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The Tech Industry Has Contributed To an 'Attention Crisis', Google Researchers Say (washingtonpost.com) 72

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
A new paper written by Google's user experience researchers delves into the reasons that we can't put down our phones, and starts to explore what companies can do about it. It also calls on the technology industry to reexamine the way it ties engagement to success -- noting that capturing people's attention is not necessarily the best way to measure whether they're satisfied with a product. From a report: For its study, Google focused on a small group of smartphone users and kept tabs on how they used their smartphone throughout a normal day. It also dug into 112 interviews from previous research to evaluate how people felt about their phone use. Researchers Julie Aranda and Safia Baig of Google presented the paper at mobile conference Tuesday in Barcelona. Google used the results of this study to help design its "Digital Wellbeing" tools, which are a part of the company's newest Android operating system and designed to help people curb their smartphone use. The paper provides an overall picture of the reasons people feel they have to be in constant contact with their phones -- though it stops short of evaluating the best ways to combat that.

It does, however, take aim at the basic way that Internet companies -- including Google -- have elevated engagement as the best metric to measure success, creating an economy where attention becomes the most important currency. "We feel that the technology industry's focus on engagement metrics is core to this attention crisis that users are facing," the paper says. "... It's important to consider alternative metrics to indicate success, relating to user satisfaction and quality of time spent."
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The Tech Industry Has Contributed To an 'Attention Crisis', Google Researchers Say More

The Tech Industry Has Contributed To an 'Attention Crisis', Google Researchers Say

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  • This is a well know fact... (Score:5, Funny)

    by The Original CDR ( 5453236 ) on Thursday September 06, 2018 @10:31AM (#57263956)
    That marketeers have four seconds to catch somone's attention before they move on to — Squirrel!

    • Tufty died in a road accident as a result of distraction.

  • You lost me.

  • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by q_e_t ( 5104099 )
      Damn, you beat me to it. It's all I came here to do - post that. So I am off now to look at a shiny thing.

  • "... It's important to consider alternative metrics to indicate success, relating to user satisfaction and quality of time spent."

    When at work, I observe some of my colleagues. I have one conclusion:

    One will easily conclude that these folks are mentally ill just by the way they interact with their devices...mostly FB.

    • Re:Surprising that mental illness is on the rise? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Thursday September 06, 2018 @10:59AM (#57264160)
      I don't know if it's the devices themselves or if we raised a generation that we didn't want to let play outside for fear that they would get into trouble or that something bad would happen to them. Is it any wonder that they turned to electronic devices in order to keep themselves entertained and that they never learned to enjoy other activities outside of those devices?

      I think that we've replaced a lot of our environments and communities with digital equivalents and they're a very shallow substitute at best. Maybe that will change as the technology improves, but I think it's pretty important for us to remember that we're an animal that spent a lot of its evolutionary history without exposure to this kind of technology and that just like other animals we need some natural light, exercise, and a lot of other things that we might tend to put off as a bit primitive or regard as uncivilized.

      When looked at in that way, it doesn't seem strange at all for technology to exert a large amount of selective pressure on the population. Of course a lot of people are miserable or appear to be ill. They're just unfit for this new world we find ourselves in, but there's no need for them to remain that way. Humans are wonderful at adapting the environment to suit them, so there's nothing that says you can't go barbecue or shoot hoops down at the park instead of posting on social media.
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • I don't know if it's the devices themselves or if we raised a generation that we didn't want to let play outside for fear that they would get into trouble or that something bad would happen to them.

        No, it's the devices. The human mind is geared to respond to social cues and providing an immense flood of them to anyone is an easy path to addiction. I have seen people that were addicted to smartphones, who at the same time grew up into adulthood before the internet even existed.

  • Weak minded (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The weak minded will always attach themselves to things, be it their phones or anything else.
    They are simply to easy to manipulate and thus get addicted to mostly anything.
    To fix this we must raise the critical thinking skills of the entire world. Not that tptb will ever willingly do that though :(

    • The weak minded will always attach themselves to things, be it their phones or anything else.

