Facebook, Twitter, YouTube. There seems to be no end to the distractions that are popping up on the Web. But are they turning the management brain to mush in the process?
For months, the public instant messaging service Twitter has been up and down like a yo-yo. And every time the service falters, the blogs and bulletin boards of the Internet lambast the company for its shoddy, but entirely free-of-charge, service.
The howls of outrage that echo round the technology blogs imply that Twitter is an essential tool. Yet, the core question that the service asks when you log in is: “What are you doing?” You could be eating, on a bus, possibly working. But it’s unlikely that the message will have much to do with what you are supposed to be doing.
Then you have Facebook. From its roots as a networking tool for students and recent graduates, the site has become one of the top destinations for adults to stay in touch, displacing tools such as email and instant messaging. Some estimates have put the amount of time spent by adults on Facebook as high as 90 minutes per day. The Web application topped a list that IT managers said they wanted banned, according to Internet-filter provider Blue Coat Systems.
For its part, Email Systems identified the video-sharing YouTube as one of the most popular targets for at-work bans. More than half of its customers said they blocked YouTube during work hours in a survey carried out last year.
Despite the draw of distractions such as Facebook and YouTube, people complain of email overload. A heavily cc:ed email on some obscure policy is nowhere near as much fun as watching someone build fountains from Mentos and coke.
What makes distractions so mind-numbing? Consultant Linda Stone dubs the condition “continuous partial attention”, a consequence of the human desire to stay in touch. And the Internet has delivered the ability to keep contact in spades.
Speaking at the recent DLD conference in Germany, she said: “Our world is noisy and we use everything to keep on top. Every blog post, every person passing by may just give us the next opportunity. We multitask to create more opportunities for ourselves. We use continuous partial attention to scan for opportunities. We want to be a live node on the network.”
There is a cost to all this partial attention. The stress that results from trying to do many things at once makes us anxious.
“We have more attention and stress-related diseases than ever before because we cannot switch these devices off,” says Stone. “Over-stimulation and a lack of fulfilment are the shadow side of continuous partial attention.”
Research by scientists such as Professor Amy Arnsten shows that exposure to even quite mild uncontrollable stress impairs thought processes in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that deals with complex thought. “This may have survival value when we are in danger, but is often detrimental in the information age when we depend on prefrontal cortex functions to steer us through massive interference.”
The answer to the problem is get rid of the interference. It should come as no surprise that methods for improving productivity, such as the Getting Things Done techniques promoted by self-styled self-help guru David Allen, concern themselves with getting rid of stress-inducing distractions. At the core of it all is the idea of writing things down so that you can clear them from your head. If you don’t write them down in some sort of list, they will clutter up your mind while you try to achieve something important.
Stone is an optimist when it comes to dealing with the world of continuous partial attention that has created a market in tools to help us focus. She believes that most of us will learn to focus as we get used to the many communication tools now at our disposal.
“We have been in the age of continuous partial attention for the last 20 years. We are now moving into the age of uni-focus. The first signs are starting to show up but, by 2014, we will be in the prime of this transition,” Stone claims.
For Stone, ‘uni-focus’ is the ability to concentrate and bring attention onto one thing at a time, blocking out the potential distractions. “The world may continue to be noisy but our fulfilment will come from getting to the bottom of things.”
What is unclear is whether this will all happen naturally – that office workers will find the off button on the BlackBerry and set aside time for Facebook – or whether people will have to start getting training on how to pay attention.
One thing is for sure, there will be plenty of people selling services to help make it happen.
The problem of Web-borne distraction may go deeper than simply siphoning off attention to fun sites. Writing in The Atlantic, former editor of Harvard Business Review Nick Carr worries that the way the Web is structured is making it harder and harder to think deeply about subjects, that it is affecting the ability to concentrate. He asks bluntly: “Is Google making us stupid?”
Carr cites a study carried out by the Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (CIBER) at University College, London for the British Library.
Researchers studied the behaviour of visitors to the library site and noticed a pattern: “It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.”
Carr is far from alone in wondering about this. Prolific blogger Andrew Sullivan, who peppers his site with short, often one-line links to stuff out there on the Internet, writes that Carr’s story “strikes close to home”. A number of commenters reckon that they no longer get pleasure from reading longer texts: that they prefer to go for the quick fix all the time.
However, what CIBER and others have spotted may just be evidence of Mooers’ Law. Calvin Mooers was a librarian long before the Internet was even dreamt of but he noticed one thing: information is troublesome.
“It is now my suggestion that many people may not want information, and that they will avoid using a system precisely because it gives them information... if you have information, you must first read it, which is not always easy. You must then try to understand it...understanding the information may show that your work was wrong, or may show that your work was needles... thus not having and not using information can often lead to less trouble and pain than having and using it.”
Some 40 years later, Roger Summit, the founder of the online information-retrieval service Dialog, reformulated Mooers’ assertions in a manner fitting for the Google generation: “Mooers’ Law tells us that information will be used in direct proportion to how easy it is to obtain.”
Nothing makes information easier to obtain than a search engine. And if the text looks a little tricky on one page, there’s always another one two clicks away that might just tell us the answer we want.
Facebook, Twitter and blogs
The Web 2.0 revolution has created an alarming array of time-sapping diversions. But few have achieved the ability to divert of social-networking programs such as Facebook, Twitter and the sprawling network of blogs. Each of these is a gateway drug to the others. People may start on Facebook only to find themselves starting up obscure blogs and telling everyone about their latest sandwich on Twitter as they get sucked into the social-media revolution.
YouTube
Got an email from a friend? Chances are it’s got a link in it, and that link leads straight to YouTube and a guaranteed five-minute distraction, whether it’s a slow-motion close-up of a karate chopper’s hand wrapping itself around a breeze block or a guy trashing his office cubicle. You can console yourself with the idea that there are some useful videos there, such as the Red Cross guide to cardiopulmonary resuscitation. But few people go to YouTube for its useful videos.
Fark
The creators of Fark.com have no illusions: “It’s not news, it’s Fark.” What could provide a better distraction hit than a little bit of news from the outside world. Try stuff that isn’t really news. Snippets such as “winged rat comes home to owner ten years after it disappeared” and “police arrest man running on trail in thong” are culled from the dark underbelly of world media and served up in bite-sized chunks at Fark. Bet you can’t read just one.
Lolcats
You could lose yourself in Lolcats. It all looks harmless on the surface. You have pictures of cats doing stupid things or sleeping in weird places in the way that only cats can. People then add captions, preferably in some headline font like Franklin Gothic. But not just any old caption. It has to be in lolspeak: a strange pidjin version of English that you’d expect from a three-year-old. Or a cat. The first few don’t take up so much time. But half-an-hour later, you’re still there, thinking “just one more”. It’s truly Web crack. Yet, after days wandering around inside the lolcat site par excellence, you will still wonder: “Why is it called ‘I can has cheezburger’?”
cc: emails
Most distractions are fun, which is why they are so insidious. But the pet-hate for most people in the office is the massively cc:ed email. In the politics of the working world, no-one wants to get caught out on a project later on by someone who didn’t get the message. So, everyone plays safe by sending emails about projects to just about every person who could conceivably care, which is a number roughly five times that of those who do care. The result is an email inbox groaning with messages that get some attention but probably don’t deserve it.
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