There’s a psychological burden of digital life even heavier than distraction.
When the iPhone was first introduced in 2007, the notion of an “everything device” was universally celebrated. A single object that could serve as phone, camera, music player, web browser, and so much more promised unprecedented convenience and connectivity. It was, quite literally, the dream of the nineties. But the better part of twenty years later, we’ve gained enough perspective to recognize that this revolutionary vision came with costs we did not anticipate.
Distraction, of course, is the one we can all relate to first. An everything device has the problem of being useful nearly all the time, and when in use, all consuming. When you use it to do one thing, it pushes you toward others. In order to avoid this, you must disable functions. That’s an interesting turn of events, isn’t it? We have made a thing that does more than we need, more often than we desire. Because system-wide, duplicative notifications are enabled by default, the best thing you could say about the device’s design is that it lacks a point of view toward a prioritization of what it does. The worst thing you could say is that it is distracting by design.
(I find it fascinating how many people – myself included — attempt to reduce the features of their smartphone to the point of replicating a “dumbphone” experience in order to save ourselves from distraction, but don’t actually go so far as to use a lesser-featured phone because a few key features are just too good to give up. A dumbphone is less distracting, but a nightmare for text messaging and a lousy camera. It turns out I don’t want a phone at all, but a camera that texts — and ideally one smaller than anything on the market now. I know I’m not alone, and yet this product will not be made. )
This kind of distraction is direct distraction. It’s the kind we are increasingly aware of, and as its accumulating stress puts pressure on our inner and outer lives, we can combat it with various choices and optimizations. But there is another kind of distraction that is less direct, though just as cumulative and, I believe, just as toxic. I’ve come to think of it as the “digital echo.”
On a smartphone, every single th
13 Comments
gchamonlive
Byung-Chul Han in burnout society introduces the concept of hyperattention, which is the kind of attention that seems efficient at first, because it gives the impression of enabling you to multitask, but in reality it robs you from any deep and meaningful connection to anything around you.
That's is pretty much what happens with anything tech nowadays. Because we see technology as a pure feat of rationality where in fact what we consume are nothing more than cultural artifacts, which will invariably reflect the fundamental problems of the society in which these artifacts are forged. In our case, in the Burnout Society, it's potentializing hyperattention.
tines
> The “digital echo” is more than just the awareness of this; it is the cognitive burden of knowing that our actions generate data elsewhere.
I don't really feel any burden of this myself, I don't feel weighed down by the data generated by my actions. If someone else wants to clutter up their database with some useless info, that's on them. I mainly feel the "direct" burden of distraction.
doright
I think there is a more interesting point made by the essay than "digital echoes," which are pretty abstract in comparison to day-to-day distractions that tangibly reduces time.
It's that there's a notion of a device that has so many features that it becomes "too useful." There is only so much time you can devote to so many features. Yet it's clear, for example observing the uptick in sci-fi computer interfaces in movies and such at the time, that crossing a threshold of "enough features" at once was useful at a certain point – having a pocket-sized Internet-capable device with a small-format camera that didn't suck for one thing.
There was also the essay posted recently that argued for a macOS release focused on bugfixes and stability over the disruption of new features with accompanying issues.
I've been wondering for a long time now, at what point will so much innovation have already happened since the 90s-00s that there won't be enough actually useful features to tack on to the next release of X thing except ones that solve problems we didn't have? Has that point already passed? I remember some iDevice releases weren't as notable upgrades as their predecessors for example.
In my opinion, if the AI revolution hadn't happened exactly when it did a couple years ago, this problem of diminishing tech returns would have been much more obvious than it is already. In fact, I think the current LLM rampage of sorts acted as a flood to fill the drought of incremental innovation that would have otherwise occurred.
degun
I wonder if this is why BlackBerry phones (best ones ever made) went extinct. Because the media used to grab attention more aggressively, images and short videos essentially, are better experienced on a bigger screen. That's why there are no more iPhone minis. It's either convenient for Big Tech to keep us engaged to that type of media, or just simply user preference. Guess I'll never know, but I do miss smaller phones, and especially a physical keyboard.
stevenAthompson
The author is largely correct, and I've personally been doing something similar to him for the last few year: purchasing physical media, shunning unnecessary smart gizmos that I don't directly control, and otherwise trying to just be disconnected for a period of time each day.
