Our Evolving Interaction with Technology
The Responsibility of Developers, Writers, and Content Creators
I still vaguely remember a time in my childhood when I was able to read effortlessly for a whole day, being fully absorbed in whatever I was reading.
Now my attention often starts to drift after a page, or even a paragraph, looking for something else to do, something new for my nervous mind to jump on.
I am by no means alone in this realization. Pathologist Bruce Friedman laments having “almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print”, his mind having taken on a “staccato” quality.
“Calm, focused, undistracted, the linear mind is being pushed aside by a new kind of mind that wants and needs to take in and dole out information in short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts — the faster, the better.”
— Nicholas Carr
In his book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, from which the above quote was taken and which inspired and informed much of this article, Nicholas Carr contrasts this racing mind with the feeling many of us experience when being in a library.
In such a place we rarely experience the same kind of anxiety that’s so symptomatic of information overload: “Take your time, the books whispered to me in their dusty voices. We’re not going anywhere.”
The fact that we have almost all of humanity’s accumulated wisdom only a single click away is wonderful and has been a driving force behind our tremendous progress. But it also comes at a huge price.
It is an old misconception that the adult brain is static. More recent studies have found that the brain remains highly plastic during our entire lifetime. In the words of neurophysiologist J. Z. Young, “every action leaves some permanent print upon the nervous tissue”.
“The brain has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”
— James Olds
And it is not just physical actions and stimuli that can trigger changes in the brain. Mental activity itself can physically alter the brain.
A famous study by Alvaro Pascual-Leone compared people who practiced the piano to people who only imagined practicing the piano. The result: The visualization based group, even though they didn’t touch a piano for the entire duration of the study, improved their skills almost as much as the group who spend the same time on an actual piano.
Visualisations are not just new-age nonsense, they can be a powerful tool. But this is not purely good news.
Mental activity being able to induce physical changes in the brain leads to feedback loops, which can lock behaviors into habits. And bad habits are just as easy to ingrain as good habits. In a very real sense, the mind can train itself to be sick.
Underlying this plasticity is the very rough (and somewhat outdated) but often cited Hebb’s rule: “Cells that fire together wire together.” Another slightly more alarming way of capturing this idea is “survival of the busiest”.
This more directly hints at the underlying problem: Neurons don’t care about the quality of a thought. All they want is to be activated.
An Extension To Our Brain
According to Carr there are four different categories of technology.
Technology that extends our physical capabilities (e.g. plow)
Technology that extends our senses (e.g. microscope)
Technology that allows us to control or reshape nature (e.g. birth control)
“Intellectual Technologies” (e.g. abacus)
Out of these, Intellectual Technologies play a special role. They are the most intimate. They are not only tools we use, but they become a direct extension of us and fundamentally alter our brain.
“It is that technologies are not merely aids to human activity, but also powerful forces acting to reshape that activity and its meaning”
— Langdon Winner
Some people, championed by the idea of Thorstein Veblen’s “Technological Determinism”, go so far as to say that technology is the actual autonomous driving force of change, and humans are just there to facilitate it. Or as media theorist Marshall McLuhan put it, humans become “the sex organ of the machine world”.
“Things are in the saddle / And ride mankind.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Even within the Intellectual Technologies, there is one group that stands out: Language, the medium our conscious thoughts are made up of, and the tools and technologies we created around it have an unrivaled impact on our brain.
Our brains change dramatically as we learn to read. The visual cortex develops specialized regions reserved exclusively for the processing of written text. There is even a substantial difference between the brains of people using alphabet based scripts such as the Latin script, versus pictogram based scripts like Chinese.
Researchers like Maryanne Wolf have described reading as a strange evolutionary anomaly. It requires our brain to focus on a single thing for a long time. This goes completely counter to evolution and our natural instincts, which consider being aware of peripheral distractions as important. Those distractions could mean danger after all.
Luckily, we usually don’t have to worry anymore about a tiger jumping out of the bush while we’re enjoying a good book.
Thus, reading has become a prime tool in overcoming this (mostly) obsolete instinct, and might have been the key driving force behind humans developing a capability for deep thought and contemplation, sustained concentration, and developing long and complex arguments.
A 2009 study from Washington University also showed that “readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative.” In the words of lead author Nicole Speer, deep reading “is by no means a passive exercise.” Readers in a sense quite literally become one with the story.
