February 27, 2018 • 50 mins
Are apps, smart phones and social media sucking us dry? As Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick discuss in this two-part Stuff to Blow Your Mind exploration, the modern media experience certainly depletes our attention. Learn all about the ramifications of this dystopian reality, as well as some tips to combat these neurological vampires.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
A day in the life of Alice. Alice works at
the plant. Alice has a strange pay system at her
job at the plant. Instead of getting weekly paychecks, every day,
her employer deposits one seventh of her weekly income into
her bank account. She makes what passes for an average
median wage in the New U s territories, so this
(00:22):
means about a hundred and twenty one credits shows up
in her bank account every day. It's Saturday if she's
off work, and she's out of food at her apartment,
so Alice decides to go to the grocery store to
buy a few things to make herself some lunch and dinner.
On our way walking to the store, she sees another
woman walking an extremely cute puppy. Alice goes up to
(00:43):
ask the woman if she can pet the puppy. The
woman says, okay, but it will cost you three credits.
Alice thinks about it for a second, then makes a
few swipes on her identipad and sends this woman the money.
She pets the puppy. Of course, she enjoys the experience
because hey, puppies are great. On the way to the store,
she stops four other dog walkers and pays them each
(01:06):
three credits to pet their dogs. Now, dogs are still
great when you can find them. Petting dogs is still wonderful,
but Alice notices that each time she stops to pet
a dog, she gets less happiness out of it than
she did the last time. Having spent fifteen credits on dogs,
she's now down to a hundred and six credits for
the day. Halfway to the store, she walks past the
(01:26):
scene of an auto car accident ambulances a peacekeeper detail.
She doesn't really want to look, and she feels guilty,
but she can't help it. The feeling of curiosity is
so overwhelming she has the irresistible urge to peek and
see if anybody got hurt, but she gets caught. An
armored peacekeeper walks up and says, ma'am, I noticed you
(01:48):
watching the scene. There's a surcharge of twenty six credits
if you want to do that. Reluctantly, Alice hands over
the payment and then spends a while watching the scene.
Now she's down to eighty credits of the day, and
on top of that, she feels pretty guilty about snooping
on the wreck in the first place. On the way
to the store, she has more encounters like this. She
stops to watch a couple having a heated argument a
(02:10):
parking lot. They charge her forty credits to watch, and
all it does is make her feel bad. Then outside
the grocery store, a vendor is selling crystal lattees. She
buys one for five credits and stands there drinking it.
It is a truly delicious crystal latte, so she buys
another one, and then another one, and then three more.
(02:30):
By the time she's done, she is highly overcaffeinated, feels
twitchy and anxious, and has a horrible stomach ache, and
she only has fifteen credits left to buy groceries with.
This is not enough for her to make what she
was planning for lunch and dinner, let alone enough to
save what she needs each day to pay for rent
her virtual reality bill, or save for that Ganymede Mec holiday.
(02:51):
She's been dreaming of what happened Alice in this story.
At every stage of every part of the she was
doing what she wanted to do in the moment. Nobody
coerced her at all, nobody forced her to do any
of that stuff, and yet everything has gone wrong. Her
financial plans for the day have been completely destroyed. What happened?
(03:18):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how stup
dot com. Hey you, welcome to stuff to blow your mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
what we just read was an attempt to sketch out
an illustration of an idea that we're going to be
(03:40):
talking about for a couple of episodes here. This is
going to be the first of a two part episode
about the attention economy, the technosphere, and the war for
your eyeballs. And one of the core ideas that we're
gonna be talking about today is the idea that we
should start thinking about our attention, what we pay attention to,
(04:01):
as a finite resource that has to be invested in
things with deliberation and care in order for us to
get what we want out of life. If you think
back over the story we told about Alice and simply
take out the money, remove the credits from the scenario,
is it a day well spent? Is the story? Okay?
If you take out all the money she spent staring
(04:23):
at the at the wreck, at the argument, at the puppies,
at the Latte's um. It's still not quite right, is it. Yeah.
The great thing about this little story is that we
have these sort of fun dystopian sci fi elements, but
at heart we have a very dystopian idea that matches
up with our our daily life, our daily struggles over attention. Yeah, exactly,
(04:48):
because even if you take all of the money out
of the story, she wasn't spending money, but she's spending
something that cannot be replaced, which is her time and
what she devotes her mind to. Yeah, thinking about that
purchase that she wants to make, thinking about the situation
that she's a mere bystandard too. Right, It's a distraction
(05:09):
from whatever else it is you want to do with
your life. Because our attention is truly finite. It might
feel like an infinite and value uncoupled resource to us, right,
because there's just so much of it for us to give,
and we squander it so much of the time, and
there's no explicit dollar value attached to it. But think
about it like this. You do work so that you
(05:32):
can get a paycheck that will number one by you
the basic necessities of survival, But then what do you
work for on top of that? It's because you want
to have money in your paycheck that will allow you
to spend your free time devoting your attention to things
you want. You like to spend your attention on family,
(05:52):
on friends, on books and movies and enjoyable meals, and
sports and the outdoors and meditation and how abbies and
personal projects and all of all of that is attentional desires.
The reason we want to have free time is because
we want to be able to spend our attention on
these things. And we at least subconsciously realize that we
(06:14):
only have a limited amount of attention to spend. Our attention,
quite literally is our lives. And over the next couple
of episodes, we're gonna try to offer some evidence and
make an argument that we increasingly live in a world
of incredibly powerful, highly evolved attention vampires that we have
(06:35):
thoroughly integrated into our daily lives and allowed to just
suck away our attention at a massive scale without us
even noticing it. Because do you ever realize that you've
been sitting there scrolling through your Facebook news feed mindlessly
for half an hour when you really meant to be
doing something else, Or do you ever suddenly snap, as
(06:57):
if from a trance from watching a long string of
random YouTube videos, not videos that you went to YouTube
specifically to watch, but videos that have been served to
you as related content, compulsively clicking on the next video
or allowing it to auto play, like you're just hypnotized. Yeah. Like,
I often have this situation where I feel like if
(07:20):
I were a primitive human, I would be seated and
say a clearing um, perhaps you know, next to a tree,
and I would be working on some craft. Perhaps I'm
I'm chipping away at what will be an arrowhead or
the head of a spear. And then occasionally I'll look
up from my craft and I'll look around at the
(07:40):
surrounding territory, you know, just to make sure that the
rival tribe is not attacking, that there are no predators
creeping up on me, and then continue with my work.
But in my day to day environment, it's not merely
the physical surroundings that I had that I gaze up
from and look at. It's the all the social media
um aspects of my environment, like gazing over at at Facebook,
(08:03):
at Twitter, at Reddit, at at what have you, many
of which are tied to my job. I'm looking at
feeds for the podcast feeds for work, and yet it
is it is getting in the way of my my
actual job. But you often get derailed. I bet, don't
you Like you go to Twitter or you go to
Facebook because it's something you have to do for your job,
(08:23):
and say, I need to check the page for X,
or I need to upload a link to why. But
then that news feeds there isn't it, Or some things
are scrolling in and you get kind of sucked in,
or sometimes you're not even in there for any other reason,
but you feel this kind of inexplicable tug. Do you
ever notice yourself getting derailed from important or interesting projects
(08:46):
they frequent unnecessary compulsion to check Twitter and see what
happened on it? Or do you ever have that feeling
that suddenly a whole evening is gone by and you
didn't really do anything productive or enjoyable. You just had
a long sustained session of consuming digital content without making
any conscious choices or decisions, and all you're left with
(09:10):
is this hollow feeling of regret. What happened to my night? Yeah?
Sometimes it's something is is nonsensical too, is just a
sudden need to explore the filmography of Rod Steiger or
something that added fact. You know, it's like it's just
like I wonder what his big film was, and then
and then going out. Yeah, like the encyclopedic rabbit holes,
(09:32):
going one Wikipedia link to another. That can happen too.
And this is what we're gonna be talking about for
these next couple of episodes. So I came across a
startling fact that's often cited by a technology ethicis that
we're gonna be talking about in these couple of episodes.
A guy named Tristan Harris. You might have seen him
in the news over the past couple of years because
he's been leading this new movement. Will be discussing a
(09:53):
little bit. But Harris often cites the fact that the
average person with the smartphone checks their phone hundred and
fifty times a day. Yeah, well that doesn't that doesn't
sound too far off. I I shudder to think that
could be true. But that might be true about me.
I don't know, but I would be scared to see
(10:13):
the number if somebody kept track of how often I
checked my phone, because it begins to feel like coming
up for air. It's just something that you almost do
as a reflex. You know, I'm walking down the hallway, Well,
nothing to do but check my social media. Yeah, if
that number is true, And if you're in that average
band and you check your phone about a hundred and
(10:34):
fifty times a day, think about what that does to
your day. Even if you only spend an average of
thirty seconds each time looking at your phone, that's seventy
five minutes of every day staring at your phone. But
we all know it's not just thirty seconds, right, Sometimes
it's thirty seconds, sometimes maybe a little bit less. Sometimes
you open the Facebook app or the Instagram app and
(10:56):
it turns into ten minutes, twenty minutes, or an hour.
Why is this happening and how is this affecting us?
One of the funny things about this is the fact
that we're using in this conversation the word phone. I
know we've had this talk before about how like one time, Robert,
you were like, it's not really a phone, is it? No?
(11:16):
I yeah, I have. I have gotten in the habit
of trying to refer to it as a tiny pocket
computer because it feels far more accurate than saying phone,
because phone sounds utilitarian. I have my phone in case
an important call comes through. It's a tool for getting
in touch with the hospital or something like. But it's not.
It's a tiny pocket computer full of data streams and
(11:38):
games and various social media bells and whistles and and
ultimately also it's just this portal for anxiety, you know,
like all the various, all sorts of bad news can
come flying through this black little screen. And yet we
we want to be next to it at all times,
you know, we we need to be there when when
the bad news comes to calling. We have talked about
(12:00):
how it should be called a tiny pocket computer, and
that would be much more accurate. But I also think
people should run this experiment. Try this exercise. Anytime somebody
says a sentence about their smartphone and they're not actually
talking about like a landline telephone, if they're talking about
a smartphone, replace the word phone with the word god
and see how the sentence sounds actually. Just search Twitter
(12:23):
for some my phone statements and turned up things like
I hate going out when my God isn't fully charged,
my God died mid inst alive, It's been a big day.
