The Tech Industry Has Contributed To an 'Attention Crisis', Google Researchers Say (washingtonpost.com) 72
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."
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."
This is a well know fact... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: This is a well know fact... (Score:2)
Tufty died in a road accident as a result of distraction.
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What phones did you buy that only last 2 years?
I had my iPhone 3GS till I got my iPhone 6s+....that was a long time and it worked great.
I don't plan to ditch my 6s+ for quite awhile, nothing so compelling that I feel the need to upgrade...and I'll get a free battery replacement here in a month or so....
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So I went back to using a dumbphone. It will last much longer than two years, it costs a tenth as much as a smart phone, and it does not pull me in to some sort of Attention Crisis.
It's great that that works for you, but for many people, me included, not having a smartphone means having to carry a whole bunch of other devices as well. A PDA for calendaring and contact management, a GPS receiver for navigation, a camera, an ebook reader, an MP3 player, a portable game console, a fitness tracker, etc. I used to actually carry all of the above (not all the time; I had to pick and choose what to take when and often didn't have the device I wanted), and besides the proliferation of things
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It's great that that works for you, but for many people, me included, not having a smartphone means having to carry a whole bunch of other devices as well. A PDA for calendaring and contact management, a GPS receiver for navigation, a camera, an ebook reader, an MP3 player, a portable game console, a fitness tracker, etc.
Oh bullshit... I have a tablet that has every single function you just named. ONE DEVICE. But, I don't carry it in my pocket. It's not a constant distraction. Normally it's sitting on the passenger seat and, if I need it, I can retrieve it quickly. I carry a flip phone for phone calls.
I'm not saying that works for you.. I'm simply saying that every function you just described can be accommodated without a smart phone and without multiple devices.
So you carry a phone and a tablet. How is that not "multiple devices"?
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Sure. But if you take one more step you get to one device. One small enough to fit in a pocket. And all of your non-phone functionality has a data connection even when Wifi is unavailable -- unlike your tablet, unless the tablet has a cellular modem and you pay for service for it.
Of course, I'm not trying to tell you that your solution is bad. If it works for you, great. But the AC above was trying to say that people are stupid for wanting a smartphone when a dumbphone is all you need. My point was tha
Wot? (Score:1)
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Surprising that mental illness is on the rise? (Score:2, Interesting)
"... 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)
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.
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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)
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
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So only greed and narcissism exists in Western Society?
Yes. That is why the 3rd world is so much more prosperous, and why so many Europeans and Americans are trying to illegally immigrate to Nigeria and El Salvador.
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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]
The same thing was said about Newspapers (Score:2)
Human attention is not meant for long-term focus (Score:1)
We evolved as hunter-gatherers, and it would be rather fatal for us to stay fixated on one thing at a time.
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Spam Just Shifted (Score:2)
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
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I want a robot to rub my...feet...too. (Score:2)
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)
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.
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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....
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Smartphones are the modern day cigarette. (Score:1)