Strikes me that the ability to focus and direct ones own attention will (or already has) become a new form of class divide; those who can concentrate and those who can't. And it will likely have much different boundaries than earlier class divisions like wealth - in fact the wealthy are more likely to struggle given greater access to a wide range of digital products.
It reminds me of Cal Newport's book Deep Work, where he argues those who can deliberately focus in the 21st century and actively deny themselves from being distracted (scheduled e-mail reading, banning Slack, only reading news certain times of the day) and go deep in subject matters will have massive advantages in the knowledge economy. The open office trend certainly hasn't helped. One of my friends who is a ML coder says he'll get 4x done in a single day at home compared to going to work where he gets bombarded by conversations.
After reading many books related to apps and attention (e.g. Hooked!, Irresistible), I elected to give up using Facebook, Instagram, and put heavy restrictions on my habit of going to Reddit/NYTimes/News Websites.
And I'll print things from the web so that I can concentrate on it without distraction in a quiet room with no digital distractions.
When I was younger, I probably called Knuth a luddite for abstaining from e-mail all the way back in the 90s. But wow, my opinion has done a full 180 over the 2010s.
A counterpoint is Warren Buffett. His office doesn't have a phone or computer or anything that might interrupt him. He tells his secretary to hold everything while he goes inside, kicks back, and reads volume after volume of market data. To me, focus is more accessible to the wealthy. If I could afford it, I'd pay someone to handle Slack/phone/email for me so I could do what I most enjoy, which is get into a flow with the knowledge that I won't be interrupted.
It's true that the wealthy need discipline in order to achieve focus, but the poor need discipline and an environment that is conducive to focus. The latter is getting rarer and rarer. The very poor often live in crowded, noisy, and even unsafe areas.
I would argue the opposite. The poor are incentivized to use free (but containing ads) products. The rich can pay their way out of those attention seeking ads.
The ability to read a broadsheet newspaper rather than a tabloid 'newspaper' was the old 'class divide'. In the pre-internet days when newspapers were still allegedly important, not everyone could read a full length article in 'The Manchester Guardian'. (Not sure what the U.S. equivalent would be).
Papers like 'The Sun' and 'The Daily Mail' were there to entertain and brainwash. Their headline writers were absolutely excellent at what they did, e.g. 'FREDDIE STARR ATE MY HAMSTER'. Does that not pique your curiosity? There is not a lot that can be added to that story - did the hamster taste nice? Who knows, the hamster was never eaten and the article was a bit of 'fake news' (clickbait) and was there to promote the comedian's up and coming tour.
Most people elected to read something other than 'The Guardian' even if they went broadsheet rather than tabloid. For every Guardian reader there were ten 'Telegraph' readers and maybe three 'Times' readers. Now I was a paperboy back then so I read all the papers extremely quickly. Only 'The Guardian' and 'The Financial Times' interested me enough to not speed read. It amused me to see people waste their attention on the other papers. Why spend a Sunday ploughing through The Sunday Times? It was a good all-day read back then. Yet I felt a lot of people were going through the motions, trying to focus on these stupid papers that rarely had more than one genuine bit of investigative journalism in them, if that.
As a child with every paper free to read every day I gravitated towards the newspaper requiring attention. I could have just stared at Sam Fox's breasts on page 3 of the Sun but preferred the financial pages of the Guardian, followed by the international news. Importantly I decided this for myself, not out of peer pressure. Moving swiftly on to today and here I am reading HN instead of whatever junk appears as 'news' on the Internet Explorer home page or the online version of the Daily Mail. Why am I again in the minority of people seeking more than PR pieces about 'hamsters being eaten'?
So will the wealthy be disproportionately affected by issues with concentration? That seems to be the implication of your statement. However, I'm also unconvinced that the ability to concentrate (above an average level, at least) has historically been an important component of accumulating wealth.
Chemistry is tacitly striving to help. I mean, things like Adderal or Ritalin don't need any marketing around people whose jobs need concentrated attention. But those are controlled substances; nicotine, less so, and caffeine is just dispensed for free in most offices.
"Do not feed the monsters.
Some are wandering thought forms, looking for a place to set up house.
Some are sent to you deliberately. They come from arrows of gossip, jealousy or envy–and inadvertently from thoughtlessness.