High school really is a waste of time. I just
sit here on my God all day. Now. I wonder
if we could give the god a proper name like
phone Hovah or something. That would be kind of fun,
(12:44):
but no, it would more accurately represent the I mean,
the the value in time and attention that we give
this device. I think it is not exaggerating at all
to say that we now have a religious level of
devotion to these personal devices that are Internet connected. We
consult them in a way that if we if we
(13:04):
were suddenly exposed to this world, if we hadn't been
eased into it over the past, you know, ten years
or whatever, if we just popped into this future and
saw everybody checking their phones and staring at their phones
all the time, we we would think this was absurd.
We would think this was a ridiculous way to live. Yeah,
And I mean I have moments where I do snap
out of it and for a few minutes anyway, and
(13:26):
realize this is this is crazy that we're all pouring
ourselves into these devices all the time, and it it's
it's beyond mere convenience. And yet when people bring this
up in a satirical context, I often see people making
this point. Everybody's staring at their phones all the time.
It is treated as an indictment of the behavior of
people and not an indictment of the design of the technology.
(13:50):
If you notice that it's like, oh, all these stupid
people staring at their phones all the time? Yeah, wake up,
people are are often at times, there's there's sort of
this this this this anti youth vibe to it as well, like, yeah,
there's millennials won't stop looking at the fields. But I
think we all have seen enough examples to know that
humans of all ages are susceptible to the the the
(14:13):
sirens song of the smartphone. Right later in this pair
of episodes, we're going to be discussing a lot of
the specific ways that our technologies that are personal devices
and the apps within them are absolutely totally designed to
hijack our attention and make us behave this way. I
think it's not because people are stupid, it's not because
(14:35):
they're weak. It's how we are. We have certain vulnerabilities
in our brains, and these devices and the software within
them exploit those vulnerabilities brilliantly. Yeah, we have just we
have crafted an ever evolving neural parasite that we all
pay top dollar for. I want to discuss a couple
(14:56):
of findings about the effects of having of like phone
and interruptions, the interruptions they provide on our attention, and
the way this happens in our lives. Before we dig
more into the meat to the topic. Just in, Robert,
I think you might have seen the study. I think
maybe we talked about it. There was research out of
u T. Austin just last year in that found something
pretty weird. People who had their smartphone within reach did
(15:20):
worse on tests of cognitive performance than people who had
it in another room. This is even if the smartphone
was turned off. If it's visible or within an arm's length,
it was distracting enough to deduct from our effective I
Q and I have anecdotally noticed this in my own life.
(15:41):
I'll be working and having trouble focusing on work, even
if I'm not actually checking my phone, I will be
in a more distracted state of mind if I've got
my phone on me, And if I merely take my
phone to a different room of the house and shut
the door and then go back to my work, I
can focus more. I'm serious. I have found this as well.
(16:01):
If I can stick it in a drawer now, as
as I am saying, this as I am speaking into
the microphone. My phone is situated over here to the side.
I have it an airplane mode so that it won't
interrupt me. But still it's there in my peripheral vision,
like kind of staring at me with its with its
dark screen, and there's this this sense that's still this
is this idea that it might light up at any moment,
(16:24):
I might get some sort of an alert, even though
it should not be able to give it to me,
right yeah, even though it's not doing anything to you,
it's in your It's in your consciousness at some level.
Right in the same way that somebody's god belief becomes
a part of their conscience, the presence of your phone
becomes a part of your situational awareness. It's always lingering there.
(16:45):
It's always a potential, right yeah. And sometimes the potential
is just for mundane stuff to happen, like, oh, the
doorbell will ring at my house. That means a package
has been delivered, you know, and it's just I don't
need that information. It's just you know, a box of
of cat food. I don't need to be there, and
no additional plans need to be made. But yet the
(17:06):
delivery of cat food has interrupted my daily workflow. Yeah.
The English psychologist Glen Daniel Wilson I've read, has shown
that the distraction threat of things in the digital realm,
So like the example would be an unread message sitting
in your inbox, you're aware of that, and you've got
that distraction threat on your mind. It can lower our
(17:27):
effective i Q by about ten points. But then think
about what happens when you actually have the distractions coming in,
Like if you've got notifications turned on on your phone.
Interruptions matter a lot to your ability to focus on
projects and activities you care about. When a notification interrupts you,
it's not just the time you spend looking at the
(17:49):
interruption that you lose. Interruptions degrade the quality of your
focus on your primary activity. Some psychologists call this quote
a task shifting penalty. Robert, I'm sure you've felt this before, right,
I feel this all the time. Yeah. You get into
a certain workflow and then something pops you out of it, right,
and that's and that's when, or if you actually get
(18:10):
back into the task at all. According to a two
thousand five University of California, Irvine study by Gloria Mark
and colleagues. Regaining your original focus on a project or
task after an interruption takes people, on average over twenty
five minutes. And if that's they actually resume the task
on the same day they were interrupted. Sometimes they don't
(18:31):
resume it for the whole day. So what happens when
you get when you're working on something or you're focusing
on something, is if you're gonna get interrupted, it takes
you longer to get back into the zone. And that's
if you even pick the task back up, and sometimes
it will take you a while to do that. Interruptions
are more than just the content of the interruption. They
(18:52):
totally degrade the quality of our engagement with every goal
pursuit we care about. You know, this reminds me of
some some research I was putting in on another topic
where an individual touched on the nature of torture and
one of the psychological aspects of torture is making the
torture recipient unsure about what is going to happen at
(19:13):
any given time. And this is a power that we
have handed not only over to the torture but also
to the smartphone and various other devices in our life. Well, yeah,
we were just recently reading some stuff about pain and
the role that that uncertainty and anxiety plays in the
amplification of the sensation of pain. So anyway, given all
(19:34):
of this, I have to start wondering in a quite
literal sense. I I don't mean this as an exaggeration.
Are we currently living in an attention dystopia? All right?
You think about that while we take a quick break,
and then we'll come back and try to regain focus.
Than alright, we're back now. I think we should think
(19:55):
about the idea of attention. We've already discussed that attention
essential is our lives. Attention is what we value in
our lives. When you think about the life you want
to live, what you really mean is you want to
be able to spend your attention on certain things, right, Yeah,
Because I mean when you start thinking about what attention is,
it's more than just looking at something or thinking about
(20:18):
something momentarily. It is Uh, it's it's crucial to what
I've seen referred to as the selective directedness of our
mental lives, right, having a having a will for how
you use your mind. Yeah, I mean, in some models
of consciousness that we've discussed on the show even center
on the manner in which humans utilize their attentive powers.
As such, there are multiple philosophical arguments for the nature
(20:41):
of human attention and the reasons for our limited process
and capability. Yeah, but ultimately it's kind of like the
primitive example I gave earlier. You know, there's no doubt
that we evolve to handle various streams of stimuli at
once and to apply selective attention based on their importance.
This is why we can go to a party and
you can tune out all the other voices in the
(21:02):
party except for the person you're talking to, or that
you can do the exact opposite, tune out the person
you're supposed to be talking to and listen to a
more interesting conversation in the vicinity. But one thing you'll
notice if you do that is it really degrades what
you take away from any of those experiences. That's so
like if you were trying to talk to one person
in a crowded room, you can focus on them and
(21:24):
pay attention to them, But if you're trying to switch
between paying attention to them and eavesdropping on somebody nearby,
you're not really going to get a very good sense
of either one, right, But still there are limits to
what you can encounter in a like a physical real
world scenario. You know, even if the tribal meeting is
is rather crowded, there's only so much you're gonna be
(21:45):
able to hear over the shouting and of course the
sacrifices to to ug uh you know, I mean, it's uh,
there are going to be limits in place. There's the
world of multiple stimuli streams and fixed and moving objects
that we evolve to thrive in, and then there's this
world we've made a place of over stimulation, over choice
in myriad voices to command our psyche. This is a
(22:07):
really good point because we could easily think of the
virtual world we've created, the world within our phone operating systems,
or computer operating systems, or the web, especially the modern web,
which is so highly designed focused, or our social media
apps and all that. We could think of that as
an extension of our world. It's just like the world
(22:29):
is going into this virtual space. But I don't think
it's like that. This is not an extension of our
physical lives in the physical space. It is a different
world with different properties, and it operates on different rules
and the rules it operates on. As we're about to
get into our the monopolization of your attention primarily, that
(22:49):
is the ultimate goal of most of this stuff we
interact with in the information age. The attention devouring technosphere,
i would say, is not an accident. It's by design.
These apps and devices are specifically engineered to suck out
as much of our attention as they can get. And
you know this, rightly, feel it. You can see that
(23:10):
in every piece of clickbait headlines, right you know, or
anything like that. It's trying to get your eyeballs. People
in the industry talk about the idea of eyeballs. They
want eyeballs on things. Yeah, there is kind of the
the content product, and then there is the the the
app product, the interface product, and all of them are saying, hey,
(23:30):
look at me, look at me, do this, interact with me,
use me more, read me more, consumedly more, and ultimately
probably purchase more. Right exactly, so we should ask the
question why, like why are so many highly calibrated technological
monsters vying for our attention in the first place? And
this is an interesting question. One paper we might want
(23:51):
to mention is that back In two thousand twelve, the
M I. T economists Eric Brynjolfsson and U he Oh
wrote a paper called the Attention Economy. It was essentially
geared toward trying to quantify the economic value, the money
value provided by free content and services on the Internet,
because obviously the abundance of all these free services, you know,
(24:12):
websites that you go to for free, apps that you
use for free, all that stuff that's offered online is
providing value to people because they're choosing to spend their
attention on it, and that value isn't getting directly measured
in the economy the way the value of many other
consumer services would be. Like if you want to measure
the value of a bottle of drain, Oh, it's the
(24:35):
value is what people go to the store to spend
on it. Right, But the consumer is not spending money
on these apps and devices and stuff, but they are
spending something something that has some kind of value that
we need a way to measure. Well, it sounds an
awful lot like engagement to get into sort of the
business terms of websites and and even podcasting, right, The
(24:59):
idea that you want you want to user engagement, right,
and the user, the user or the consumer. One of
the things we've got to understand is that the user,
the consumer of these information services, these free internet services
like Facebook or any any digital media, even what we do,
the user is not really the customer because they're not
(25:19):
paying money. The customer is going to be the advertiser,
and the user is the product. Essentially, you cultivate a
product by getting eyeballs, and then you sell access to
those eyeballs that you gather to an advertiser in any way.
