The Distraction Addiction: Getting the Information You Need and the Communication You Want, Without Enraging Your Family, Annoying Your Colleagues, and Destroying Your Soul - Hardcover

Pang, Alex

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316208264 ISBN 13: 9780316208260

Publisher: Little, Brown US, 2013

Synopsis

The question of our time: can we reclaim our lives in an age that feels busier and more distracting by the day? We've all found ourselves checking email at the dinner table, holding our breath while waiting for Outlook to load, or sitting hunched in front of a screen for an hour longer than we intended. Mobile devices and the web have invaded our lives, and this is a big idea book that addresses one of the biggest questions of our age: can we stay connected without diminishing our intelligence, attention spans, and ability to really live? Can we have it all? Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, a renowned Stanford technology guru, says yes. The Distraction Addiction is packed with fascinating studies, compelling research, and crucial takeaways. Whether it's breathing while Facebook refreshes, or finding creative ways to take a few hours away from the digital crush, this book is about the ways to tune in without tuning out.

About this title

About the Author

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang has spent the past twenty years studying people, technology, and the worlds they make. A professional futurist with a PhD in the history of science, Pang is a former Microsoft Research fellow, a visiting scholar at Stanford and Oxford universities, and a senior consultant at Strategic Business Insights, a Silicon Valley-based think tank. Pang's writings have appeared in Scientific American, American Scientist, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review, as well as in many academic publications.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Distraction Addiction

Getting the Information You Need and the Communication You Want, Without Enraging Your Family, Annoying Your Colleagues, and Destroying Your Soul

By Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

Little, Brown and Company

Copyright © 2013 Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-316-20826-0

CHAPTER 1

BREATHE

Before you read any farther, get your smartphone or iPad or laptop and checkyour e-mail. This is probably something you do multiple times a day; for many ofus, it's almost a reflex, and we hardly think about it. Productivity expertsrecommend checking work e-mail only a certain number of times a day, but lots ofpeople hit the new-mail notifier on the computer's menu bar or punch the GetMail button in the e-mail program every few minutes. It's an automatic, nervoushabit, like glancing at one's watch. Computers automate the practice and checkfor us several times an hour. If you have alerts running on multiple devices andseveral e-mail accounts, that can translate into hundreds of interactions withyour in-boxes every day.

So go check your mail. But this time, as you do, don't think about the messagesthat might be waiting in your in-box or about how you really should haveanswered those messages from last week. Try not to let your thoughts wander.Instead, pay attention to yourself. Try to observe what you do. Watch how thecomputer reacts to you and how you react to it.

In particular, notice how you breathe. Did you hold your breath? Chances are,you did, and that small unconscious habit is a window into a big world ofissues. It shows how a disembodied transfer of information that we think hasnothing to do with the physical world actually does have a bodily, physicaldimension. It illustrates how we don't use information technologies in the waywe use bicycle pumps or elevators or salad tongs; the technologies turn intoextensions of our minds and memories. They become entangled with us.

Linda Stone is a technology consultant, writer, and former Apple and Microsoftexecutive, the sort of person who can coin a phrase like continuous partialattention, which describes the way a person divides his focus among multipledevices, never giving any single one his complete attention. In 2008, shenoticed herself holding her breath while checking her e-mail. After observingpeople at cafés and conferences, asking friends, and doing some informalsurveys, she found that lots of people held their breath when they checked theire-mail.

Stone called the phenomenon e-mail apnea. The term is a play on sleep apnea, abreathing problem caused by either a physical obstruction in the airway thatkeeps air from reaching the lungs or a failure of the brain to signal the lungsto breathe. People with sleep apnea can stop breathing hundreds of times anight, sometimes for up to a minute. It's not usually fatal, but it cancontribute to fatigue and impaired cognition, and even to physical problems likeobesity and heart disease.

E-mail apnea is probably more pervasive than sleep apnea. Somewhere between 100million and 350 million people worldwide have sleep apnea; in the United States,it's estimated to be as common as heart disease, clinical depression, oralcoholism. But roughly two billion people worldwide, nearly a third of theEarth's population, use computers. Roughly two billion people have broadbandInternet access. More than twice that number have mobile phones.

It's not a stretch to assume that e-mail apnea, like sleep apnea, isn't verygood for us. Stone speculates that holding one's breath while checking mail istriggered by the fight-or-flight reflex. It reflects the anxiety many of us feelas we check for new messages in our in-boxes, not knowing what new fires we'llhave to put out or what problems we'll have to solve. We see variants of it inother electronic interactions: when you're waiting for a critical text message,for example, or when you unexpectedly have to update the printer driver in orderto print out the document you really need for a meeting that's starting in a fewminutes.

E-mail apnea is the kind of chronic condition that can make a person's life alittle more unpleasant, and make a person more unpleasant to others. Those sixbillion devices making all of us a bit more anxious do connect us to oneanother, after all. But we're barely aware of the problem.