Combining this insight with our knowledge of the power of visualisations suggests what a tremendous impact a good story can have on a reader.
A New Technological Era
The shift from spoken to written, printed, and now electronic language was possibly the greatest technological transition in human history. The formerly oral culture gave way to a literary culture.
But today, we find ourselves again at a transition between two technological worlds. We have entered the Information Age, with the internet at its core.
The internet is inherently different from previous media.
For one, it is bidirectional. It connects us, and is both a personal as well as commercial broadcasting medium. Medium itself is a great example. It provides a unique platform that allows writers to not only easily publish their stories, but directly interact with their audience. In the not so distant future we might even see social networks embedded in books.
Historically, the media landscape was also highly fragmented. Newspapers, TV broadcasters and radio stations only tangentially overlapped, with vastly different creation processes and distribution channels.
But once digitized, all forms of media become essentially the same, the internet becoming and all-purpose tool. To see this trend one just needs to look at any newspaper website. In many cases the actual text has almost become secondary, being steadily eclipsed by the flood of embedded multimedia content.
“The gray text page, once a magazine staple, has been all but banished”
— Michael Scherer
As the net absorbs a medium, it essentially recreates it in its own image, with hyperlinks and peripheral context.
This fundamentally changes the way in which we use, create, share, understand, and experience content.
Reading is a multi-sensory experience. Reading printed text versus reading on the net has completely different effects on the brain. It also has a direct influence on our attention.
Hyperlinks, inescapable on the web, encourage rapidly dipping in and out of text, fragmenting our focus.
Producers are restructuring their content to fit shorter and shorter attention spans. TV and even real world experiences like theater are made more and more interactive and linked to the web. Magazines and newspapers publish ever shorter stories and summaries.
This creates a feedback loop. Readers expect ever shorter and more interactive and interlinked content, encouraging creators to make more and more attention fragmenting content.
When I published my first article on Medium, a 37 minute long-form piece, I was asked by many people if I couldn’t have made it shorter, or split it into several parts. Many readers don’t seem to be prepared to (or able to?) read anything that’s longer than a few paragraphs.
These changes in reading style will invariably bring changes in writing style. From catering to shorter attention spans, to writers optimizing for search engines or algorithmic virality. Many of these changes help writers hack their readers brain, or at least access to it, but come at the cost of quality.
“Our indulgence in the pleasures of informality and immediacy has led to a narrowing of expressiveness and a loss of eloquence.”
— Nicholas Carr
However, as I have recently noticed first hand through overwhelmingly supportive responses to an article I wrote on quality vs. quantity, there still seems to be strong demand for content that is first and foremost optimized for quality, not virality or ease of consumption. Content that is not consumed, and certainly not produced, in 5 minutes or less. Many of the recent developments around Medium suggest the same.
Let’s break the feedback loop!
I urge everyone reading this who is in any way involved in this process, either as a developer of the tools, or as a writer or other creator, to shape the technology and the content published through it in a responsible way.
Yes, the medium shapes us, but all of us also have the power to shape the medium itself.
As an AI researcher and writer, I see this as one of my top priorities. I really believe that artificial intelligence can have an incredibly positive impact on taming the flood of information overload and increase the signal to noise ratio, leaving the rapid attention switching to AI (which is much better at this anyway), and free us up once again to delve deep into long-form articles or intricate novels.
However, AI can be quite a double-edged sword in this endeavor. Trying to reduce information overload invariably has to involve some form of selection and curation. Doing this without creating artificial filter bubbles, even involuntarily, is an incredibly difficult challenge. But I am hopeful, and very excited to work on this problem.
Designed To Distract
In the mid 1970s, Xerox held a meeting at their Palo Alto Research Centre in which they for the first time revealed the idea of multi-tasking on a computer. Proudly, they showed how you could be programming, stop coding mid-line to quickly respond to an email, and then immediately go back to programming.
Immediately a scientist in the audience demanded “Why in the world would you want to be interrupted, and distracted, by e-mail while programming.”
Now this question would seem crazy to most people.
“When we go online we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. [The net] turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.”
— Nicholas Carr
While it is possible to go deep online, this is in many cases not what the technology naturally promotes. Instead it rapidly and repeatedly first captures and then scatters our attention.