That paper I mentioned earlier, those two economists estimated that
(25:40):
over at the time, this was back in two thousand twelve, quote,
the increase in consumer surplus created by free internet services
was quote over one hundred billion dollars per year in
the US alone. There's an enormous amount of perceived value
or wealth being offered in these free internet services. But
somebody that they exist mainly because we live at a
(26:04):
time when your attention alone is worth money to somebody else.
So you mentioned the idea of ad supported media. Most
of the internet and online services that you uh that
you use are offered to you for free, and it
doesn't have to be this way, right, We could have
a tech economy where everything that you got over the
Internet or through your devices had a fee to access, right,
(26:27):
Do you ever think about why it's not that way? Well,
I mean both. Part of it is that we have
we have grown accustomed to getting things for free on
the Internet, and that applies to everything from newspaper articles
to music, and that's been one of the that's been
one of the hurdles for for online business to try
and figure out how to get people to pay for things. Again,
do you think free music sharing through piracy and Napster
(26:51):
and all that in the early days of the Internet
helped shape the free ad supported information content of the
Internet today, Like people got trained on the idea that
it wasn't really stealing because you know, I can't remember
who this is. But there was once a comedian I
heard doing a comedy act about those old piracy commercials
that are like, you wouldn't steal a car, why would you?
(27:13):
Why would you steal music? But the comedian said, you know,
I would steal a car if all I had to
do was touch the car, and then an instant copy
of the car would be created and I could have
it and the original person could keep their car, and
you know, it created the sense because it was digital
information that could be copied without consequence, that you weren't
(27:35):
really taking from anybody. You're just getting a copy of
a thing. Yeah, it's out there, and all I am
doing is breathing it in as if it were air. Yeah.
And so it's like trained people on this idea that that,
you know, information should be free, and as has been said,
information wants to be free, but it's led to this
world where Okay, to produce information, you have to spend money, right,
(27:59):
Like anything that is made on the internet. If you
want to run a website, if you want to write
an article, if you want to create a podcast, if
you want to create a video, almost none of this
can be done for free. You have to invest in it.
And so that's got to be paid for somehow. And
so the way everything works, including us here, is that
you pay for things by running ads. That's right, I mean,
(28:19):
And that's not even getting into the idea that people
are putting their time into creating things, and that time
has to come out of your life and you and
the individual the individual creator has bills to pay and
a route to maintain, and needs to have food eat, right,
and so the way technology companies and digital media companies
can pay for themselves is to run advertisements. And the
(28:42):
way they can increase the amount of money they're making
uh and that they can charge advertisers is basically twofold.
I think one is simply by selling more exposure to
your eyeballs to the user's eyeballs. The more attention you
spend on a platform, the more advertising that platform can
show you. So if you go to Facebook and they
get you to stay on Facebook twice as long, they
(29:04):
can show you twice as many ads, so they can
charge the advertisers that much more. You increase the supply
of attention that can be sold to the customer, which
is the advertiser or The other main way media companies
can make money off your attention is by gathering data
about you. The more you use a social media site
(29:24):
like Facebook or whatever, the more social media, the more
that social media site knows about who you are and
where you live, and what you're interested in and what
you'll spend money on and so forth. And the more
it knows about who you are, the better they know
how to sell you stuff. You might have noticed that
in the early days of the Internet when you were
getting targeted ads, they were bad. You. I remember the
(29:46):
days when I was getting targeted ads on Facebook that
were for ridiculous things I would never want. But over time,
targeted advertising has gotten a lot better, hasn't it. Oh,
it's gotten really really good. It's like to the point
where you you look up an item on Amazon on
you're thinking about thinking about getting it. For instance, recently
I looked at the blu ray of the movie Screamers,
(30:06):
A Wonderful Fishman, which one the one from the nineties
with Peter Weller or the no, that's a great film too,
but though this is the Fishman movie and the Italian one, yeah,
the Italian one. And I wasn't actually gonna buy, you know,
but I looked it up. I was curious to see
if the blue, if the blue ray was available, And
then it seems like every day for the following week,
when I first went onto Facebook, i'd be hit with
(30:26):
that Amazon targeted ad for that very blu ray disc.
Now that's the easy part. You've already looked that up.
They've sold that data to somebody else, or they're using
that data to run targeted ads for you on another platform.
That's pretty straightforward. It gets creepier though, what about what
about when they show you ads for things that you've
never looked up as far as you can recall, but
(30:47):
they really are in your wheelhouse. Yeah, yeah, I'm into that,
Like it's another Fishman movie that I'm not familiar with,
and or it's a Fishman comic, or it's a an
All Gillman, you know, doom that band, and I'm like, oh,
I had no idea, but that sounds like the kind
of thing would be into, right. So this is another
reason the providers of these technology platforms want your attention.
(31:07):
It's because the data is valuable to them directly. The
more you use the platform, the more attention you give them,
the more data about you you give them, and the
more they can target you in the future, the more
they learn about how to glazer in on exactly what
you'll click on and buy. So it's also it's valuable
for that reason. It's also valuable as the data is
(31:28):
valuable as a commodity that can be sold to third
parties that want to know things about you in order
to target sales or advertising. And actually, I'd put in
a third motivation for capturing more attention, and Robert, I
wonder what you think about this. This doesn't get cited
as much, but I would argue a third major motivation
for commanding your attention on a platform is habit formation.
(31:51):
What do we usually reflexively do with our attention when
we've got free time. We do what we've done before, right,
that's right. We fall into the hal bit of going
on Facebook, or for me, one of the worst is
just going into my my email, not to actually read
meaningful emails, but to clear out garbage, to clear out
not even necessarily spam, but the sort of promotional emails
(32:15):
that I think you signed up for, that I signed
up for, that I'm for some reason, I'm still like,
I don't want to actually unsubscribe, but I'm also not
going to read them, but they just keep coming. I'm
just sort of maintaining this weed garden of of crap,
and it's taking away from my day. And that's a
habit you formed. We are creatures of habit. We mostly
(32:35):
do what we've trained ourselves to do in the past.
Most of our behaviors are not novel. Most of the time,
we tend to shop at the stores we've shopped at before.
Most of the time, we go to the restaurants we've
gone to before, and we do the same thing in
our digital spaces. Every time you make a decision about
what to do with your attention, you are training your
(32:56):
brain to make similar decisions or the same decision in
the future, which is kind of a daunting thought, isn't it.
I think that's absolutely true. But you need to think
about the fact that every time you act, even in
trivial activities throughout the day, you are altering the source
code of your own brain to encourage your future self
(33:17):
to behave more like your behaving right now. And of
course all this is even more nefarious when you realize
that not everyone is selling a product. A lot of
people are selling an idea or a or or or
some sort of vision of reality, a political ideal, a
social ideal. They are attempting to tell you how to
(33:38):
feel and how to think. But that all depends, of course,
on continued access to that consumer of information. Right. So,
if you are a platform like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, any
of that, and you want people's attention, it's it's important
to help people form patterns of habit in which they
learn to give that attention to you. They'll be more
likely to keep giving it to you in the future
(33:59):
because it's become familiar and easy and habitual. It's what
they've done before, so it's what they'll do again now.
I want to come back and say that we want
to be clear. I think that not every bid for
your attention is bad or evil. Right. There are lots
of things we do with our attention that we consider
good uses of our attention. And there's lots of for example,
(34:21):
ads supported media that obviously we think is worthwhile and
worth having. I mean, I listen to podcasts that run
ads in order to pay the bills and keep producing
the podcast. I'm fine with that if I care about
the podcast and want to make that decision deliberately with
my time, right Yeah. There's nothing evil about that, right,
I Mean, that's just we've recognized that's part of the
(34:42):
economics of how the content we like and care about
is produced. What becomes more nefarious is when we find
ourselves using technological services and consuming content compulsively or impulsively
reflexively without really making a decision about something we want
to consume or that we care about, right yeah, Yeah,
(35:03):
where it's just this click click, click, it's just this uh,
it's it's not even becomes a situation where you're not
even really absorbing information. You're just dipping into the information
stream exactly. Yeah, you are becoming a passive receiver of
what is being fed to you by a platform that
you have habitually formed an information consumption relationship with. You're
(35:28):
on Facebook, and it's just streaming into you. Yeah, and
and there's so there's this like informational context to it,
but also there's there's a tactile context to it as well.
You know, the swipe of fingers over the over the screen,
and then the the acknowledgement that you have clicked something,
you've checked something off of this list. In a way,
I think we should take a quick break and pay
(35:49):
the bills with some advertising, and then we should come
back and look at some actual data on the way
people use their attention on digital devices and how they
feel about that. Thank alright, we're back now. You might
have seen this idea of like the distractions and the
attention war come up in the in the news over
the past year or two with respect to technology, apps
(36:11):
and social media. And one reason you might have seen
something about this is that words been spreading about a
particular movement and nonprofit organization called Time Well Spent, which
was founded by a guy I mentioned earlier, a former
Google employee named Tristan Harris, and a number of other people.
And these people were not the first to point out
that the media are controlling the economy of our attention
(36:33):
in negative ways, but having worked in the modern tech sector,
I think they've got a more specific message about the way,
for example, your phone and the apps on it are
not just sub optimal, but possibly really driving your life
and the culture in general into an extremely unhealthy space
that runs contrary to our goals and what we want
(36:55):
our lives to be. And so they've been doing a
lot of media interviews recently in the past year so
and so I think maybe we should take a look
at some at some time well spent information and data.
That sounds good job. This sounds like time well spent alright,
So how good are we really at spending our attention
in ways that make us happy and give us a
sense of fulfillment. Maybe you're out there listening and you're like, now,
(37:17):
I don't buy it. I use my attention exactly how
I want, you know, when I use Facebook, it's just
it's because I want to do that. I'm living my
own life. Yeah, or you know, or you you sort
of qualify the kind of content. Well, I use it
to keep in touch with my friends. My real friends
are my real family, and it's about maintaining that social network.
