This morning, I encountered two pieces on the same topic from separate vectors. The power of browsing compels me to write about it.
First, here is an NPR piece on how "training willpower" doesn't work:
NPR: Kids' willpower is no match for fast food and screens. Try this instead
Short version: Trying to brute-force good decisionmaking in the face of temptation does not work. Removing temptations so you don't have to decide anything works better.
The article specifically uses the example of teaching kids to put their phone in another room while they do homework, thus removing the temptation to respond to notifications. Which seemed especially relevant when a colleague emailed the teacher listserv with a link to this Substack post:
Carl Hendrick: How much cognitive damage does a phone notification actually do?
(The answer is "a lot.")
Hendrick discusses a study of the effect that receiving repeated phone notifications has on our ability to pay sustained attention. He does so through Simone Weil's lens of attention not just as a cognitive power but a *moral* one - that who, what, and how we choose to pay our attention has weight. From that point of view, the effect of notifications is particularly dire. Over time, phone notifications train us to stay in a state of vigilance, waiting for the next ping or beep. In doing so, they trash our ability to commit sustained, focused attention on anything at all. Some part of our brains is always hanging on for the next tiny little hit of digital dopamine.
This past weekend's weather was sufficiently sunny for me to spend an hour or so outdoors at a time. So I did, which allowed the chickens to run around the backyard. The first time, I took a book with me; the second time, I just sat and watched the chickens. For an hour.
As I did, I also noticed how odd that sort of sustained attention felt. Smartphones have undermined mine, certainly. Even though I turned off all my notifications and set my phone permanently to silent in 2013, I still experience "the ambient awareness that something, somewhere, might require a response," as Hendrick puts it. If my phone is on my person, I'm going to check it. Hell, my phone was *not* on my person while I was hanging with the chickens and I *still* tried to check it.
To be clear: My phone only pushes three types of notifications: voicemail, SMS messages, and Signal messages. It makes no sound when it does any of these. I only respond in anything like "real time" to one of the three (Signal). And yet, deprived of my phone, I will still reach for my pocket to look at it.
When I started systematically kicking Big Tech out of my life a year ago, I hoped one result would be the return of my ability to pay sustained attention. I regret to announce that, while regrowth has occurred, it's nothing like it was in the pre-smartphone era. I still can't read for more than about forty minutes at a stretch, even if I'm interested in what I'm reading. Eventually my brain just starts skipping.[FN1] I still reach for and check my phone even when I don't want to. Even when I have a feeling of annoyance or revulsion as I do it - "ugh, why am I holding my phone all of a sudden?" "Dammit, I was trying to do something else."
I have actually considered having two phones. My smartphone would stay at home; its primary job is to be my Internet connection these days. It would keep my current phone number, which has been in service so long it now attracts as much spam as anything else. My "new" phone would be a dumbphone, with a number I give only to people who actually need to contact me in emergencies. It would travel with me.
I have no idea how well this would work. I might get defeated the first time I try to park downtown and can't use a parking meter. But I am getting ever closer to thinking that a two-phone system would be worth an extra $15 per month to me.
Yet: Why should I have to pay $15 a month to get my attention back? Why have we allowed the creation, the ubiquity, of an economic model that so burdens our attention we have to *pay* to make it stop? The mere thought gives me rage.
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FN1: To put this in perspective: When I was a camp counselor in the mid-1990s, we were taught that we could reasonably expect 20 minutes of attention span from 6-8 year olds, 30-40 minutes from 9-11 year olds, and 45 minutes to an hour from 12 year olds and above. Today, I struggle to get high schoolers to pay sustained attention to anything for more than 20 minutes - the amount of time I used to get with lower elementary kids. Reading for 40 minutes tops puts me, an adult whose entire childhood occurred in the previous century, on par with last century's fifth graders!
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