Advancing technology with decreasing attention span!!!
The modern world cocaine: browsing
It was a normal day at gym. I finished my resistance training and then moved on to abs and side workout. I had to do 100 half crunches in sets of 4 or 5 however possible.I started doing, and counting in my mind and within 10 seconds I counted 50. I thought back, did I really do 50 crunches? or I skipped numbers in between. That’s when I realised how my attention span has dropped down and I have lost focus so badly. I barely did 50 crunches, they were just 10–15 and I miscounted. I tried again and yet again, I lost the count. This happened over and over again till I counted properly. I had to put in so much focus to keep the count right. I realised while doing my crunches, after just 3 or 4 of them, my mind wandered thinking about different things in life including my job, future prospects and various ideas I had in my mind. It was so tough to count till 100 in my mind without letting my mind go in different directions and loose count. This is when I realised how my attention span had been compromised.
With advancing technology, our attention span and focus capabilities have been decreasing constantly. To not let this happen, I dropped out of social media and deleted my account from all social media websites. I felt much better after letting go of the bad habit of scrolling through feeds for hours and then feeling guilty after that. I felt more energy and focus and was able to concentrate on better things. I thought that I had left these things behind and my focus was only going to increase in future. But, I could not be more wrong.
Being a software developer, I spend a great chunk of my time handling different tasks like coding, resolving tickets, attending meetings and learning about new technologies. As, I am a big fan of music, I work on most of the things while listening to music, and this is what most developers do around the globe. One accessory which you can find with each developer is great headphones. But, where do we listen music ?? Obviously on Youtube/Spotify or any other streaming websites. This changed rapidly with increase in connection speeds and unlimited data consumption limits. Earlier people used to download music and listen from a fixed library of songs. Apple I-pods were widely used. As the internet speed grew, streaming services came into the picture. The limited library of songs was now unlimited. One could browse through a large variety of songs from different nations and different genres. It was now hard to even find the song which you want to listen, because of having so many options. Most of the people spend about 70% of their time browsing through various websites than doing what they actually wanted to do because of so large variety of options.This is true for all the streaming websites — Netflix, Prime Video, Hotstar, Youtube, Spotify. All of these provide so large variety of options easily accessible. This creates difficulty in selecting and we spend hours browsing and searching that best option.
This is true for almost all the successful websites each serving different purposes. Some people spend a lot of their time on shopping websites looking for clothes/technology even though they do not want anything. This is the biggest breakthrough of virtual world, bringing everything to our fingertips. We can order anything from around the globe and we will get it delivered. It is such a great technology but the consequences it has on our attention span are mind boggling. Even grocery apps, which are just selling grocery are addictive making you scroll through a lot of available options. It is so hard to just order what you want and get out, because most of the times you don’t want anything but that dopamine hit you want. I realised how deeply this affected my brain, when I went on trips. On my trips to hills where days are busy, we spend much less time on technology. So, whenever I used to return from such trips, I used to feel a different level of waves in my mind, making me want to do some great and deep work rather than scrolling/browsing through various different websites.
Who could have thought that booking a flight/hotel can be so addictive, where you spend so much time thinking about which hotel to stay in, thinking about various issues. Seeing photos/reading reviews and finding the best possible option in the best possible price and spending hours doing this. Planning trips in itself has become one of the greatest pass time of people. This time increased even more in Covid, when human contact decreased and people started spending more time at home with themselves and what did we turn to ? Obviously technology.
In India, where there are big fat weddings, people spend a lot of time scrolling various social media websites trying to find the best outfit/the best photographer/the best destination/the best flower design, and not just for one function but for 3–4 functions. Everyone wants everything to be perfect for their big day and spend huge amount of time on it. I recently witnessed a wedding closely, and I found how deeply are people affected by browsing syndrome in trying to find that one perfect thing out of the large variety of available options. When I look back, it was hard to even decide which engineering college to get in with just 2 choices. Now, with so many options, I don’t see any possibility of finding that one best thing.
Learning anything properly requires deep work, understanding the concepts and then applying them properly. But, we rarely do any deep work. We do shallow things. We watch a bunch of videos where people tell us a lot of things, giving us that dopamine hit and then just slouch. That is the major reason why online courses can never beat books in enhancing someone’s knowledge. I can’t believe the other day, I spent 1 hour reading about various news around the world. Now some people will argue that, it was worth it for general knowledge, but I don’t think so. This is just simple addiction. The way news websites are designed, their major motive is to increase engagement.
Everything has become so easy, with advancing user interfaces. It is so easy in switching from one screen to another. I have been using mac from past 2 years and yesterday I tried using my linux laptop which does not offers a great UI but it surely does the same job. i was amazed to see that I spent an hour doing some productive work without changing my screen which is almost close to impossible while working on mac where just sliding fingers can take you to a completely new window. This is the major reason I hate mac and I argue that Mac can ever be productive for anyone. Switching to linux can surely increase someone’s productivity by many folds.
The number of people actually doing some deep work has decreased significantly. The older social media websites are now replaced by streaming websites and newer method of gaining attention. Technology makes something boring and then finds a way to find something more interesting. Initially, just text/posts were interesting. They were soon replaced by photos and in this era, the photos are also replaced with short videos. Those 8 second videos have been generating a huge amount of revenue and are responsible for building million dollar businesses. There have been many television series and videos by some extremely successful people who talk about the idea behind various developments in user interfaces and formats of various social media and streaming websites.
The incoming technology works in a way to actually make our life easy and seamless. The technology has made great strides in doing that. Soon enough, the virtual world will be a part of our life with smart glasses where just our eye movements or brain signals would be enough to do certain job.
Technology will surely grow and we would surely be more stupider….