And there's some truth to an argument like that. Oh sure, yeah,
we don't want to totally demonize any particular app. I mean,
(37:40):
we've been saying a lot of negative stuff about Facebook
and related apps, but there's no reason to totally demonize
an app to its core. But we should be aware
of what its capabilities are and how we're interacting with
it on average. So there's an iOS app called Moment,
which is a device usage tracker, and what it does
is it logs how much time you spend using your
(38:02):
iPhone or your iPad and which apps you spend the
most of your time on. And so the Moment app
has partnered with time Well Spent what I just spent
before and the associated UH nonprofit, the Center for Humane
Technology to gather data about how much time people spend
on various apps and how they feel about spending their
time that way. So to be clear, this is something
(38:24):
where the user can see how they're spending their time on. Right,
So the app says, hey, did you know you spent
x a number of minutes on this app and this
many times a day, and what it shows you your usage.
I like this idea because it reminds me of how
with a lot of the modern video games we have,
they'll tell you how many hours you've sunk into the game,
but you spent twenty seven days playing. Yeah. It's it's
(38:47):
generally horrifying to read because because it's the sobering moment
where you're like, oh my god, I spent that much
time playing this video game or any video game or
anything that isn't uh, you know of of of really
intrinsic value in my life. Yeah. So, there was an
initial study conducted in a pool of two hundred thousand
iPhone users on this this moment uh and time well
(39:09):
spent partnership. And when you look at the results, there
is an immediately apparent and overwhelming correlation between apps that
we spend more time with and a feeling of unhappiness
with spending our time in the apps. Now, you might
be able to explain this correlation in a number of
different ways. We'll get to that after we discuss the data,
but first let's just look at the results. Apps like Facebook, Snapchat,
(39:34):
and tweet bought people tended to spend roughly an hour
or more in each day, and the majority of users
reported that they were unhappy having spent the time in
the app. For example, Facebook, the average daily Facebook use
was fifty nine minutes, and sixty cent of users, or
about two thirds, reported that they were unhappy that they
(39:56):
had spent the time that that amount of time in
the Facebook app, and the apps that made people the
most unhappy seemed to be things like social media, dating apps,
and games like candy Crush. Meanwhile, let's look at the
opposite end of the spectrum, which apps did people claim
to be the most happy with the time they spent using.
The list is more diverse here. It's more populated by
(40:19):
things like books and podcasts. It makes me feel good
about podcast space, but books and podcasts, music, weather apps,
navigation apps, fitness, meditation, and calmness. So the general trend
here is that I think these are things related to
intellectual stimulation like books and podcasts, uh and even like music.
(40:42):
Personal improvement like you know, wellness, and all that, and
functional utility tools that are useful in your life, like
navigation or weather right or the flashlight app. Let's not
forget that at all the ding dang time. I'm sure
people are very very happy with their use of the
flashlight app, and yet people reported spending much less time
engaging directly with these apps that made them happy. For example,
(41:05):
people were happy with the time they spent with Audible
the audio books app, but they only spent an average
of about eight minutes a day with it, which is
a lot less than people spent in Facebook and Candy Crush,
especially given how long some of the audio books. Are
you planning to finish that thing anytime? Saying I don't know,
People spent a lot less time, but they felt good
about the time they spent. They were happy about the
(41:29):
time they spent with podcasts, but spent only an average
of about eight minutes a day there as well. Again,
so these episodes seen to be about an hour long,
the two coming out a week, You gotta you gotta
crack the quip a little bit more. Well, you gotta
think about these are averages of courses, So you know,
maybe people listen to one podcast a week I'm just
thinking of Joe and Jane average out there. Now. I
(41:50):
wonder if I don't know exactly what the methodology here is,
So I wonder if this could be an artifact of
how moment tracks app usage. Like if an app runs
in the background without being the first app open on
the screen, I don't know how that gets tracked. Does
that get Does that get tracked the same way a
screen oriented app like a game or Facebook would. I'm
(42:11):
not quite sure, but I want to think. I think
we should think about explanations for this. So why is
it that the apps we spend the most time with
make us the most unhappy? It could be that the
same apps that command the most of our attention just
coincidentally also happened to be the ones that leave us
feeling regretful about spending our time with them. Well, you
(42:32):
know one thing that instantly pops out at me too
is these examples of positive experience apps. They are not
as focused on the machine itself. You know, like when
I'm listening to music, I am potentially doing something else.
I'm not staring at my phone and looking at Spotify,
you know, I'm doing I'm engaging in some of their activity.
But people were very happy with their books apps, and
(42:53):
so like, if you're reading your kindle app or something,
people that made people happy. But where are you when
you read a book? You're not really in the phone,
in the imagination in your mind. Yeah. And then likewise
with some of these mindfulness apps, whereas what are you
doing when you're looking at Facebook? You are kind of
in the default mode network of worries about your own
social situation past in future, you're in the Facebook space. Yeah.
(43:17):
So another explanation could be a more direct correlation, right.
It could be the fact that we spend so much
time with an app is what makes us regretful about
using it, Right, Like, would we be happier with our
Facebook usage if we only spent ten minutes a day
on it? Would we be sad about our Audible or
Kindle usage if we spent an hour or more a
(43:38):
day on that? I feel like there might be a
yes to the first question, but a node to the
second one, right, Like there, I can't be sure, but
somehow I doubt that we would be sad using Audible
for an hour a day because I don't know when
I listened to audiobooks for a long stretch of time
while I'm doing yardwork or cooking or something. I feel
very happy about that. Yeah, it doesn't feel like a
(44:00):
slur to say, to say, oh, man, Joe is an
audible theme. It's an audible freak. Joe, get out that audible,
you know. But if we if we inserted a Facebook
or Twitter in instead of instead of an audio book program,
it would be a different connotation entirely. Now I should
say I just realized we've run audible ads on the
show before. They're not paying us to talk about any
(44:20):
of this. This is just what the results were. But
I can honestly say I do enjoy books and podcasts
related apps much more than social media apps. But then again,
I don't know. Like, so imagine that the average Facebook
usage was only ten minutes a day, and it's still
the same kind of usage. It's not like having a
specific interaction with somebody or looking up an event page
(44:42):
or something. But just ten minutes a day scrolling through
the algorithmically generated news feed. Would people be happy about that?
I don't know. It's hard to say. I don't know.
It doesn't doesn't sound that happy. Yeah, I want to
look at a second set of results compiled through the
Moment app with Time Well Spent. This was just a
separately compiled page I found uh In this separately compiled
(45:02):
set of results, the top apps that people were happy
to have spent time with were in similar categories. There
are things like, uh, you know, books and meditation and
wellness and learning and music. And the average amount of
time people spent per day on these top happiness apps
was around seven minutes. Another way of measuring the usage
is that they noted how many times a day did
(45:23):
you pick up the app for these apps? The answer
was generally about one to three times a day. The
top apps that people were unhappy to have spent time
with were generally social media apps and games, and these
apps people spent closer to around forty five minutes to
an hour a day on less time on the dating
apps than the other social media and games. So for
(45:45):
the purpose of this conversation, I think we can assume
that these results are more or less correct. They certainly
ring true to me, though I haven't found an in
depth description of the methodology by which they were arrived at,
but these organizations seem trustworthy to me. I think these
are probably basically correct findings. But assuming this is roughly correct,
why are we living the technological part of our lives
(46:07):
this way? Why do we spend the most time using
our technology in ways that end up making us the
least happy. That's kind of the the ultimate uh, like
kicking the pants at the end of a day, right
where you if you look back and you think, oh,
I spent I spend a fair amount of time doing
things that brought me no joy? Why didn't I use
(46:28):
that time? Why didn't I scroll that time away for
the things that I need to do and or really
want to do? Exactly? Nobody's forcing you to scroll your
Facebook timeline over and over, your your news feed or
Twitter or Reddit or any of these other things. Nobody's
forcing you to just spend your time running through this
infinite stream of content. And yet you do it. You
(46:51):
keep doing it, you keep going back to it sometimes
during the things that we want to do. Have you
ever had this experience where you're you're watching a movie yeah,
or a movie you're interested in yeah, and then for
some reason, like I mean, on one hand, I kind
of get into it this way, like I'll I convinced
myself it's certainly okay, to go to IMDb and look
up people in the movie. So who's who's that? Who's
(47:12):
that actor? All right, I'll look him up, and I mean,
that's all right. But then it goes beyond that, because
then I'm just on a reflex. I'm pulling open my
my work email account or my personal email account, or
I'm even worse, I'm clicking on social media or or
or Reuter's or something instead of just focusing on the
one distraction that I'm supposed to be into right now. Yeah,
(47:34):
So we're detecting that there is this inherent tension. It's
the same thing we talked about in the story we
used to illustrate the problem at the beginning. There is
a tension between what we want to do with our lives,
what we want to want, and the things we do
with our technology of our own free will. Seemingly moment
to moment when we have these impulsive, tempting little bits
(47:57):
of digital candy to pull us a side and distract
us and lure us in and then just keep us
gobbling for you know, minutes, hours, for as long as
it can keep our eyes glued to the screen. And
I think in the next episode we should focus a
little bit more on how technology is doing this to us,
how it's changing us, and how it works, what tools
(48:18):
it uses in order to exploit our psychological vulnerabilities. Yeah,
next next episode is going to be more of a
fight the power. I'm hoping it's gonna be. We wanted
to explain the problem in this one. Yeah, the next one,
you're this This episode was about finding out what the
terminators are. In the next episode you'll find out about
how to blow them up and you know, make your
(48:39):
own kitchen pipe bombs to do it. Right. So, when
that social media app says I need your clothes, your boots,
and your motorcycle, you say no. You say no, sir, no,
thank you? All right? Well, hey, in the meantime, head
on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
That's where you'll find all the podcast episodes. You'll find
various blog posts as well as links out to our
(49:00):
social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Instagram. We
have so many of them. Uh, they drain us. Allow
them to drain you as well. Well. I'd say if
you go use them, try to be deliberate about that time.
Don't get sucked into whatever. Look for what you're looking for.
Get that thing you're looking for, don't let it pull
you into passive consumption. But if you want to be
(49:21):
really deliberate about getting in contact with us, of course
you can do that through email the old fashioned way.
