Getting attention

I'm sitting here in a lecture. I should be listening, but instead, I'm writing. I'm doing this because I just thought of a flip side to the debate over attention span, distraction, and the use of networked media by young people. Even if we ban the laptops in lecture, their/our minds might have been altered in some way that makes lectures like this pointless.

Sure, maybe people who use networked media a lot are accustomed to instant gratification (the emphasis being on "gratification": experiences that offer pleasure). And yes, media experiences are briefer than ever before.

But maybe this just means they're engaged in the expression and consumption of important ideas in a more efficient manner. Rather than thinking of networked media users' listening, reading, and thinking skills as being hobbled by networked media, they may just have become more efficient at finding and using relevant information. Thus, when they are forced to sit through a linear lecture with a lot of information that is not relevant and cannot be searched or scanned, they tune out, not out of boredom or lack of discipline necessarily, but because they prefer a more efficient flow of information.

So we sit here, slackjawed, unable to concentrate on a lecture. Whose fault is this: the speaker or the listeners? My hunch is that its a little bit of both. Of course, those who use networked media a lot would tend to think the problem is with the old fogeys who still lecture in the same way, insist that we consume information in the same way we did hundreds if not thousands of years ago. Those who do not use networked media (the tendency to use such media more likely being an effect of age cohort and/or income than an effect of holding any ideological disposition; the ideological disposition is a justification for an existing behavior, not the other way around) would tend to think that young people cannot think with the same depth and rigor and are thus intellectually stunted by their near-constant use of networked media.

I think what we need to isolate are the types of media experience or content. If consumers of information choose indulgent experiences over virtue experiences, then they are at fault. But if there isn't a significant different in virtue/vice value that one seeks out when using networked media, then perhaps producers of information should be more efficient in the manner in which they convey information.

I keep returning to the questions: What does it mean to be efficient communicators? What is the goal of communicating information? There is a category of media use referred to by Uses and Gratifications researchers as "information seeking." Its time to start scrutinizing that category and splitting it up into smaller ones. So much of what we do now is information seeking, but clearly, some of it is in our collective long-term interest and some of it is not. Some of what might look like dawdling is really the kind of creative play that leads to new ideas. And some of it really is dawdling.

Two approaches might help us tell the difference between the two: experiments that restrict people's access to parts of the vast quantity of information and detailed tracking of people's work using networked media, tracing the paths of new ideas to certain types of free-association information seeking.

Discipline & Privacy

I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to showcase some of my ideas on networked media, selection habits, and immediate gratification (which is shaping up to be my dissertation topic) in front of some esteemed colleagues from the psych department here at UMich. The great part about giving talks like this is that it can get you to look at a problem you've been staring at for way too long in a new way.

Something Ed O'Brien said prompted me to return to the issue of privacy. Research suggests that we keep our immediate desires (or inner hedonist, if you will) in check in various ways: by making a habit of things that we don't like doing but know will help us in the long term, by taking temptations out of our immediate grasp, by having reminders of what will happen to us if we fail to curb our immediate desires, or by exercising good ol' fashioned self control. There's also another thing that prevents our inner hedonists from taking over: public censure, or the judgment of others. We don't fill our faces with chocolate cake, fritter away our time on leisure pursuits instead of working, cheat on our husbands/wives, or buy boatloads of porn for various reasons, but one of them is likely that we will be looked down upon by others. We will be publicly embarrassed. But what if you could do all of those things in private, taking the punishment or barrier of public censure and embarrassment out of the equation?

I posit that new media allows us to do just that. We can do so many things that we would have been judged for without being judged because we can do them in private. In many cases, this is good. We can pursue our true passions without repressing who we really are for fear of some sort of cultural judgment. But in other cases, the selves that are being repressed by public scrutiny are just our inner hedonists. The inner hedonist is just one aspect of a self, an aspect that has been kept in check by public scrutiny for probably all of human history in one way or another. Give that aspect of the self space to do whatever it wants and you're going to get behavior that does not reflect what you consider to be "your self." You will get behavior that reflects one aspect of your self.

Here's the counter-intuitive part of this. Most people think our privacy is being eroded by networked media, that more and more of our lives are on display. There are two problems with this line of reasoning. First, though that information is out there and it is attainable, we must look at who is attaining it, how its being used, the extent to which we know about those things, and the extent to which that feeds back to alter our behavior. I would submit that most of the information about our online habits either sits unused, is used in some sense that ultimately doesn't embarrass us or punish us directly or indirectly (used to show us various kinds of ads), and thus does not alter our patterns of behavior. Its all fine and well to quote Orwell and come up with possible future scenarios in which our data is used by others to alter our desirous behavior, but I haven't encountered any evidence that indicates that has happened or is happening.

Here's the second problem. We never had the opportunity to do so many things that we can do now with networked media. Doing any number of things that feel good in the moment but are frowned upon by society (be it cheating on your wife/husband, learning how to build a bomb, trading bigoted jokes, etc.) were just too logistically difficult to pursue. It would be too much of a pain in the ass to find the right people or goods to carry those things off, and you had to sneak around to do them. These are just much, much easier to do now with networked media. We didn't do those things partly b/c we would not have had privacy when we did them and thus we would have been punished for doing them. Now, we can use the privacy that we should expect (privacy regarding our bank statements, voting behavior, private conversations with family members) to cloak the privacy that we never had (privacy regarding things that we know we shouldn't do but do anyway, not because they don't line up with the current public's social mores, but because they conflict with our own long-term goals). Online privacy is expected to cover a wider range of activities, some of them fine and some of them not so fine, than old school offline privacy. Is privacy eroded by these technologies? The technology allows it to be eroded, but I don't see that happening.

So if the eyes of the public can't keep your inner hedonist in check, then who can? Your inner disciplinarian, of course! And various kinds of technologies (like the program Freedom, or the Me timer or time tracking software for firefox) can do something that has never been done before with such efficiency and to such an extent: it can put your self at one point in time (the self that sits there not in direct proximity to temptation, well aware of what it should do) and allow it to exert power over your self at another time (the self that is surrounded by temptation and requires the discipline of some outside force to prevent it form acting). Think of it as a more nuanced, self-imposed chastity belt.

The most important difference is that we need to realize that the inner hedonist was always being kept in check, but that he was being kept in check by forces (i.e. the public, the government, mom, dad, etc.) that didn't always have our best interests at heart and had their own incentives for altering our behavior. We've found ways around them, but are we really any better off with our inner hedonists running the show? Now we can discipline our inner hedonist while preserving our autonomy and privacy. That's a big deal, and that's what I'll most likely be studying for the next couple of years.