They feed on your attention, and feast on your fear."
- Joy Harjo, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems (via dukeofbookingham)
Do people really click more ads the longer they spend on Facebook? It feels like an unreasonable assumption to me. Clicking on an advert takes you away from the app, so if you design an app that people never want to stop using then they're never going to click an ad. The 'ideal' (for Facebook, not for users of Facebook) is an app that people want to use enough to be aware of an ad that's displayed on the page, but that isn't compelling enough for them to want to stay on the page rather than click on the ad to go wherever it takes them.
Facebook would maximise their profit by tailoring the application to be something that people want to log in to as regularly as possible but not to stay on for very long so they're compelled to click away after a seeing an ad. Maybe that's what Facebook have done, but when you hear about users spending hours a day scrolling through their timeline on there it doesn't seem that way.
Ads aren't just about click-throughs though. If someone is scrolling endlessly and seeing adverts every few minutes, that's still influencing them. Possibly more so because they're in a comfortable cycle of absorbing snippets of information, and don't appraise it critically.
That is exactly what they've done, training you to quickly open the app to check for notifications/messages/event invites.
More recently, after running a script found on here to unfollow everyone in my feed, I've noticed that Facebook will "invent" notifications - someone's birthday, an event near me, etc - to keep the dopamine slot machine going
The difference that I justify for using HN over a lot of other aggregators in the quality of the content tends to be much higher. I still have a large backlog of repos and writeups that I'd like to study, all found from submissions on HN.
HN is probably in my top two time-wasters. And yet, it also gives me genuinely useful information.
It even sometimes prevents wasted time. I'll look at the comments first, and quickly figure out that the article is a waste of time. I find that out faster from the comments than I would from the article. Net result - time saved (or at least time more efficiently wasted...)
We haven't seen nothing yet. Smartphone addiction is a thing, but at least you can put your phone in your pocket on silent and go on with your day.
But AR lenses are coming and will be the next big thing in my opinion. Imagine being immersed in this semi-virtual world all day long. Imagine being a child and grow up in a world where these things are ubiquitous. Imagine what this will do to their attention.
Imagine the world a hundred years from now, where almost everything is presented as augmented reality, and where someone who doesn't have permanently augmented vision is seen as an outsider, much like the Amish today.
Think about nothing being sold with a color or pattern anymore, because you can just customize it to whatever you want in your AR view. Think about products not having any sort of printed imagery, because it's pointless when animated digital overlay overrides it anyway.
Think about being one of those outsiders who sees an entire world where everything you interact with is black and white and you can't hold but the lowest job, because you are literally blind to 99.9% of "reality". Think about not being able to live a middle class life without augmenting your vision.
Rainbow's End by Vernor Vinge explores this a bit. Classroom distractions become students throwing up graphics in their shared AR and the one guy in the room that doesn't know how to access it is left out of the joke. It's been a while since I read it but I think one of the big plotlines was getting one of the older characters to finally learn how to use the shared AR.
Just as you can put your phone in your pocket, you can take off your AR lens. (At least until it's surgically implanted. Even then, it should still have a silent mode, just like your phone.)
Just engaging with all the devices is a job in itself. Its very tough to focus.
I keep all social media & news apps in a tablet that I refer to as the "time-killer". Controlling the alerts is a losing game. So, I just put all in a separate device. Even with browser, I have a separate profile that I use for HN & reddit.
Even my phone is silent most of the times. I wish there was a answering machine app, so I can respond to calls at my convenience. In my circle, we actually just voice message via whatsapp, so no one is disturbed and can respond at a convenient time.
"Just engaging with all the devices is a job in itself. Its very tough to focus.
I keep all social media & news apps in a tablet that I refer to as the "time-killer". Controlling the alerts is a losing game."
I have manually disabled nearly all notifications on my phone, which works pretty well for me (but I think your isolation strategy sounds like a pretty good one, too).
old news I guess but I recently realized I could block elements with ublock origin so I blocked the "hot meta questions" and "hot questions from other stack exchange sites" elements from stack overflow because I'd see some slightly interesting topic and get sucked in.
not sure what other similar helpful things I can do. I unfollow agressively on Facebook. use Fbpurity to filter as much as possible. don't use Twitter.