Oh and of course I want to give a big
shout out, as always to our excellent audio producers Alex
Williams and Tarry Harrison. But that email address if you
want to write us a note let us know what
you think about this episode or any other, to request
a topic for the future. That address is blow the
mind at how stuff works dot com. For more on
(49:54):
this and thousands of other topics. It how stuff works
dot Com about a lot of people, the people the
biggest fourth start
A day in the life of Alice. Alice works at
the plant. Alice has a strange pay system at her
job at the plant. Instead of getting weekly paychecks, every day,
her employer deposits one seventh of her weekly income into
her bank account. She makes what passes for an average
median wage in the New U s territories, so this
(00:22):
means about a hundred and twenty one credits shows up
in her bank account every day. It's Saturday if she's
off work, and she's out of food at her apartment,
so Alice decides to go to the grocery store to
buy a few things to make herself some lunch and dinner.
On our way walking to the store, she sees another
woman walking an extremely cute puppy. Alice goes up to
(00:43):
ask the woman if she can pet the puppy. The
woman says, okay, but it will cost you three credits.
Alice thinks about it for a second, then makes a
few swipes on her identipad and sends this woman the money.
She pets the puppy. Of course, she enjoys the experience
because hey, puppies are great. On the way to the store,
she stops four other dog walkers and pays them each
(01:06):
three credits to pet their dogs. Now, dogs are still
great when you can find them. Petting dogs is still wonderful,
but Alice notices that each time she stops to pet
a dog, she gets less happiness out of it than
she did the last time. Having spent fifteen credits on dogs,
she's now down to a hundred and six credits for
the day. Halfway to the store, she walks past the
(01:26):
scene of an auto car accident ambulances a peacekeeper detail.
She doesn't really want to look, and she feels guilty,
but she can't help it. The feeling of curiosity is
so overwhelming she has the irresistible urge to peek and
see if anybody got hurt, but she gets caught. An
armored peacekeeper walks up and says, ma'am, I noticed you
(01:48):
watching the scene. There's a surcharge of twenty six credits
if you want to do that. Reluctantly, Alice hands over
the payment and then spends a while watching the scene.
Now she's down to eighty credits of the day, and
on top of that, she feels pretty guilty about snooping
on the wreck in the first place. On the way
to the store, she has more encounters like this. She
stops to watch a couple having a heated argument a
(02:10):
parking lot. They charge her forty credits to watch, and
all it does is make her feel bad. Then outside
the grocery store, a vendor is selling crystal lattees. She
buys one for five credits and stands there drinking it.
It is a truly delicious crystal latte, so she buys
another one, and then another one, and then three more.
(02:30):
By the time she's done, she is highly overcaffeinated, feels
twitchy and anxious, and has a horrible stomach ache, and
she only has fifteen credits left to buy groceries with.
This is not enough for her to make what she
was planning for lunch and dinner, let alone enough to
save what she needs each day to pay for rent
her virtual reality bill, or save for that Ganymede Mec holiday.
(02:51):
She's been dreaming of what happened Alice in this story.
At every stage of every part of the she was
doing what she wanted to do in the moment. Nobody
coerced her at all, nobody forced her to do any
of that stuff, and yet everything has gone wrong. Her
financial plans for the day have been completely destroyed. What happened?
(03:18):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how stup
dot com. Hey you, welcome to stuff to blow your mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
what we just read was an attempt to sketch out
an illustration of an idea that we're going to be
(03:40):
talking about for a couple of episodes here. This is
going to be the first of a two part episode
about the attention economy, the technosphere, and the war for
your eyeballs. And one of the core ideas that we're
gonna be talking about today is the idea that we
should start thinking about our attention, what we pay attention to,
(04:01):
as a finite resource that has to be invested in
things with deliberation and care in order for us to
get what we want out of life. If you think
back over the story we told about Alice and simply
take out the money, remove the credits from the scenario,
is it a day well spent? Is the story? Okay?
If you take out all the money she spent staring
(04:23):
at the at the wreck, at the argument, at the puppies,
at the Latte's um. It's still not quite right, is it. Yeah.
The great thing about this little story is that we
have these sort of fun dystopian sci fi elements, but
at heart we have a very dystopian idea that matches
up with our our daily life, our daily struggles over attention. Yeah, exactly,
(04:48):
because even if you take all of the money out
of the story, she wasn't spending money, but she's spending
something that cannot be replaced, which is her time and
what she devotes her mind to. Yeah, thinking about that
purchase that she wants to make, thinking about the situation
that she's a mere bystandard too. Right, It's a distraction
(05:09):
from whatever else it is you want to do with
your life. Because our attention is truly finite. It might
feel like an infinite and value uncoupled resource to us, right,
because there's just so much of it for us to give,
and we squander it so much of the time, and
there's no explicit dollar value attached to it. But think
about it like this. You do work so that you
(05:32):
can get a paycheck that will number one by you
the basic necessities of survival, But then what do you
work for on top of that? It's because you want
to have money in your paycheck that will allow you
to spend your free time devoting your attention to things
you want. You like to spend your attention on family,
(05:52):
on friends, on books and movies and enjoyable meals, and
sports and the outdoors and meditation and how abbies and
personal projects and all of all of that is attentional desires.
The reason we want to have free time is because
we want to be able to spend our attention on
these things. And we at least subconsciously realize that we
(06:14):
only have a limited amount of attention to spend. Our attention,
quite literally is our lives. And over the next couple
of episodes, we're gonna try to offer some evidence and
make an argument that we increasingly live in a world
of incredibly powerful, highly evolved attention vampires that we have
(06:35):
thoroughly integrated into our daily lives and allowed to just
suck away our attention at a massive scale without us
even noticing it. Because do you ever realize that you've
been sitting there scrolling through your Facebook news feed mindlessly
for half an hour when you really meant to be
doing something else, Or do you ever suddenly snap, as
(06:57):
if from a trance from watching a long string of
random YouTube videos, not videos that you went to YouTube
specifically to watch, but videos that have been served to
you as related content, compulsively clicking on the next video
or allowing it to auto play, like you're just hypnotized. Yeah. Like,
I often have this situation where I feel like if
(07:20):
I were a primitive human, I would be seated and
say a clearing um, perhaps you know, next to a tree,
and I would be working on some craft. Perhaps I'm
I'm chipping away at what will be an arrowhead or
the head of a spear. And then occasionally I'll look
up from my craft and I'll look around at the
(07:40):
surrounding territory, you know, just to make sure that the
rival tribe is not attacking, that there are no predators
creeping up on me, and then continue with my work.
But in my day to day environment, it's not merely
the physical surroundings that I had that I gaze up
from and look at. It's the all the social media
um aspects of my environment, like gazing over at at Facebook,
(08:03):
at Twitter, at Reddit, at at what have you, many
of which are tied to my job. I'm looking at
feeds for the podcast feeds for work, and yet it
is it is getting in the way of my my
actual job. But you often get derailed. I bet, don't
you Like you go to Twitter or you go to
Facebook because it's something you have to do for your job,
(08:23):
and say, I need to check the page for X,
or I need to upload a link to why. But
then that news feeds there isn't it, Or some things
are scrolling in and you get kind of sucked in,
or sometimes you're not even in there for any other reason,
but you feel this kind of inexplicable tug. Do you
ever notice yourself getting derailed from important or interesting projects
(08:46):
they frequent unnecessary compulsion to check Twitter and see what
happened on it? Or do you ever have that feeling
that suddenly a whole evening is gone by and you
didn't really do anything productive or enjoyable. You just had
a long sustained session of consuming digital content without making
any conscious choices or decisions, and all you're left with
(09:10):
is this hollow feeling of regret. What happened to my night? Yeah?
Sometimes it's something is is nonsensical too, is just a
sudden need to explore the filmography of Rod Steiger or
something that added fact. You know, it's like it's just
like I wonder what his big film was, and then
and then going out. Yeah, like the encyclopedic rabbit holes,
(09:32):
going one Wikipedia link to another. That can happen too.
And this is what we're gonna be talking about for
these next couple of episodes. So I came across a
startling fact that's often cited by a technology ethicis that
we're gonna be talking about in these couple of episodes.
A guy named Tristan Harris. You might have seen him
in the news over the past couple of years because
he's been leading this new movement. Will be discussing a
(09:53):
little bit. But Harris often cites the fact that the
average person with the smartphone checks their phone hundred and
fifty times a day. Yeah, well that doesn't that doesn't
sound too far off. I I shudder to think that
could be true. But that might be true about me.
I don't know, but I would be scared to see
(10:13):
the number if somebody kept track of how often I
checked my phone, because it begins to feel like coming
up for air. It's just something that you almost do
as a reflex. You know, I'm walking down the hallway, Well,
nothing to do but check my social media. Yeah, if
that number is true, And if you're in that average
band and you check your phone about a hundred and
(10:34):
fifty times a day, think about what that does to
your day. Even if you only spend an average of
thirty seconds each time looking at your phone, that's seventy
five minutes of every day staring at your phone. But
we all know it's not just thirty seconds, right, Sometimes
it's thirty seconds, sometimes maybe a little bit less. Sometimes
you open the Facebook app or the Instagram app and
(10:56):
it turns into ten minutes, twenty minutes, or an hour.
Why is this happening and how is this affecting us?
One of the funny things about this is the fact
that we're using in this conversation the word phone. I
know we've had this talk before about how like one time, Robert,
you were like, it's not really a phone, is it? No?
(11:16):
I yeah, I have. I have gotten in the habit
of trying to refer to it as a tiny pocket
computer because it feels far more accurate than saying phone,
because phone sounds utilitarian. I have my phone in case
an important call comes through. It's a tool for getting
in touch with the hospital or something like. But it's not.
It's a tiny pocket computer full of data streams and
(11:38):
games and various social media bells and whistles and and
ultimately also it's just this portal for anxiety, you know,
like all the various, all sorts of bad news can
come flying through this black little screen. And yet we
we want to be next to it at all times,
you know, we we need to be there when when
the bad news comes to calling. We have talked about
(12:00):
how it should be called a tiny pocket computer, and
that would be much more accurate. But I also think
people should run this experiment. Try this exercise. Anytime somebody
says a sentence about their smartphone and they're not actually
talking about like a landline telephone, if they're talking about
a smartphone, replace the word phone with the word god
and see how the sentence sounds actually. Just search Twitter
(12:23):
for some my phone statements and turned up things like
I hate going out when my God isn't fully charged,
my God died mid inst alive, It's been a big day.