      Another sign of a weak mind is someone who need to validate his self worth by pointing out that everyone else has a weak mind.

      https://xkcd.com/610/ [xkcd.com]

  • And television. Naysayers think that everyone but themselves is responsible.

  • We evolved as hunter-gatherers, and it would be rather fatal for us to stay fixated on one thing at a time.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by q_e_t ( 5104099 )
      You need to be at least to manage partial concentration on something for periods of time, else the fish gets away. You don't want to concentrate so much the bear which also wants fish eats you instead. But then that's why you have fishing buddies - one to look out for the bears. Or that is what you tell your wife when loading the beer into the fishing tackle bag along with the rod and bait.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • I think a major part of the issue is that the amount of notifications people get daily are very high. App developers generate notifications based on what's best for the developer, rather than the end user. No mobile game has ever needed notifications (I *might* make an exception for asynchronous turn-based games), but all of them push you to let their game send notifications. The F2P games do the whole "new daily special" sort of thing where logging in needs to be habitual in order to get in-game bonuses. C

    • I just turned my notifications off. The only notification I get on my cell phone is my text notification. That is because when I get automated texts from work about servers or services, I need to hear them. Otherwise, everything else is turned off. I don't get work emails on my phone, so I don't give a shit. I read facebook when I have time, so I don't need notifications. News alerts? World sucks, I don't need a notification letting me know it is only sucking more.

  • I have literally found myself in this situation: TV on, Netflix streaming, Big Brother livestream running, game (Warcraft) idling running, and surfing on a web site.

  • Help me avoid floods, rather than managing them. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by shess ( 31691 ) on Thursday September 06, 2018 @11:32AM (#57264376) Homepage

    When I worked at Google, a lot of people took it as a badge of pride how much email and chat and crap like that that they "managed". A lot of feature proposals for things like gmail are geared towards somehow helping you manage the flood. Basically, the first assumption is that email is good and more is better, and that assumption is probably right at first, but certainly wrong once you can't keep up. Just like it's good for you to directly interact with tens of people in a day, but directly interacting with thousands of people in a day destroys you.

    You know what I'd really like to see? I'd like to see a way for my computing systems to realize that a mailing list I'm on is useless, that I never engage with it, or that I engage with it in only negative ways - and then suggest that I unsubscribe from it, or skip it past my inbox to a folder for later. I'd like to be able to tell gmail to hold new content for an hour, so that I can triage what I have without having to deal with new items popping in and distracting me. [You can kinda-sorta fake that by processing using labels.] I'd like to be able to tag a few apps as being useful for a particular project, then as the computer notices I'm using something else, it can ask "Is this helping or hindering your project?", and then I could ask to put that app in a timeout if needed.

    Basically, it would be nice if instead of providing tools to magnify my ability to focus on more things, the computer could provide tools to excise irrelevant things from my focus, allowing me to more effectively use what I have.

    • You know what I'd really like to see? I'd like to see a way for my computing systems to realize that a mailing list I'm on is useless, that I never engage with it, or that I engage with it in only negative ways - and then suggest that I unsubscribe from it, or skip it past my inbox to a folder for later.

      Personally, I'm perfectly capable of figuring out that I'm looking at a useless mailing list. What I want is for my computing systems to stop giving me impertinent suggestions as to how to spend my life....

    • Have you looked into Google Inbox? It some of the distraction-reduction things you ask for. Bundle related emails together and then have the bundle appear only once per day or once per week. Snooze emails that you can't address right now to a later date.

  • Smartphones are the modern day cigarette. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Don't get me wrong, they are a useful and powerful tool. But for most people it is more of an addiction and distraction that they simply can not stop. Like a cigarette using a certain brand appears hip. Like a cigarette it's addiction can lead to problems, and like a cigarette user these addicts can be seen as annoying in public, in movie theaters, etc. Sometimes dangerously so (use while driving). Also like a cigarette the manufacturers know of and encourage addictive tendencies.

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