How the Internet Changes Our Thoughts and Behaviors for the Worse (2011)

http://www.theemotionmachine.com/the-dark-sides-of-our-digital-self

by Phithagoras • 10 years ago

67 45 10 years ago

tmaly3• 10 years ago

I was just talking about this broad subject last night.

It feels as if the interaction of people with the internet especially through phones is causing a ADHD of sorts.

It is affecting peoples ability to interact with one another. I try daily to strike up a conversation with people I encounter. Years ago, you could have a really great conversation. These days it seems increasingly difficult to find anyone interest in having a discussion about anything.

Loughla• 10 years ago

Where do you live? This must be regional. In the midwest US, people are still SUUUUPER willing to have an in-depth conversation with me about absolutely anything at all.

user8341116• 10 years ago

I can confirm this as true. I need to get out of this place.

tmaly3• 10 years ago

I am over in CT about an our from NYC.

Xeoncross• 10 years ago

It's "regional" because the adoption of all this was slower out here - just like it would be in other parts of the world people didn't grow up glued to their phones / tv's etc..

Swizec3• 10 years ago

Ever since I turned off notifications on my phone, I've been noticing this more and more.

The worst part is when my girlfriend (or anyone really) asks me a question, then starts staring at their phone before I even begin answering. I'd understand if I was boring and they didn't want to listen to me drone, but they don't even give me a chance to begin to be boring.

Maybe I'm just fundamentally boring. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

mikestew• 10 years ago

The worst part is when my girlfriend (or anyone really) asks me a question, then starts staring at their phone before I even begin answering.

I'm starting to wonder if staring at your phone isn't just becoming the default. I'm currently consulting at a large multi-national company in the Seattle area. I almost took a picture as I was walking down the hallway and saw everyone one of the six people walking toward me while looking at their phones (no, the irony of pulling out my phone to take a picture of people using their phones is not lost on me). It's like I woke up in a fucking zombie movie. And it's not just that one incident, I dodge phone zombies in the hall on a daily basis. I watched one guy run into a support column while staring at his phone, hit it hard enough to kind of spin him around. He never even looked up.

Maybe it's just where I'm at, maybe it's this area of the country, or maybe it's everywhere, I don't know. I'm just starting to feel like Wesley Crusher in that ST:TNG episode with the head-worn video game the whole ship got sucked into.

Dylan16807• 10 years ago

Do they ignore you once you start talking? If their attention is going to slack at some point, the best time for that is probably while you're thinking silently.

brightball• 10 years ago

Talk to older people. Works like a charm.

elliotec• 10 years ago

Not for long though.

pavedwalden• 10 years ago

Where I perceive a tendency to ADHD is in myself. I used to enjoy long in-depth journalism, now after a few paragraphs I get the urge to open another tab. I used to enjoy long plodding movies by Kubrick and Malick, now when I watch a 60 minute television drama I keep pausing it playing with my phone.

It's like my mean-time-till-context-switch has gotten shorter out of habit.

michaelchisari• 10 years ago

I've found the same situation, and it's why it's led me back to printed books (or e-books without wifi). Everything gets turned off, and I read.

Every time I do, I get that same urge to "open a tab", power up my phone, and start playing around.

Eventually the urge does go away, but I have to create a certain artificial environment for myself to force it to.

cylinder• 10 years ago

Same. I can't even watch a movie at home without having my phone out for the slow parts.

WA• 10 years ago

Maybe you just became older. Movies, books, shows - to some extend its always the same stuff repeated over and over.

Falkon1313• 10 years ago

I feel similar - being used to the distraction of switching between multiple tabs while waiting for a page to load, while a video plays on the second monitor, scanning the feeds on my phone on breaks. I can't focus to read a book and a movie takes days to watch. But it's not the internet.

I used the internet for years without any attention-span decrease or distraction features. When it was gopher, telnet, IRC, email, and BBSes etc. running on a DOS PC with no multitasking. (OK, I cheated, I had a TSR that let me switch between up to 3 programs, but RAM was limited and you were only using one at a time.)

It's the combination of multitasking OSes, putting a lot more things on the screen(s), and ubiquitous pocket supercomputers. That's led us to a new standard way of living where we're always trying to do several things at once and expecting context switches every few seconds. That makes it hard to do anything deeply and fully, or focus on anything for a lengthy time; it feels unnatural.

digi_owl• 10 years ago

After discovering the Column Reader Firefox extension i have found long form articles online much more readable.

It converts an article into screen height pages, much like reading a magazine article.

And i think way too many TV drams these days fail the "show don't tell" check. Meaning that you get two talking heads yapping at each other in a static shot more often than not.

CaptSpify• 10 years ago

Speaking purely for myself: It depends on the conversation, but I'm better at non-verbal conversation. I can research, source, write, edit, etc before I post. When I talk, my mouth moves faster than my brain.

I agree it's affecting people's abilities to interact, and that it does have some downsides, but I'm not convinced it's a bad thing overall.

nine_k• 10 years ago

It's still verbal, but not oral.