High school really is a waste of time. I just
sit here on my God all day. Now. I wonder
if we could give the god a proper name like
phone Hovah or something. That would be kind of fun,
(12:44):
but no, it would more accurately represent the I mean,
the the value in time and attention that we give
this device. I think it is not exaggerating at all
to say that we now have a religious level of
devotion to these personal devices that are Internet connected. We
consult them in a way that if we if we
(13:04):
were suddenly exposed to this world, if we hadn't been
eased into it over the past, you know, ten years
or whatever, if we just popped into this future and
saw everybody checking their phones and staring at their phones
all the time, we we would think this was absurd.
We would think this was a ridiculous way to live. Yeah,
And I mean I have moments where I do snap
out of it and for a few minutes anyway, and
(13:26):
realize this is this is crazy that we're all pouring
ourselves into these devices all the time, and it it's
it's beyond mere convenience. And yet when people bring this
up in a satirical context, I often see people making
this point. Everybody's staring at their phones all the time.
It is treated as an indictment of the behavior of
people and not an indictment of the design of the technology.
(13:50):
If you notice that it's like, oh, all these stupid
people staring at their phones all the time? Yeah, wake up,
people are are often at times, there's there's sort of
this this this this anti youth vibe to it as well, like, yeah,
there's millennials won't stop looking at the fields. But I
think we all have seen enough examples to know that
humans of all ages are susceptible to the the the
(14:13):
sirens song of the smartphone. Right later in this pair
of episodes, we're going to be discussing a lot of
the specific ways that our technologies that are personal devices
and the apps within them are absolutely totally designed to
hijack our attention and make us behave this way. I
think it's not because people are stupid, it's not because
(14:35):
they're weak. It's how we are. We have certain vulnerabilities
in our brains, and these devices and the software within
them exploit those vulnerabilities brilliantly. Yeah, we have just we
have crafted an ever evolving neural parasite that we all
pay top dollar for. I want to discuss a couple
(14:56):
of findings about the effects of having of like phone
and interruptions, the interruptions they provide on our attention, and
the way this happens in our lives. Before we dig
more into the meat to the topic. Just in, Robert,
I think you might have seen the study. I think
maybe we talked about it. There was research out of
u T. Austin just last year in that found something
pretty weird. People who had their smartphone within reach did
(15:20):
worse on tests of cognitive performance than people who had
it in another room. This is even if the smartphone
was turned off. If it's visible or within an arm's length,
it was distracting enough to deduct from our effective I
Q and I have anecdotally noticed this in my own life.
(15:41):
I'll be working and having trouble focusing on work, even
if I'm not actually checking my phone, I will be
in a more distracted state of mind if I've got
my phone on me, And if I merely take my
phone to a different room of the house and shut
the door and then go back to my work, I
can focus more. I'm serious. I have found this as well.
(16:01):
If I can stick it in a drawer now, as
as I am saying, this as I am speaking into
the microphone. My phone is situated over here to the side.
I have it an airplane mode so that it won't
interrupt me. But still it's there in my peripheral vision,
like kind of staring at me with its with its
dark screen, and there's this this sense that's still this
is this idea that it might light up at any moment,
(16:24):
I might get some sort of an alert, even though
it should not be able to give it to me,
right yeah, even though it's not doing anything to you,
it's in your It's in your consciousness at some level.
Right in the same way that somebody's god belief becomes
a part of their conscience, the presence of your phone
becomes a part of your situational awareness. It's always lingering there.
(16:45):
It's always a potential, right yeah. And sometimes the potential
is just for mundane stuff to happen, like, oh, the
doorbell will ring at my house. That means a package
has been delivered, you know, and it's just I don't
need that information. It's just you know, a box of
of cat food. I don't need to be there, and
no additional plans need to be made. But yet the
(17:06):
delivery of cat food has interrupted my daily workflow. Yeah.
The English psychologist Glen Daniel Wilson I've read, has shown
that the distraction threat of things in the digital realm,
So like the example would be an unread message sitting
in your inbox, you're aware of that, and you've got
that distraction threat on your mind. It can lower our
(17:27):
effective i Q by about ten points. But then think
about what happens when you actually have the distractions coming in,
Like if you've got notifications turned on on your phone.
Interruptions matter a lot to your ability to focus on
projects and activities you care about. When a notification interrupts you,
it's not just the time you spend looking at the
(17:49):
interruption that you lose. Interruptions degrade the quality of your
focus on your primary activity. Some psychologists call this quote
a task shifting penalty. Robert, I'm sure you've felt this before, right,
I feel this all the time. Yeah. You get into
a certain workflow and then something pops you out of it, right,
and that's and that's when, or if you actually get
(18:10):
back into the task at all. According to a two
thousand five University of California, Irvine study by Gloria Mark
and colleagues. Regaining your original focus on a project or
task after an interruption takes people, on average over twenty
five minutes. And if that's they actually resume the task
on the same day they were interrupted. Sometimes they don't
(18:31):
resume it for the whole day. So what happens when
you get when you're working on something or you're focusing
on something, is if you're gonna get interrupted, it takes
you longer to get back into the zone. And that's
if you even pick the task back up, and sometimes
it will take you a while to do that. Interruptions
are more than just the content of the interruption. They
(18:52):
totally degrade the quality of our engagement with every goal
pursuit we care about. You know, this reminds me of
some some research I was putting in on another topic
where an individual touched on the nature of torture and
one of the psychological aspects of torture is making the
torture recipient unsure about what is going to happen at
(19:13):
any given time. And this is a power that we
have handed not only over to the torture but also
to the smartphone and various other devices in our life. Well, yeah,
we were just recently reading some stuff about pain and
the role that that uncertainty and anxiety plays in the
amplification of the sensation of pain. So anyway, given all
(19:34):
of this, I have to start wondering in a quite
literal sense. I I don't mean this as an exaggeration.
Are we currently living in an attention dystopia? All right?
You think about that while we take a quick break,
and then we'll come back and try to regain focus.
Than alright, we're back now. I think we should think
(19:55):
about the idea of attention. We've already discussed that attention
essential is our lives. Attention is what we value in
our lives. When you think about the life you want
to live, what you really mean is you want to
be able to spend your attention on certain things, right, Yeah,
Because I mean when you start thinking about what attention is,
it's more than just looking at something or thinking about
(20:18):
something momentarily. It is Uh, it's it's crucial to what
I've seen referred to as the selective directedness of our
mental lives, right, having a having a will for how
you use your mind. Yeah, I mean, in some models
of consciousness that we've discussed on the show even center
on the manner in which humans utilize their attentive powers.
As such, there are multiple philosophical arguments for the nature
(20:41):
of human attention and the reasons for our limited process
and capability. Yeah, but ultimately it's kind of like the
primitive example I gave earlier. You know, there's no doubt
that we evolve to handle various streams of stimuli at
once and to apply selective attention based on their importance.
This is why we can go to a party and
you can tune out all the other voices in the
(21:02):
party except for the person you're talking to, or that
you can do the exact opposite, tune out the person
you're supposed to be talking to and listen to a
more interesting conversation in the vicinity. But one thing you'll
notice if you do that is it really degrades what
you take away from any of those experiences. That's so
like if you were trying to talk to one person
in a crowded room, you can focus on them and
(21:24):
pay attention to them, But if you're trying to switch
between paying attention to them and eavesdropping on somebody nearby,
you're not really going to get a very good sense
of either one, right, But still there are limits to
what you can encounter in a like a physical real
world scenario. You know, even if the tribal meeting is
is rather crowded, there's only so much you're gonna be
(21:45):
able to hear over the shouting and of course the
sacrifices to to ug uh you know, I mean, it's uh,
there are going to be limits in place. There's the
world of multiple stimuli streams and fixed and moving objects
that we evolve to thrive in, and then there's this
world we've made a place of over stimulation, over choice
in myriad voices to command our psyche. This is a
(22:07):
really good point because we could easily think of the
virtual world we've created, the world within our phone operating systems,
or computer operating systems, or the web, especially the modern web,
which is so highly designed focused, or our social media
apps and all that. We could think of that as
an extension of our world. It's just like the world
(22:29):
is going into this virtual space. But I don't think
it's like that. This is not an extension of our
physical lives in the physical space. It is a different
world with different properties, and it operates on different rules
and the rules it operates on. As we're about to
get into our the monopolization of your attention primarily, that
(22:49):
is the ultimate goal of most of this stuff we
interact with in the information age. The attention devouring technosphere,
i would say, is not an accident. It's by design.
These apps and devices are specifically engineered to suck out
as much of our attention as they can get. And
you know this, rightly, feel it. You can see that
(23:10):
in every piece of clickbait headlines, right you know, or
anything like that. It's trying to get your eyeballs. People
in the industry talk about the idea of eyeballs. They
want eyeballs on things. Yeah, there is kind of the
the content product, and then there is the the the
app product, the interface product, and all of them are saying, hey,
(23:30):
look at me, look at me, do this, interact with me,
use me more, read me more, consumedly more, and ultimately
probably purchase more. Right exactly, so we should ask the
question why, like why are so many highly calibrated technological
monsters vying for our attention in the first place? And
this is an interesting question. One paper we might want
(23:51):
to mention is that back In two thousand twelve, the
M I. T economists Eric Brynjolfsson and U he Oh
wrote a paper called the Attention Economy. It was essentially
geared toward trying to quantify the economic value, the money
value provided by free content and services on the Internet,
because obviously the abundance of all these free services, you know,
(24:12):
websites that you go to for free, apps that you
use for free, all that stuff that's offered online is
providing value to people because they're choosing to spend their
attention on it, and that value isn't getting directly measured
in the economy the way the value of many other
consumer services would be. Like if you want to measure
the value of a bottle of drain, Oh, it's the
(24:35):
value is what people go to the store to spend
on it. Right, But the consumer is not spending money
on these apps and devices and stuff, but they are
spending something something that has some kind of value that
we need a way to measure. Well, it sounds an
awful lot like engagement to get into sort of the
business terms of websites and and even podcasting, right, The
(24:59):
idea that you want you want to user engagement, right,
and the user, the user or the consumer. One of
the things we've got to understand is that the user,
the consumer of these information services, these free internet services
like Facebook or any any digital media, even what we do,
the user is not really the customer because they're not
(25:19):
paying money. The customer is going to be the advertiser,
and the user is the product. Essentially, you cultivate a
product by getting eyeballs, and then you sell access to
those eyeballs that you gather to an advertiser in any way.
