captured by my 27” iMac. When I step out from of a long run in front of a computer, it’s almost as though I have to reorient myself in the same way that I reorient myself in the morning when I wake up.
Every time you get a new email, text message, or other kind of notification, you also get a little hit of our old friend dopamine. It turns out that dopamine not only puts us into a seeking frenzy, but it also distorts our sense of time. We can spend an hour inside of our email inboxes when it feels like just a few minutes.
Email Roz and her husband Writer Clay have done some pretty terrible things to each other—they’ve left each other at train stations, been late to dinner dates, and let entire evenings pass them by while they’ve sat together. Just a quick check of the email when we get home can often end up in evenings entirely lost to LCD screens.
Attention Fatigue
About two years ago, I started to wonder: what the heck happened to my short-term memory? And where did my attention span go? I’ve written a little, pithy 140-character tweet, sent it into the universe, and in no more than five minutes received a reply. The only problem is, I’ve already forgotten what I wrote in the first place. I’ve had to go back, and look at what I said just five minutes ago to understand what the person replying to me is referencing.
Some days my brain just feels like it’s in a state of frenzy, and I
The new world of abundant information, as many have noted, is one filled with distraction. On any given day, many of us see thousands of advertisements cleverly designed to capture our attention. We come across scores of links on the Web, custom tailored just for us. Twitter streams across many a desktop, and Facebook’s little red notification number beckons us with the details of our friends at every moment. Our emails, phone calls, and text messages can interrupt us at any second.
All of this wreaks havoc on our ability to sustain attention. Cory Doctorow points out that whenever we sit at our computers, we’re tuning in to a new “ecosystem of interruption technologies.”
Nicholas Carr points out in his book,
Attention is something that requires cognitive energy, and it’s something that we must build up. You don’t train for a marathon by sitting on a couch and you don’t help your attention span by giving in to the temptation of every distraction that comes across your eyeballs. As information becomes more and more tailored, it becomes harder and harder for us to resist pursuing it, and our attention banks carry smaller and smaller balances.
Loss of Social Breadth
Social anthropologist Robin Dunbar, alongside several other scientists, has an interesting theory: our neurocognitive resources have a limit to the total number of relationships we can manage—and that number is somewhere between 100 and 250. Informally, the number is estimated to be 150, and it’s called
Dunbar came to this conclusion by studying human tribes, hunter-gatherer types, and it’s bound to remain relatively true today in the age of the social networks: there is a finite number of people that we can possibly care about, and while that number varies from person to person, it doesn’t come close to the numbers that sit by our names on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
If Dunbar is right, that means our ability to manage news from friends in new social networks, and to use it to enhance meaningful relationships, is limited. By succumbing to our biases and falling into homogenous groups or epistemic loops, we eliminate the social inputs that bring us news we disagree with. Strong bias for some non–conscious consumers means cutting off meaningful relationships with people we care about but may disagree with.
The overconsumption of specialized knowledge—whether it be political or technical or even sports- related—can make it so that the only thing you’re capable of holding a conversation about is the thing that you’ve been so deeply into, and thus as your consumption of information around a particular subject becomes more homogenized, if you’re not deliberate and careful, your social group too becomes a reflection of that homogenization.
Distorted Sense of Reality
Cults work because they get their members to either convert the people around them or dismiss the nonbelievers as heathens. They’re methodical in their epistemic closure, first building up a new lens to view a lens through, and should someone else see the world differently, that person is either branded a heretic (which comes from a Greek word meaning “choice”) by the orthodoxy, or a “dead agent” in the realm of scientology.[66] Most major cults have some way of labeling the outsider.
Rapture tends to be an excellent topic area in which to see the effects of epistemic closure, confirmation bias, and poor information diets. Evangelical radio host Harold Camping famously predicted that the world would end and Judgment Day would arrive on May 21, 2011. Two hundred million Christians were to be taken to heaven before a global earthquake would destroy the planet.
Camping’s organization, Family Radio, spent millions of donated dollars on more than 5,000 billboards across the country. He, along with his devoted followers, were certain that on May 21, the world would be filled with rapture and spread the word to everyone who would listen. The world did. The media—television, radio, newspapers, Facebook, and Twitter— were filled with news of the impending rapture.
Leading up to the event, a Yahoo group called “Time and Judgment,” a group whose purpose was “to discuss the events that the Bible declares will unfold on May 21st, 2011,” was filled with a thousand messages of people professing their faith and sharing plans for the rapture. Leading up to the rapture, the group fed off itself. It was as though people were competing to see who could have the most blind faith.
Marco M., May 5th: “I have looked at the Biblical evidence for the Rapture and Judgment Day on May 21, 2011. It is solid, convergent, inter-locking and replicable. So, I have no doubt whatsoever that May 21 is Judgment Day. And yes, I have quit my job.”[67]
Tony V., May 7th: “I am a bus driver for NJ Transit and I get 4 weeks vacation. I took all my vacation in March. But I’m still working so I can spread the Word on my job and still have an income so I can continue to support FR with finances. After May 21 money will be useless, so I want to spend all my money in getting the Word out.”[68]
Enow A., May 19th: “I just want to use this last chance to write to you to let know how fortunate I consider myself to be part of those spreading the May 21, 2011[sic]. Fellowshipping with you has been a source of