It delivers exactly the right stimuli, “repetitive, intensive, interactive, addictive” (Carr), that promote neuroplasticity, and makes use of it to quickly rewire the brain.
We keep repeating the same actions and patterns over and over again, triggered by visual and auditory stimuli, just like a compulsive gambler in front of a slot machine.
This analogy has actually been taken way more literal by many tech giants than we’d like to suspect. There is a reason pull-to-refresh and its many cousins feel so similar to pulling a lever on a slot machine.
But the game is rigged against us. These companies employ some of the world’s smartest behavioral psychologists with the sole task of finding exactly the tricks that get us hooked and come back to a website or app as quick and as often as possible.
Luckily some of the insiders are now speaking up and fighting against what they created. Chief among them Tristan Harris, who was formerly working on exactly this problem of getting users hooked, but then founded the Center for Humane Technology and is now helping companies like Google and Facebook design their products and services in a more responsible way.
Whether out of guilt and to improve their public image, or from true conviction, many of the big players have recently publicly recognized the problem and in many cases even included finding a solution in their mission statement.
We will see if this actually leads to a change, but the signs are starting to turn very positive.
While the trends towards ever more distracting and attention grabbing design are appearing to slow down or even reverse, for now we have to live with the constant risk of cognitive overload.
According to psychologist John Sweller, divided attention is one of the main sources of cognitive overload. And it is also a central features of the net as a medium.
The aforementioned tendency of the net to sprinkle hyperlinks through all its content used to be seen as a great aid to rapid learning and understanding new topics. It allows us to immediately relate new ideas to a greater context and cover vast amounts of material in a short time. Modern and forward thinking schools jumped onto this notion and switched from traditional text-books to highly hyperlinked multi-media tools instead.
However, more and more studies have shown that reading linear texts provides much higher comprehension than reading hypertext full with links, even for very internet-literate people. A study by Erping Zhu showed a direct relation between increased number of links in a text and decreased comprehension.
“Reading and comprehension require establishing relationships between concepts, drawing inferences, activating prior knowledge, and synthesizing main ideas. Disorientation or cognitive overload may thus interfere with cognitive activities of reading and comprehension”
— Erping Zhu
Ironically, the fact that I included a link to the study above, probably means that your comprehension of this article just suffered a little bit.
As writers, we have to find a balance. Being able to link to other content can be great and very useful. It allows us to refer to our sources, give the more interested reader a chance to dive deeper without overwhelming the less interested reader, and simply share other great content.
But it comes at the cost of depth.
Thus, a unique part of the challenge of being a writer on the net, one which is rarely considered, is balancing this tradeoff between full immersion but lack of connectedness on the one hand, and highly interlinked content at the cost of diverting attention on the other hand.
Studies have also shown that multimedia presentation of information results both in lesser understanding as well as less enjoyment of the learning experience. While many of us (me included) intuitively think that multimedia content is often more fun and engaging than pure text, this assumption actually seems to be flawed.
Multi-tasking, even if it is just in the form of taking in information through multimedia content, is more mentally draining and frustrating than beneficial. And as Stanford professor Clifford Nass puts it, habitual multi-taskers become “suckers for irrelevancy”.
It’s time to simplify again.
Let’s strip out the unnecessary embedded content and distractions that encourage multi-tasking and focus on the core ideas themselves, allowing our readers to be fully immersed in our stories.
When we pick up a new tool, say a hammer, the way we perceive the world completely changes. The net is no different. It’s just a much more powerful and multi-purpose tool than anything we have created before.
Marshall McLuhan pointed out that tools numb whatever part of our body they amplify. Computers, and the net in particular, amplify so much of our central nervous system that we have to be cautious not to have our thoughts themselves numbed.
“We shape our tools, and thereafter they shape us.”
— John Culkin
The amplifying effect has been tremendous. Thanks to computers and the net we have achieved intellectual feats that seemed unthinkable just decades ago. And AI is still very much in its infancy and might in the coming years catalyze and accelerate this effect beyond anything we can currently imagine.
The potential upside is enormous. But it’s up to us not to let it swing the other way.
Developers, let’s make ethical design one of our top priorities, identifying distractions not as a key design feature, but as the problem to be solved.
Writers, let’s create writing that is appropriate for the new technology, but doesn’t sacrifice the depth and immersion of books.