That paper I mentioned earlier, those two economists estimated that
(25:40):
over at the time, this was back in two thousand twelve, quote,
the increase in consumer surplus created by free internet services
was quote over one hundred billion dollars per year in
the US alone. There's an enormous amount of perceived value
or wealth being offered in these free internet services. But
somebody that they exist mainly because we live at a
(26:04):
time when your attention alone is worth money to somebody else.
So you mentioned the idea of ad supported media. Most
of the internet and online services that you uh that
you use are offered to you for free, and it
doesn't have to be this way, right, We could have
a tech economy where everything that you got over the
Internet or through your devices had a fee to access, right,
(26:27):
Do you ever think about why it's not that way? Well,
I mean both. Part of it is that we have
we have grown accustomed to getting things for free on
the Internet, and that applies to everything from newspaper articles
to music, and that's been one of the that's been
one of the hurdles for for online business to try
and figure out how to get people to pay for things. Again,
do you think free music sharing through piracy and Napster
(26:51):
and all that in the early days of the Internet
helped shape the free ad supported information content of the
Internet today, Like people got trained on the idea that
it wasn't really stealing because you know, I can't remember
who this is. But there was once a comedian I
heard doing a comedy act about those old piracy commercials
that are like, you wouldn't steal a car, why would you?
(27:13):
Why would you steal music? But the comedian said, you know,
I would steal a car if all I had to
do was touch the car, and then an instant copy
of the car would be created and I could have
it and the original person could keep their car, and
you know, it created the sense because it was digital
information that could be copied without consequence, that you weren't
(27:35):
really taking from anybody. You're just getting a copy of
a thing. Yeah, it's out there, and all I am
doing is breathing it in as if it were air. Yeah.
And so it's like trained people on this idea that that,
you know, information should be free, and as has been said,
information wants to be free, but it's led to this
world where Okay, to produce information, you have to spend money, right,
(27:59):
Like anything that is made on the internet. If you
want to run a website, if you want to write
an article, if you want to create a podcast, if
you want to create a video, almost none of this
can be done for free. You have to invest in it.
And so that's got to be paid for somehow. And
so the way everything works, including us here, is that
you pay for things by running ads. That's right, I mean,
(28:19):
And that's not even getting into the idea that people
are putting their time into creating things, and that time
has to come out of your life and you and
the individual the individual creator has bills to pay and
a route to maintain, and needs to have food eat, right,
and so the way technology companies and digital media companies
can pay for themselves is to run advertisements. And the
(28:42):
way they can increase the amount of money they're making
uh and that they can charge advertisers is basically twofold.
I think one is simply by selling more exposure to
your eyeballs to the user's eyeballs. The more attention you
spend on a platform, the more advertising that platform can
show you. So if you go to Facebook and they
get you to stay on Facebook twice as long, they
(29:04):
can show you twice as many ads, so they can
charge the advertisers that much more. You increase the supply
of attention that can be sold to the customer, which
is the advertiser or The other main way media companies
can make money off your attention is by gathering data
about you. The more you use a social media site
(29:24):
like Facebook or whatever, the more social media, the more
that social media site knows about who you are and
where you live, and what you're interested in and what
you'll spend money on and so forth. And the more
it knows about who you are, the better they know
how to sell you stuff. You might have noticed that
in the early days of the Internet when you were
getting targeted ads, they were bad. You. I remember the
(29:46):
days when I was getting targeted ads on Facebook that
were for ridiculous things I would never want. But over time,
targeted advertising has gotten a lot better, hasn't it. Oh,
it's gotten really really good. It's like to the point
where you you look up an item on Amazon on
you're thinking about thinking about getting it. For instance, recently
I looked at the blu ray of the movie Screamers,
(30:06):
A Wonderful Fishman, which one the one from the nineties
with Peter Weller or the no, that's a great film too,
but though this is the Fishman movie and the Italian one, yeah,
the Italian one. And I wasn't actually gonna buy, you know,
but I looked it up. I was curious to see
if the blue, if the blue ray was available, And
then it seems like every day for the following week,
when I first went onto Facebook, i'd be hit with
(30:26):
that Amazon targeted ad for that very blu ray disc.
Now that's the easy part. You've already looked that up.
They've sold that data to somebody else, or they're using
that data to run targeted ads for you on another platform.
That's pretty straightforward. It gets creepier though, what about what
about when they show you ads for things that you've
never looked up as far as you can recall, but
(30:47):
they really are in your wheelhouse. Yeah, yeah, I'm into that,
Like it's another Fishman movie that I'm not familiar with,
and or it's a Fishman comic, or it's a an
All Gillman, you know, doom that band, and I'm like, oh,
I had no idea, but that sounds like the kind
of thing would be into, right. So this is another
reason the providers of these technology platforms want your attention.
(31:07):
It's because the data is valuable to them directly. The
more you use the platform, the more attention you give them,
the more data about you you give them, and the
more they can target you in the future, the more
they learn about how to glazer in on exactly what
you'll click on and buy. So it's also it's valuable
for that reason. It's also valuable as the data is
(31:28):
valuable as a commodity that can be sold to third
parties that want to know things about you in order
to target sales or advertising. And actually, I'd put in
a third motivation for capturing more attention, and Robert, I
wonder what you think about this. This doesn't get cited
as much, but I would argue a third major motivation
for commanding your attention on a platform is habit formation.
(31:51):
What do we usually reflexively do with our attention when
we've got free time. We do what we've done before, right,
that's right. We fall into the hal bit of going
on Facebook, or for me, one of the worst is
just going into my my email, not to actually read
meaningful emails, but to clear out garbage, to clear out
not even necessarily spam, but the sort of promotional emails
(32:15):
that I think you signed up for, that I signed
up for, that I'm for some reason, I'm still like,
I don't want to actually unsubscribe, but I'm also not
going to read them, but they just keep coming. I'm
just sort of maintaining this weed garden of of crap,
and it's taking away from my day. And that's a
habit you formed. We are creatures of habit. We mostly
(32:35):
do what we've trained ourselves to do in the past.
Most of our behaviors are not novel. Most of the time,
we tend to shop at the stores we've shopped at before.
Most of the time, we go to the restaurants we've
gone to before, and we do the same thing in
our digital spaces. Every time you make a decision about
what to do with your attention, you are training your
(32:56):
brain to make similar decisions or the same decision in
the future, which is kind of a daunting thought, isn't it.
I think that's absolutely true. But you need to think
about the fact that every time you act, even in
trivial activities throughout the day, you are altering the source
code of your own brain to encourage your future self
(33:17):
to behave more like your behaving right now. And of
course all this is even more nefarious when you realize
that not everyone is selling a product. A lot of
people are selling an idea or a or or or
some sort of vision of reality, a political ideal, a
social ideal. They are attempting to tell you how to
(33:38):
feel and how to think. But that all depends, of course,
on continued access to that consumer of information. Right. So,
if you are a platform like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, any
of that, and you want people's attention, it's it's important
to help people form patterns of habit in which they
learn to give that attention to you. They'll be more
likely to keep giving it to you in the future
(33:59):
because it's become familiar and easy and habitual. It's what
they've done before, so it's what they'll do again now.
I want to come back and say that we want
to be clear. I think that not every bid for
your attention is bad or evil. Right. There are lots
of things we do with our attention that we consider
good uses of our attention. And there's lots of for example,
(34:21):
ads supported media that obviously we think is worthwhile and
worth having. I mean, I listen to podcasts that run
ads in order to pay the bills and keep producing
the podcast. I'm fine with that if I care about
the podcast and want to make that decision deliberately with
my time, right Yeah. There's nothing evil about that, right,
I Mean, that's just we've recognized that's part of the
(34:42):
economics of how the content we like and care about
is produced. What becomes more nefarious is when we find
ourselves using technological services and consuming content compulsively or impulsively
reflexively without really making a decision about something we want
to consume or that we care about, right yeah, Yeah,
(35:03):
where it's just this click click, click, it's just this uh,
it's it's not even becomes a situation where you're not
even really absorbing information. You're just dipping into the information
stream exactly. Yeah, you are becoming a passive receiver of
what is being fed to you by a platform that
you have habitually formed an information consumption relationship with. You're
(35:28):
on Facebook, and it's just streaming into you. Yeah, and
and there's so there's this like informational context to it,
but also there's there's a tactile context to it as well.
You know, the swipe of fingers over the over the screen,
and then the the acknowledgement that you have clicked something,
you've checked something off of this list. In a way,
I think we should take a quick break and pay
(35:49):
the bills with some advertising, and then we should come
back and look at some actual data on the way
people use their attention on digital devices and how they
feel about that. Thank alright, we're back now. You might
have seen this idea of like the distractions and the
attention war come up in the in the news over
the past year or two with respect to technology, apps
(36:11):
and social media. And one reason you might have seen
something about this is that words been spreading about a
particular movement and nonprofit organization called Time Well Spent, which
was founded by a guy I mentioned earlier, a former
Google employee named Tristan Harris, and a number of other people.
And these people were not the first to point out
that the media are controlling the economy of our attention
(36:33):
in negative ways, but having worked in the modern tech sector,
I think they've got a more specific message about the way,
for example, your phone and the apps on it are
not just sub optimal, but possibly really driving your life
and the culture in general into an extremely unhealthy space
that runs contrary to our goals and what we want
(36:55):
our lives to be. And so they've been doing a
lot of media interviews recently in the past year so
and so I think maybe we should take a look
at some at some time well spent information and data.
That sounds good job. This sounds like time well spent alright,
So how good are we really at spending our attention
in ways that make us happy and give us a
sense of fulfillment. Maybe you're out there listening and you're like, now,
(37:17):
I don't buy it. I use my attention exactly how
I want, you know, when I use Facebook, it's just
it's because I want to do that. I'm living my
own life. Yeah, or you know, or you you sort
of qualify the kind of content. Well, I use it
to keep in touch with my friends. My real friends
are my real family, and it's about maintaining that social network.
