or shoot hoops down at the park instead of posting on social media.
When I worked at Google, a lot of people took it as a badge of pride how much email and chat and crap like that that they "managed". A lot of feature proposals for things like gmail are geared towards somehow helping you manage the flood. Basically, the first assumption is that email is good and more is better, and that assumption is probably right at first, but certainly wrong once you can't keep up. Just like it's good for you to directly interact with tens of people in a day, but directly interacting with thousands of people in a day destroys you.
You know what I'd really like to see? I'd like to see a way for my computing systems to realize that a mailing list I'm on is useless, that I never engage with it, or that I engage with it in only negative ways - and then suggest that I unsubscribe from it, or skip it past my inbox to a folder for later. I'd like to be able to tell gmail to hold new content for an hour, so that I can triage what I have without having to deal with new items popping in and distracting me. [You can kinda-sorta fake that by processing using labels.] I'd like to be able to tag a few apps as being useful for a particular project, then as the computer notices I'm using something else, it can ask "Is this helping or hindering your project?", and then I could ask to put that app in a timeout if needed.
Basically, it would be nice if instead of providing tools to magnify my ability to focus on more things, the computer could provide tools to excise irrelevant things from my focus, allowing me to more effectively use what I have.