What I particularly dislike about oral communications is its real-time aspect. Sometimes it's indispensable, but most of the time I'd rather 're-formulate my phrase three times to make it convey the meaning best. It's easy with text, but haphazard with speech.

kordless• 10 years ago

The global consciousness is simultaneously boring and bored because it knows about everything given it is everyone. It's hard to strike up a conversation with someone who's bored and also you.

When people are out of their phones they are in their natural setting as individuals with meaning and purpose. They forget they know everything, so things are interesting again.

dasboth4• 10 years ago

"It's hard to strike up a conversation with someone who's bored and also you."

I like that, it's a really interesting way of phrasing it (and it eerily makes us sound a bit like the Borg).

Aelinsaar2• 10 years ago

People adapt to their environment, and if their environment is dominated by shallow, fleeting interactions, it's hard to imagine that it doesn't have at least a temporary effect. The thing is, I don't see it being the dominant force in the life of healthy people. Young or old, your majority of social interactions won't be online, and you're going to be more shaped by consequential interactions.

Friends and family are just going to exert more pressure on who you are, and how you behave, than distant people you don't really know.

For a healthy person. For someone who is very isolated for one reason or another, then it can probably get very strange and unpleasant. That strikes me more as another symptom of whatever isolates, rather than an underlying cause though.

Swizec3• 10 years ago

Have you ever seen a family eat dinner with the TV turned on? There's no conversation. Fleeting phrases here and there. Everyone watches TV.

It's the same when everyone's smartphone is on the table. Perhaps worse because you aren't even sharing the experience of watching the same TV.

All my friends are always inside my phone. Only some of them are in front of me. Guess who wins.

Aelinsaar2• 10 years ago

That's just a glimpse of their lives, not most of it.

Hnrobert42• 10 years ago

It seems Dr. Aboujaoude has a pretty low opinion of people's ability to choose for themselves what they want. The gripes about incorrect capitalization seem particularly petty. There seems to be little consideration given to the fulfillment people get from exploring alternate versions of their personality. Basically, it seems like he doesn't like the internet and then sets about justifying his position.

throwanem• 10 years ago

He doesn't seem to like much technology that's newer than television, from all I can see. Too, the direct link is to an outright puff piece. I'm really surprised this has survived on the front page as long as it has, or gotten so near the top.

ehnto3• 10 years ago

The explanation for the latter is probably that people identify with the subject and want to discuss it anyway.

I am sure many jumped straight to the comments, as I did. I just want to hear what this community thinks about the topic.

rrecuero2• 10 years ago

It seems to me that the internet is turning us a bit into bumper cars. Everything just happens. We get a new tweet, then we open the phone, we retweet. A minute later, another notification from whatsapp comes in... From notification, to reward to action, we get stuck in that social loop.

We need to develop a more intentional relationship with our environment, friend and specially with ourselves.

ehnto3• 10 years ago

That is exactly the mentality that allowed me to scrape back my concentration and productivity.

If I am to open my phone it has to be with intent. I need to be achieving something.

The idle twiddling of thumbs waiting for something to react to is what becomes a bad habbit, and drives the need to constantly check your phone even though nothing is happening on it.

ehnto3• 10 years ago

That probably sounds really dry, but the real benefit of ditching the phone habit was to gain back the ability to fully engage in games, movies, conversation, and even playing instruments. I was finding the short lived reward cycle was invading everything I did,to the point where I couldn't even sit down and learn a 2 minute song.

dasboth4• 10 years ago

Agreed. Our attention is one of our most valuable resources. It makes sense to try and optimise how we use it.

ro_sharp• 10 years ago

An interesting book on this topic: https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/d...

A review: Carr—author of The Big Switch (2007) and the much-discussed Atlantic Monthly story “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”—is an astute critic of the information technology revolution. Here he looks to neurological science to gauge the organic impact of computers, citing fascinating experiments that contrast the neural pathways built by reading books versus those forged by surfing the hypnotic Internet, where portals lead us on from one text, image, or video to another while we’re being bombarded by messages, alerts, and feeds. This glimmering realm of interruption and distraction impedes the sort of comprehension and retention “deep reading” engenders, Carr explains. And not only are we reconfiguring our brains, we are also forging a “new intellectual ethic,” an arresting observation Carr expands on while discussing Google’s gargantuan book digitization project.

kiba• 10 years ago

It's only a problem if you're actually bombarded with alerts and linkbait and refused to read anything smaller than one thousand words long.

api• 10 years ago

It's more mobile phones than the Internet. I'm expecting a backlash.

Ntrails• 10 years ago

79% of online readers scan, rather than read word-for-word. Often readers can’t be bothered to dig into text in order to find a piece of information or an answer to a problem.

Well didn't that make me feel like a shit as I scan read the article...

(Although in all seriousness I do reserve the right to be mildly interested in the overview of an article and not care about the details. I don't feel that is a flaw.)

dasboth4• 10 years ago

I agree, there's too much noise out there anyway. With most articles you don't lose much by only quickly scanning it.

How the Internet Changes Our Thoughts and Behaviors for the Worse (2011)

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