And there's some truth to an argument like that. Oh sure, yeah,
we don't want to totally demonize any particular app. I mean,
(37:40):
we've been saying a lot of negative stuff about Facebook
and related apps, but there's no reason to totally demonize
an app to its core. But we should be aware
of what its capabilities are and how we're interacting with
it on average. So there's an iOS app called Moment,
which is a device usage tracker, and what it does
is it logs how much time you spend using your
(38:02):
iPhone or your iPad and which apps you spend the
most of your time on. And so the Moment app
has partnered with time Well Spent what I just spent
before and the associated UH nonprofit, the Center for Humane
Technology to gather data about how much time people spend
on various apps and how they feel about spending their
time that way. So to be clear, this is something
(38:24):
where the user can see how they're spending their time on. Right,
So the app says, hey, did you know you spent
x a number of minutes on this app and this
many times a day, and what it shows you your usage.
I like this idea because it reminds me of how
with a lot of the modern video games we have,
they'll tell you how many hours you've sunk into the game,
but you spent twenty seven days playing. Yeah. It's it's
(38:47):
generally horrifying to read because because it's the sobering moment
where you're like, oh my god, I spent that much
time playing this video game or any video game or
anything that isn't uh, you know of of of really
intrinsic value in my life. Yeah. So, there was an
initial study conducted in a pool of two hundred thousand
iPhone users on this this moment uh and time well
(39:09):
spent partnership. And when you look at the results, there
is an immediately apparent and overwhelming correlation between apps that
we spend more time with and a feeling of unhappiness
with spending our time in the apps. Now, you might
be able to explain this correlation in a number of
different ways. We'll get to that after we discuss the data,
but first let's just look at the results. Apps like Facebook, Snapchat,
(39:34):
and tweet bought people tended to spend roughly an hour
or more in each day, and the majority of users
reported that they were unhappy having spent the time in
the app. For example, Facebook, the average daily Facebook use
was fifty nine minutes, and sixty cent of users, or
about two thirds, reported that they were unhappy that they
(39:56):
had spent the time that that amount of time in
the Facebook app, and the apps that made people the
most unhappy seemed to be things like social media, dating apps,
and games like candy Crush. Meanwhile, let's look at the
opposite end of the spectrum, which apps did people claim
to be the most happy with the time they spent using.
The list is more diverse here. It's more populated by
(40:19):
things like books and podcasts. It makes me feel good
about podcast space, but books and podcasts, music, weather apps,
navigation apps, fitness, meditation, and calmness. So the general trend
here is that I think these are things related to
intellectual stimulation like books and podcasts, uh and even like music.
(40:42):
Personal improvement like you know, wellness, and all that, and
functional utility tools that are useful in your life, like
navigation or weather right or the flashlight app. Let's not
forget that at all the ding dang time. I'm sure
people are very very happy with their use of the
flashlight app, and yet people reported spending much less time
engaging directly with these apps that made them happy. For example,
(41:05):
people were happy with the time they spent with Audible
the audio books app, but they only spent an average
of about eight minutes a day with it, which is
a lot less than people spent in Facebook and Candy Crush,
especially given how long some of the audio books. Are
you planning to finish that thing anytime? Saying I don't know,
People spent a lot less time, but they felt good
about the time they spent. They were happy about the
(41:29):
time they spent with podcasts, but spent only an average
of about eight minutes a day there as well. Again,
so these episodes seen to be about an hour long,
the two coming out a week, You gotta you gotta
crack the quip a little bit more. Well, you gotta
think about these are averages of courses, So you know,
maybe people listen to one podcast a week I'm just
thinking of Joe and Jane average out there. Now. I
(41:50):
wonder if I don't know exactly what the methodology here is,
So I wonder if this could be an artifact of
how moment tracks app usage. Like if an app runs
in the background without being the first app open on
the screen, I don't know how that gets tracked. Does
that get Does that get tracked the same way a
screen oriented app like a game or Facebook would. I'm
(42:11):
not quite sure, but I want to think. I think
we should think about explanations for this. So why is
it that the apps we spend the most time with
make us the most unhappy? It could be that the
same apps that command the most of our attention just
coincidentally also happened to be the ones that leave us
feeling regretful about spending our time with them. Well, you
(42:32):
know one thing that instantly pops out at me too
is these examples of positive experience apps. They are not
as focused on the machine itself. You know, like when
I'm listening to music, I am potentially doing something else.
I'm not staring at my phone and looking at Spotify,
you know, I'm doing I'm engaging in some of their activity.
But people were very happy with their books apps, and
(42:53):
so like, if you're reading your kindle app or something,
people that made people happy. But where are you when
you read a book? You're not really in the phone,
in the imagination in your mind. Yeah. And then likewise
with some of these mindfulness apps, whereas what are you
doing when you're looking at Facebook? You are kind of
in the default mode network of worries about your own
social situation past in future, you're in the Facebook space. Yeah.
(43:17):
So another explanation could be a more direct correlation, right.
It could be the fact that we spend so much
time with an app is what makes us regretful about
using it, Right, Like, would we be happier with our
Facebook usage if we only spent ten minutes a day
on it? Would we be sad about our Audible or
Kindle usage if we spent an hour or more a
(43:38):
day on that? I feel like there might be a
yes to the first question, but a node to the
second one, right, Like there, I can't be sure, but
somehow I doubt that we would be sad using Audible
for an hour a day because I don't know when
I listened to audiobooks for a long stretch of time
while I'm doing yardwork or cooking or something. I feel
very happy about that. Yeah, it doesn't feel like a
(44:00):
slur to say, to say, oh, man, Joe is an
audible theme. It's an audible freak. Joe, get out that audible,
you know. But if we if we inserted a Facebook
or Twitter in instead of instead of an audio book program,
it would be a different connotation entirely. Now I should
say I just realized we've run audible ads on the
show before. They're not paying us to talk about any
(44:20):
of this. This is just what the results were. But
I can honestly say I do enjoy books and podcasts
related apps much more than social media apps. But then again,
I don't know. Like, so imagine that the average Facebook
usage was only ten minutes a day, and it's still
the same kind of usage. It's not like having a
specific interaction with somebody or looking up an event page
(44:42):
or something. But just ten minutes a day scrolling through
the algorithmically generated news feed. Would people be happy about that?
I don't know. It's hard to say. I don't know.
It doesn't doesn't sound that happy. Yeah, I want to
look at a second set of results compiled through the
Moment app with Time Well Spent. This was just a
separately compiled page I found uh In this separately compiled
(45:02):
set of results, the top apps that people were happy
to have spent time with were in similar categories. There
are things like, uh, you know, books and meditation and
wellness and learning and music. And the average amount of
time people spent per day on these top happiness apps
was around seven minutes. Another way of measuring the usage
is that they noted how many times a day did
(45:23):
you pick up the app for these apps? The answer
was generally about one to three times a day. The
top apps that people were unhappy to have spent time
with were generally social media apps and games, and these
apps people spent closer to around forty five minutes to
an hour a day on less time on the dating
apps than the other social media and games. So for
(45:45):
the purpose of this conversation, I think we can assume
that these results are more or less correct. They certainly
ring true to me, though I haven't found an in
depth description of the methodology by which they were arrived at,
but these organizations seem trustworthy to me. I think these
are probably basically correct findings. But assuming this is roughly correct,
why are we living the technological part of our lives
(46:07):
this way? Why do we spend the most time using
our technology in ways that end up making us the
least happy. That's kind of the the ultimate uh, like
kicking the pants at the end of a day, right
where you if you look back and you think, oh,
I spent I spend a fair amount of time doing
things that brought me no joy? Why didn't I use
(46:28):
that time? Why didn't I scroll that time away for
the things that I need to do and or really
want to do? Exactly? Nobody's forcing you to scroll your
Facebook timeline over and over, your your news feed or
Twitter or Reddit or any of these other things. Nobody's
forcing you to just spend your time running through this
infinite stream of content. And yet you do it. You
(46:51):
keep doing it, you keep going back to it sometimes
during the things that we want to do. Have you
ever had this experience where you're you're watching a movie yeah,
or a movie you're interested in yeah, and then for
some reason, like I mean, on one hand, I kind
of get into it this way, like I'll I convinced
myself it's certainly okay, to go to IMDb and look
up people in the movie. So who's who's that? Who's
(47:12):
that actor? All right, I'll look him up, and I mean,
that's all right. But then it goes beyond that, because
then I'm just on a reflex. I'm pulling open my
my work email account or my personal email account, or
I'm even worse, I'm clicking on social media or or
or Reuter's or something instead of just focusing on the
one distraction that I'm supposed to be into right now. Yeah,
(47:34):
So we're detecting that there is this inherent tension. It's
the same thing we talked about in the story we
used to illustrate the problem at the beginning. There is
a tension between what we want to do with our lives,
what we want to want, and the things we do
with our technology of our own free will. Seemingly moment
to moment when we have these impulsive, tempting little bits
(47:57):
of digital candy to pull us a side and distract
us and lure us in and then just keep us
gobbling for you know, minutes, hours, for as long as
it can keep our eyes glued to the screen. And
I think in the next episode we should focus a
little bit more on how technology is doing this to us,
how it's changing us, and how it works, what tools
(48:18):
it uses in order to exploit our psychological vulnerabilities. Yeah,
next next episode is going to be more of a
fight the power. I'm hoping it's gonna be. We wanted
to explain the problem in this one. Yeah, the next one,
you're this This episode was about finding out what the
terminators are. In the next episode you'll find out about
how to blow them up and you know, make your
(48:39):
own kitchen pipe bombs to do it. Right. So, when
that social media app says I need your clothes, your boots,
and your motorcycle, you say no. You say no, sir, no,
thank you? All right? Well, hey, in the meantime, head
on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
That's where you'll find all the podcast episodes. You'll find
various blog posts as well as links out to our
(49:00):
social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Instagram. We
have so many of them. Uh, they drain us. Allow
them to drain you as well. Well. I'd say if
you go use them, try to be deliberate about that time.
Don't get sucked into whatever. Look for what you're looking for.
Get that thing you're looking for, don't let it pull
you into passive consumption. But if you want to be
(49:21):
really deliberate about getting in contact with us, of course
you can do that through email the old fashioned way.
Oh and of course I want to give a big
shout out, as always to our excellent audio producers Alex
Williams and Tarry Harrison. But that email address if you
want to write us a note let us know what
you think about this episode or any other, to request
a topic for the future. That address is blow the
mind at how stuff works dot com. For more on
(49:54):
this and thousands of other topics. It how stuff works
dot Com about a lot of people, the people the
biggest fourth start
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
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