I still get distracted all day long. should probably ban HN from my life for the 4th time . it's not easy. I changed my hosts file once but VMs don't use the same file. tried using parental controls on iOS but they ban way too much. used noprocrast but can open incognito window although it helps not being able to comment. Wishing there was a fake VPN app for iOS I could use to block sites
I'd really like my phone to be able to prioritize notifications and only bug me for important things. Calls, SMS, notifications etc should all be hidden and prioritized. A call from my wife, or someone I know should be immediately shown. Notifications about important emails as well, not so much about the latest offer available on amazon.com. Phones make it hard to control the level of notifications and could do a better job at that.
In android there is a "do not disturb" option that silences everything but calls (you can drill it down further to starred contacts or none at all) and sms messages (also drillable), I always have this on.
I turn off read receipts where I can, allowing me greater control of when I respond and I also silence group chats and people who are bothersome indefinitely. If they are important enough I will find time to answer them, regardless of how "noisy" or "noiseless" they are. If it's urgent, they can call.
You can install a pihole server at your home that will block advertisers through DNS, allowing you to use even free apps without ads. (I haven't done this yet since I moved recently).
As for emails, I imagine you can have a single email address on your phone for important emails and configure email forwarding rules from your default email, I haven't tried this though.
Gmail with the split inbox has that feature (although for the life of me I can't get it to put updates/promotions into the same bucket, though they are) and inbox allows you to bundle and split things even more.
Every other month I go on a media diet: no social media, no news, no unnecessary browsing of any kind - only books and a small number of podcasts are allowed (plus whatever Internet usage is necessary for work). I've been doing this for more than a year now, and it has helped me feel a lot less "fragmented". I highly recommend it.
What do you do when you need to know something? (recent example: my toilet stopped refilling, I had no idea what was wrong and found the information on the internet). Also, which podcasts do you prioritize?
This makes me think, that on the scale of the paperclips game we are well past where most players would think we are. We are actually at the beginning of the hypno drone release project.
When my friend on FB share various stupid chance-to-win contests they are selling my attention for their chance to win. I was looking for a decent way to tell them.
[+] [-] harryf|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colmvp|8 years ago|reply
After reading many books related to apps and attention (e.g. Hooked!, Irresistible), I elected to give up using Facebook, Instagram, and put heavy restrictions on my habit of going to Reddit/NYTimes/News Websites.
And I'll print things from the web so that I can concentrate on it without distraction in a quiet room with no digital distractions.
When I was younger, I probably called Knuth a luddite for abstaining from e-mail all the way back in the 90s. But wow, my opinion has done a full 180 over the 2010s.
[+] [-] christophilus|8 years ago|reply
It's true that the wealthy need discipline in order to achieve focus, but the poor need discipline and an environment that is conducive to focus. The latter is getting rarer and rarer. The very poor often live in crowded, noisy, and even unsafe areas.
[+] [-] ovi256|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Theodores|8 years ago|reply
Papers like 'The Sun' and 'The Daily Mail' were there to entertain and brainwash. Their headline writers were absolutely excellent at what they did, e.g. 'FREDDIE STARR ATE MY HAMSTER'. Does that not pique your curiosity? There is not a lot that can be added to that story - did the hamster taste nice? Who knows, the hamster was never eaten and the article was a bit of 'fake news' (clickbait) and was there to promote the comedian's up and coming tour.
Most people elected to read something other than 'The Guardian' even if they went broadsheet rather than tabloid. For every Guardian reader there were ten 'Telegraph' readers and maybe three 'Times' readers. Now I was a paperboy back then so I read all the papers extremely quickly. Only 'The Guardian' and 'The Financial Times' interested me enough to not speed read. It amused me to see people waste their attention on the other papers. Why spend a Sunday ploughing through The Sunday Times? It was a good all-day read back then. Yet I felt a lot of people were going through the motions, trying to focus on these stupid papers that rarely had more than one genuine bit of investigative journalism in them, if that.
