Jeffery Satchwill, a fifth-year communications student at the University of Ottawa, gets all his news on the way to work from his iPad, a tool to access the plethora of information virtually within his grasp.
“I like it in the sense that it allows me to instantaneously fill my natural curiosity,” Satchwill said. “To be able to access the Internet anywhere I go is pretty remarkable and useful.”
He said his only concern is relying too much on technology. And he’s not alone.
From technology writers to neuroscientists, experts have been studying the impact of technology on people’s shortening attention spans.
Used properly, laptops, smart phones, and tablets are handy organizational tools. But the relationship between humans and their pocket-portals to the Internet can lead to overdosing on information.
High on information
Guus Pijpers’ book, Information Overload – A System for Better Managing Everyday Data, warned of this. Trying to absorb too much information is neither new nor inevitable, according to Pijpers, though he admits the process is accelerated by the host of gadgets at people’s disposal.
There are simply too many ways to access the same information.
“You can have it with any communication means: Twitter, Facebook, Internet chat, text messages and what have you,” Pijpers said in a phone interview.
“If you stick to one, then you don’t have an information overload. But if you use various communication means, with the same information, then you are probably suffering information overload. But don’t blame the tool. Blame the person for not selecting the right tool and filtering the right information.”
Pijpers isn’t the only one who has pointed out people’s misuse of technology.
Pulled apart
“We pull the trigger on the guns, not the guns themselves,” said Maggie Jackson, author of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age.
In Distracted, Jackson argued that new applications and uses of technology have eroded our attention spans and capacity to think deeply and analytically about things.
She also looked into what innovations science has come up with to improve people’s capacity to pay attention.
“In the past, the now archaic definition of the word [distracted] meant to be pulled in pieces, or to be scattered. And I think that actually fits how many people feel today . . . They’re always reacting to their environment, the communications media and are always in a hurry,” Jackson said.
Doing more, achieving less
Being distracted can affect productivity. Jackson said studies have shown the average worker switches tasks every three minutes.
Not only that, but a distracted lifestyle also affects relationships. She argued that with sites like Facebook, unwired relationships are few and far between.
“[We need] depth of connections, not just hyper connectivity and expanding networks of people,” Jackson said.
In other words, people need face-time with friends and family.
Author and journalist David Shenk said he agrees.
Before the birth of iPads and smartphones, he wrote the 1997 book, Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut.
In this book, Shenk outlined many concerns now proven correct of what he called “the rapid shift from information scarcity to information abundance.”
While he finds innovations in technology exciting, he said he believes society needs to start putting more value on slow and creative thinking, instead of speed.
“To be constantly stimulated, accessible, reached is not something we want in our lives. It’s thrilling, just not nourishing,” Shenk said.
Similarly, Jackson argued that more value should be given to reflection — not just the first answer that pops up on Google.
According to Jackson, it’s easy to pick the first answer that appears, but much more difficult to find a second or third answer. This takes patience. Yet slower-paced, more patient individuals aren’t considered as productive.
“Out of all this mix, I’d argue that we’re not valuing slower, focused types of attention,” Jackson said. “We are tending to value the quick, the multitasking style. We think that that’s the way to get things done. We’re trying so hard to be efficient that we’re becoming inefficient. We’re not giving ourselves time for slow thinking, which is highly creative,” she added.
The answer to this may be to spend some time “unplugged,” away from the computer screen, Shenk said. People should make themselves inaccessible from time to time in order to be more reflective, he added.
Beyond our capacity
Amedeo D’Angiulli, a neuroscience professor at Carleton University, studies the oversaturated brain. He said his research on memory and how humans select information from their environments has helped spark an interest in the science behind multi-tasking.
“Our cognitive system is very limited,” he said.
In fact, [people are only capable of processing about five to seven “chunks” of information at any given time, according to D’Angiulli.
“And that’s the amount we can consciously control,” he said. “A chunk of information could be anything. It could be five to seven digits or five to seven words or five to seven images . . . the rest of the information is lost or we are not entirely sure if it’s transferred to long-term memory.”
Outsourcing the info
To overcome this biological barrier, people have developed the clever technique of “extended external memory.”
Simply put, people take notes, read maps, consult drawings and use symbols to fill in where their brains can’t manage.
“That’s why people are constantly relying [on] pieces of paper, notes and that kind of stuff because we cannot hold the information,” D’Angiulli said.
“To manipulate and work on it, you need to hold it. But when there’s capacity limits and you have to do this very quickly — for example sitting in a class for a very complex, even boring lecture — you need some external memory to help you.”
Multi-wasting
Multi-tasking requires more than just a brain, he said.
More and more, people are turning to technology as their extended memory. But D’Angiulli said he has reservations about relying too heavily on the new toys.
“The Internet and other gadgets are supposed to be supporting technology to do the multi-tasking. But what happens [is that devices like the mobile phone] will distract you and then it becomes dangerous,” he said. “This gadgetry very, very quickly can produce addiction. I can do email anytime now, right. Even in the bathroom. That means the technology is controlling you but you don’t have any executive control over it.”
The addiction can sometimes make studying pretty ineffective, he said.
More seriously, there are dangers of people believing they are master of their smart phone while they happen to be driving.
An interpersonal solution
There are a few easy ways to avoid information overload, Pjipers said. Friends and acquaintances can act as conduits of information. People can distill long, tedious articles into informational tidbits.
“A human can add more value than anything else. And the famous phrase I use: talking to a person for five minutes gives you more information than five hours online,” he said.
“People forget. They think we need to find it on the Internet. If you have to paint your house do you go on the internet or do you talk to your neighbours and friends to look if they have a good painter? You can find anything on the Internet of course, but if you want a really good painter for your house, you talk to your neighbour, you talk to your friends. That’s where you get the qualified information.”
An ignorant future?
If people don’t tone down their information mining, Pijpers said he worries society will begin to overlook data that is actually important.
“I think there will be a time in the next couple of years that people make the wrong decisions because they just missed the information, they didn’t get that nugget out of those hundred emails,” he said. “It’s not that the information is not available but just people miss it.”
Jackson said she foresees pile-ups on the information highway.
“The potential to be well-informed is there but I think that we’re at risk of creating a new form of ignorance,” Jackson said. “In the past, ignorance was based on the lack of information . . . now ignorance is based on an unwillingness or inability to access the information and turn it into knowledge.