E-mail apnea shines a light on an important but usually unrecognized dimensionin our relationships with information technology: the degree to which our minds,bodies, and technologies can become entangled. Researchers used to believe thatthe mind and consciousness emerge out of the brain's cognitive functions. But asthey've gotten to know more about how the brain works and how the mind reacts tonew technologies, some philosophers and cognitive scientists have begun to arguethat the boundaries between mind and body, and even the boundaries between themind, the body, and tools and surroundings, are pretty fuzzy. They argue thatit's wrong to think of the mind as being contained by the brain. Rather, theypropose a model of an extended mind, consisting of brain, body, devices, andeven social networks. The extended-mind thesis argues that we need to understandcognition, or thinking, as something that can happen anywhere in this system; aperson might internalize some cognitive functions in memorized rules or in hissubconscious, outsource others to technologies, or use a combination of memoryand device to get things done. Even something as apparently simple as readingturns out to be a vastly complicated ballet of unconscious processing andconscious action that's coordinated across body, book, eyes, and hands.

Homo sapiens has a very long history of entanglement; interactions withtechnologies change the way our bodies work and the way our minds work.Entanglement allows us to extend our physical and cognitive abilities; do thingsthat we could not do with our bodies alone; accomplish tasks more efficiently,easily, or quickly; and achieve the kind of mastery that lets us lose ourselvesin our work. It stretches the body schema, the unconscious mental map of whereone's body ends and the world starts. This is why a common statement like "myiPhone feels like part of my brain" actually expresses some deep truths.

The term entanglement combines several phenomena that scientists andphilosophers have studied separately. I prefer the term entanglementover other options for a couple of reasons. The term extended mind,coined by philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers, sounds a little toopositive. Extending one's cognitive ability or memory sounds like anunambiguously good thing; we need a term that acknowledges that some intimateengagements with technologies feel less like extensions and more likeconstraints. We also need to recognize that even the most positive extensionscome at a price; nothing in our relationships with information technologies iscompletely positive or negative.

Entanglement also suggests a degree of complexity and inevitability. Wenaturally distribute our cognitive capabilities across our brains and an arrayof devices, and we all use technologies to extend our physical capabilities;it's something we've been doing unconsciously almost since birth. We're stuckwith our devices. But you can choose whether you're tangled inyour devices, like a fly in a spider's web, or entangled with them, likea strand in a rope. The second creates something that's stronger than itsindividual parts. You know what happens to the fly.

The concept of entanglement might sound like a transhumanist fantasy, the sortof thing that leads to dreams of uploading human consciousness into computers.Certainly there are lots of people who would welcome a disappearance of theboundary between humans and machines; futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil, forexample, envisions a future in which robots and artificial intelligence are assmart as humans, nanoscale robots are able to map every atom in the brain, andmankind has moved from having a single consciousness in each person's head tohaving all minds distributed among bodies, robots, and the Cloud. But peoplealready talk about information technologies as if they were extensionsof themselves. Users often describe their mobile devices as being parts ofthemselves; they also describe themselves as being "addicted" to the Internet.

The popularity of these metaphors is illustrated by a pair of studies conductedby researchers from the University of Maryland. In 2010 and 2011, they recruitedcollege students in ten countries to stay offline and away from all media fortwenty-four hours. After putting away their cell phones, many reported feelinglike a part was missing. "I reached into my pocket at least thirty times to pullout a vibrating phone that wasn't there," one American student said. A studentin China said, "I just like touching my cell phone with my hands, which made mefeel full." One British student "actually craved having my phone, and routinelychecked my pockets for it every five minutes," while another described it as"very strange not to have my phone constantly connected to my hand." Manyreported feelings of withdrawal. "This day is simply composed by struggle andsuffering!" one Chinese student wailed, while another said, "After twenty-twohours living without any media, I can say without exaggeration, I was almostfreaking out." One American student reported that he "felt like a drug addict,tweaking for a taste of information," and another that "[I] needed my electronic'fix'" and that going offline "literally felt like some sort of withdrawal." ABritish student simply admitted, "I am an addict. I don't need alcohol, cocaineor any other derailing form of social depravity.... Media is my drug; without itI was lost." Psychologists in the United States now argue whether Internetaddiction (a term first used in the scientific literature in the late 1990s)should be recognized as a medical condition like alcoholism.

Thinking in terms of extended minds and entanglement helps clarify what's atstake when our relationships with information technologies go bad. As devicesmoved from tools we used at work or in class to things we lived with, theybecame more deeply integrated in our lives, and their potential to affect theshape and workings of our minds grew. When a device doesn't work well, it isn'tjust an inconvenience. You experience the malfunctioning device as a part of youand, at the same time, as something outside your control. It is like a limb thatwon't obey your commands. The problem with too many devices today is not thatthey are too engaging or addictive. The problem is that they are poorlydesigned.

Knowing what entanglement is and how it works is a big step toward usingcomputers in a more contemplative way. We can't begin to have betterrelationships with our devices until we have a clear picture of what betteris. Entanglement teaches us that we shouldn't worry about becoming toodependent on technologies. Throughout history, Homo sapiens has beeninseparable from technology.