Each time I find some small anachronistic way to be offline a little more I can feel myself relax just a bit.
A well lived life is not an exercise in optimization, but our phones lead us to live that way. So, I think I'm done looking for the best way to do things for awhile, and I'm going to focus on finding the most enjoyable way to do them.
mentalgear
See also: "How Phone Use Alters the Formation of Memories and Makes Time Pass Faster".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZi0fUocGyo
tamad
> It turns out I don’t want a phone at all, but a camera that texts — and ideally one smaller than anything on the market now. I know I’m not alone, and yet this product will not be made.
See the Light Phone III released this week.
HellDunkel
I agree to a lot of this. But there is something even more disturbing than the constant surveillance. With the rise of AI we can no longer be sure if what we devote our attention to is an artefact of culture or just some derivative that has been automatically created to keep our attention up. And we ultimately have to ask ourselfs what the hell are we doing here? If history is removed from the artefact it becomes meaningless but how do we evaluate that and what is the consequence? Live music and theatre plays instead of movies and video games?
garyrob
> The penultimate “smartcar” drives itself.
Er… the second-to-last one?
divan
> It turns out I don’t want a phone at all, but a camera that texts — and ideally one smaller than anything on the market now.
RayBan Meta glasses is quite close to it, seriously.
makeitdouble
The "digital echoes" naming is perhaps the most attracting part of this piece.
It's interesting that there is no parallel drawn to the more bland and every effects of our actions, the non digital echoes, where buying corn soup at the supermarket generates data on which brand sold what to who (in particular if it was paid by credit card or with a loyalty number attached). Or how public service attendency is usually tracked in very rough numbers, so going or not to your local library has rippling effects. Or how choosing to bike instead of driving at a place will impact one's town urban policies etc.
We' be always been part of an ecosystem, and our mere presence has effects on it. Caring too much about it will becomes an unsurmountable source of stress, and I feel that's where kids getting a natural sense of it earlier on probably avoids these kind of very late waking up to reality.
ronbenton
A dumb phone with good camera, texting, etc seems like a good product idea. Has it been done?
keybored
Digital information has affordances. One of them is potential infinite permanence. You put something out there and it can be perfectly replicated forever. In a conversation you have the ear witnesses and just multiple levels of hearsay after that. Not so for data. So now you are one copy-paste from leaking your diary to the Wayback Machine.[1]
Everyone talks about this affordance in how it makes things better. People also talk about how digital information is easy to leak. But few seem to talk about it as a direct and irrevocable burden.
Smartphones can do everything. So now you have to put in a lot of effort for it to do less.
For smartphones though it is less inherent. You can make software that limits it so that a million people don’t have to go through the same procedure. We could make a real concerted effort towards that, as a society. But not right now. Because companies won’t make money from less attention or less things bothering people and whatever else. So we can’t do it as a society. Because there is no business model and that is what dictates what the projects that ultimately impacts normal people should be taken on.[2] But there will be projects though. There will be at least a dozen projets on GitHub that only software enthusiasts will use.
We could make a better world if we put our minds to it. A better world for normal people as well.
[1] Eight years from now some bot is going to connect this sentiment I’ve shared here, find similar sentiments from other accounts, cross-reference them with other similarities, and then maybe ultimately find out who I “really am”.
[2] Instead we can bicker about the usual anti-consumer topics. They chose this. They bought the smartphones. Huh, if people really cared they would have bought a dumbphone. What, they need a smartphone for work? To use their bank? Then they would have bought a dumbphone as well for their analog (relatively speaking) weekends.