As a child with every paper free to read every day I gravitated towards the newspaper requiring attention. I could have just stared at Sam Fox's breasts on page 3 of the Sun but preferred the financial pages of the Guardian, followed by the international news. Importantly I decided this for myself, not out of peer pressure. Moving swiftly on to today and here I am reading HN instead of whatever junk appears as 'news' on the Internet Explorer home page or the online version of the Daily Mail. Why am I again in the minority of people seeking more than PR pieces about 'hamsters being eaten'?
[+] [-] kristianc|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] knownothing|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nine_k|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whitten|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hi41|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onion2k|8 years ago|reply
Facebook would maximise their profit by tailoring the application to be something that people want to log in to as regularly as possible but not to stay on for very long so they're compelled to click away after a seeing an ad. Maybe that's what Facebook have done, but when you hear about users spending hours a day scrolling through their timeline on there it doesn't seem that way.
[+] [-] aninhumer|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chaseha|8 years ago|reply
More recently, after running a script found on here to unfollow everyone in my feed, I've noticed that Facebook will "invent" notifications - someone's birthday, an event near me, etc - to keep the dopamine slot machine going
[+] [-] brndnmtthws|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baxtr|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colmvp|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nine_k|8 years ago|reply
If HN was a subscription-only service, I'd subscribe in a heartbeat. (It would have a number of downsides, of course.)
[+] [-] AnimalMuppet|8 years ago|reply
It even sometimes prevents wasted time. I'll look at the comments first, and quickly figure out that the article is a waste of time. I find that out faster from the comments than I would from the article. Net result - time saved (or at least time more efficiently wasted...)
[+] [-] remir|8 years ago|reply
But AR lenses are coming and will be the next big thing in my opinion. Imagine being immersed in this semi-virtual world all day long. Imagine being a child and grow up in a world where these things are ubiquitous. Imagine what this will do to their attention.
[+] [-] fortythirteen|8 years ago|reply
Think about nothing being sold with a color or pattern anymore, because you can just customize it to whatever you want in your AR view. Think about products not having any sort of printed imagery, because it's pointless when animated digital overlay overrides it anyway.
Think about being one of those outsiders who sees an entire world where everything you interact with is black and white and you can't hold but the lowest job, because you are literally blind to 99.9% of "reality". Think about not being able to live a middle class life without augmenting your vision.
[+] [-] jgroszko|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AnimalMuppet|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] digitalsushi|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] srndh|8 years ago|reply
I keep all social media & news apps in a tablet that I refer to as the "time-killer". Controlling the alerts is a losing game. So, I just put all in a separate device. Even with browser, I have a separate profile that I use for HN & reddit.
Even my phone is silent most of the times. I wish there was a answering machine app, so I can respond to calls at my convenience. In my circle, we actually just voice message via whatsapp, so no one is disturbed and can respond at a convenient time.
[+] [-] dionidium|8 years ago|reply
I have manually disabled nearly all notifications on my phone, which works pretty well for me (but I think your isolation strategy sounds like a pretty good one, too).
[+] [-] sandov|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greggman|8 years ago|reply
not sure what other similar helpful things I can do. I unfollow agressively on Facebook. use Fbpurity to filter as much as possible. don't use Twitter.
I still get distracted all day long. should probably ban HN from my life for the 4th time . it's not easy. I changed my hosts file once but VMs don't use the same file. tried using parental controls on iOS but they ban way too much. used noprocrast but can open incognito window although it helps not being able to comment. Wishing there was a fake VPN app for iOS I could use to block sites
[+] [-] 121789|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krisives|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] optimalsolver|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kurtz79|8 years ago|reply
https://xkcd.com/570/
[+] [-] tschellenbach|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Toast_25|8 years ago|reply
I turn off read receipts where I can, allowing me greater control of when I respond and I also silence group chats and people who are bothersome indefinitely. If they are important enough I will find time to answer them, regardless of how "noisy" or "noiseless" they are. If it's urgent, they can call.
You can install a pihole server at your home that will block advertisers through DNS, allowing you to use even free apps without ads. (I haven't done this yet since I moved recently).
As for emails, I imagine you can have a single email address on your phone for important emails and configure email forwarding rules from your default email, I haven't tried this though.
[+] [-] tomjen3|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pbkhrv|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomjen3|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tjwii|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quadrangle|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amrrs|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lostmsu|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ilikeeverything|8 years ago|reply