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Digital distractions: Time to pay attention
Have you ever received a “phantom” text message? If you’ve been convinced your phone is vibrating or ringing in your pocket when it turns out to be nothing, the answer is yes. And you’re not alone. According to the Pew internet research center, 67% of American adults in a national survey experienced the same thing.
The same report also found that almost 37% of those surveyed said that they “couldn’t live without” their smartphones, depicting a world in 2013 where ubiquitous computing is increasingly taken for granted – and where our bodies are every bit as involved as our minds.
In my case, phantom messages sometimes arrive when I don’t actually have my phone. I usually keep it in my left trouser pocket and, even when it isn’t there, I sometimes feel a silent-message-style buzzing in my thigh muscles, as if a message has been sent directly into my skin. It’s a disconcerting feeling, and suggests an unwelcome degree of physical conditioning, not least because of the invariable accompanying rush of blood at the thought of someone or something wanting my attention.
Text messages may seem a trivial business, but one thinker who’s increasingly concerned by the dynamic of how we interact with machines is the author and computer scientist Jaron Lanier. In a December interview with the Smithsonian magazine, Lanier railed eloquently against the social consequences of a culture conditioned to respond instantly to services like texts and social media.
“Look what we’re setting up here in the world today,” he says. “We have economic fear combined with everybody joined together on these instant twitchy social networks which are designed to create mass action. What does it sound like to you? It sounds to me like the prequel to potential social catastrophe.”
