Can I Have Your Attention?

Everyone does it. We consume media, and more media, and sometimes we consume it in multiple formats all at once. I will admit to it myself. Not long ago, my wife walked in on me sitting in the living room when I was watching tv, typing on a laptop with one hand, and running an ipad app in my other hand. Her plaintive look said, “What can you possibly be doing on three different devices all at once?” And then my smartphone notified me of an incoming message and I told her I had to check it.

It’s the siren call of technology. There are so many media channels and data streams competing for our attention, it’s a wonder we can focus on anything at all for more than 5 minutes. I watch my favorite tv program with one eye while tweeting about it with friends.

A story I heard earlier this year really hit home with me. It was about a father whose daughter was killed by a distracted driver. Weeks after the funeral, the father was driving and he found that his hand instinctively went for his phone every time it beeped, notifying him that a message had come in. This happened instinctually, even though he had a strong emotional reason not to use the phone while driving. That’s how strong our pavlovian response is to instant messages and notifications. We have no idea whether the message is going to be important or inane, but we have an innate urge to find out what someone said to us and to communicate back. The father eventually took to locking his phone in his trunk before he got into the car to remove the temptation.

We think we can do many things at once. We may even pride ourselves on how many things we can balance. But there is evidence that there’s really no such thing as multitasking. We can’t do 10 things at once, because our brains don’t work like that. We’re context shifting -- doing mini activities with our brain, and cycling through 10 different things in succession. This is fine if our tasks are all bite-sized chunks that can be dealt with a little at a time. But what about when we have something that requires more dedicated brain power? Are we doing ten things at once or are we really getting nothing done at all?

This thought process was behind the development of the conversation format of gmail. To solve the problem of users' dealing with a daily inbox of 100s (or in some cases, thousands) of different emails that go back-and-forth between multiple recipients, gmail changed the format so emails with the same subject are grouped together into conversations and can be dealt with in one fell swoop.

Going beyond multitasking, how do developments in digital technology affect how we process and store information in our brains? There is research that suggests that information obtained through online resources are stored only in our short-term memory, not saved in our long-term memory. More research needs to be done, and my feeling is that information obtained from digital resources is no different from information obtained from other reference sources. Our failure to place importance on remembering this data might be because we know we can always go back to the source and find it again. Why store information in the hard drive of our brain when it can reside in the "cloud" where we can access it anytime? I think this is also related to how our brain handles raw data without context, as opposed to how it retains and integrates information gathered through application. In other words, when we have a real-life experience it makes the information gathered from that experience more valuable to us than something that we've just read or heard, and so it’s given more importance in our brain and stored more prominently.

So how can we make sure that our experiences are valuable and inform us in a lasting way? I do think we need to slow down and appreciate life (and work). You can glance briefly at a diamond and see a sparkle. Or you can gaze at it and appreciate the beauty and complexity of every facet. I think there’s a value in giving our full attention to a subject, and looking at it from different angles. I think there’s a value in taking time to fully consider an idea and incorporate it into our understanding of the world.

When I used to edit on hard copy there was a singularity of focus to the review. I had my printed pages and markup pens and pencils in front of me, positioned away from the computer. I got down deep into the content and made sure it was clear, focused, grammatically correct, and pedagogically appropriate. Now when I do digital softproof editing onscreen, there’s a constant risk of interruption from email notifications, meeting reminders, neo updates, and the like. This is not to say that there’s anything wrong with digital softproofing. There’s many upsides to it, we just have to learn to adjust our work process. We can’t go backward. What good is it to be a troglodyte in the digital era, decrying this complex, modern world? But we can be aware that every time digital technology makes an improvement in, or has in impact on, our daily lives, we adjust our behavior accordingly. I think it’s important that we be aware of these adjustments and make that sure we aren’t leaving behind something valuable. We need to be sure that in the process of making our lives easier and more productive there’s not an undesirable byproduct of decreasing the quality of our work.

I’ve made a couple lists of ways I want to try to reduce distractions in my daily life and ways I think we can incorporate these ideas into our work. What are some ways you can think of to un-pollute our lives from excessive distractions?

Ways to be more “present” in my daily life:

• Put down the devices and look people in the eye when I’m talking to them.
• If I have an impulsive reaction to something, think about it from one or two other sides before voicing or writing (or tweeting or facebooking) my opinion.
• Keep my phone out of arm’s reach and out of earshot when I’m driving.

How this relates to the educational publishing field:

• We need to be focused and clear-minded about our mission and our products, not distracted by ephemera or the cacophony of the latest buzzworthy topic.
• We need to develop products that will capture the attention of consumers who live in an environment full of competing media distractions (tv, internet, streaming video channels, game consoles, phones, and other handheld devices).
• Our products should create experiences that promote deep thinking and create lasting impressions. If we get students’ attention for a moment and then they forget everything they’ve learned the next time they watch Spongebob, then we’ve failed to truly educate them.

~PC