Our protohuman ancestors first used stones as tools about two and a half millionyears ago; the Acheulean hand ax, a sharpened, pointed, versatile tool thatrequired substantial skill to make, was invented about 1.8 million years ago,and variations of it remained among our ancestors' most prized possessions formore than a million years. (I've held million-year-old hand axes thatstill have their edge. Imagine any present-day technology even lasting amillion years, much less still being usable and useful.)

Humans have literally never lived in a world without tools, and tool use inhumans evolved in concert with both biological and cognitive innovations. Ourancestors' brains—particularly the frontal lobes—expandeddramatically about the time they began to make and use tools. This neurologicalexpansion helped increase our ancestors' capacity to form abstract ideas abouthow objects could be used; to remember those uses; and to teach them to others.The production of stone tools in flint-rich lands for use in hunting or fishingelsewhere also provides the first evidence of our ancestors' planning for theirfutures.

Our species' external features have also changed along with our use of tools.The development of bipedalism created an opportunity for our ancestors' hands tospecialize in feeling and grasping rather than walking. This in turn made itpossible for protohuman hands to become more tool-friendly; evolution selectedfor hands that had shorter fingers, and nails rather than claws. (Recent studiesshow that apes are unable to make hand axes and other stone tools because theirwrists are too stiff and their fingers too short.) However, these evolutionarychanges also made humans more dependent in some ways: they needed tools forhunting and fighting, and materials such as leather for protecting the skin fromrough surfaces.

For the past couple hundred thousand years, humans have eaten more meat thangorillas or chimpanzees, but our species hasn't developed the sharp teeth orfearsome speed of other predators. In fact, although meat has come to occupy alarger part of our species' diet, our teeth and jaws have become weaker.Why? Teeth haven't evolved to tear living flesh from moving prey. Evolutionselected for teeth that allowed humans to more efficiently consumecooked meat; animals were killed using technologies like spears andtraps, and then the meat was cooked over fires. We're also less furry than ourprimate cousins, and we walk and balance differently, allowing us to make use oftwo other ancient technologies: clothes and shoes.

The human body took shape in a world where arrows, spears, traps, and knivesbecame the technological equivalent of killer jaws and massive haunches; humanscould rely on fire to soften and sterilize food. Technologies have changedmankind's environment and diet, and human evolution reflects that.

The evidence of cognitive entanglement is limited, because archaeologists havebeen looking for it for a much shorter period, and physical evidence ofcognitive changes is ephemeral. One form that we can trace over the past twelvethousand years, though, is the discovery, cultivation, and use of psychoactivedrugs.

In their natural state, the plants coca and khat are low-level stimulants, andthey probably helped humans for whom cooked food and clothing were novelties toignore hunger and maintain alertness during long hunts. Drugs became strongerand more refined with the rise of civilization, trade, migration, and imperialexpansion. Old World paleobotanical sources (microfossils and preserved seeds,for example) and artifacts like ceremonial bowls and burners suggest that byabout 10,000 BCE, peoples in Asia were chewing betel nuts as a stimulant.Ephedra and cannabis were cultivated by Chinese farmers by 4000 BCE, while theirEuropean brethren took to growing opium. Two thousand years later, nicotine andalkali-based hallucinogens were in use in the Middle East and Europe. Cannabisspread along caravan routes from China to central Asia and India and thence toAfrica, while opium moved in the opposite direction, into Asia and the NearEast.

In the ancient Americas, "plants of the gods" and rituals for achieving alteredstates of consciousness were pervasive. Andean peoples prepared ritual drinksmade from the hallucinogenic San Pedro cactus from 1300 BCE, and coca andcaffeine-rich guayusa were grown and traded from at least 500 CE. Ayahuasca, the"vine of the souls," was popular in the Amazon. In and around the Caribbean, asnuff called yopo was widely used; in low doses it is a stimulant, whilein high doses it becomes a hallucinogen. Central America, with its rich tropicalforests, was a veritable pharmacopoeia. The Maya in what is now Guatemala wereusing sacred mushrooms like teonanácatl as early as 500 BCE, and shamansin the Mexican region of Oaxaca developed rituals featuring brews made frommushrooms, ololiuqui (a kind of nightshade), and peyote from 100 CE.

Other entanglements developed with the domestication of animals and the rise ofagriculture, the growth of urban settlements, and the development of complexsocieties. The growth of long-distance trade and the appearance of far-flungpolitical entities created a need for reliable communication and record-keeping,and that stimulated the development and use of writing in Asia, Mesoamerica, andthe Near East. Writing supported social enterprises of unprecedented complexity,but it also had a powerful effect on the human mind. As Walter Ong memorably putit, "Writing is a technology that restructures thought."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Distraction Addiction by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang. Copyright © 2013 Alex Soojung-Kim Pang. Excerpted by permission of Little, Brown and Company.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Little, Brown US
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0316208264
• ISBN 13: 9780316208260
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 304