Digitally Interrupted
If you are doing something and get interrupted the resulting effects could range from feeling irritated to outright rage. However the digital world seems to be thinking differently.
The identity of interruptions is becoming popular and regular these days. And yes this is not new, but the advent of technology has surely changed the way we access our information.
Be it the ping i received while typing this blog post or the FB update that i keep checking every 10 mins. It was fine untill these so called friendly updates were on my phone which i could avoid by keeping my phone on silent. But a new class of technology is already encroaching, THE WEARABLES...This new class of device is built to interrupt. And it makes it even more easy to be interrupted. Be it a buzz on ur hand or the new taptic touch which makes u feel as if someone is tapping you on your wrist. And with more ease of use to reach this information we humans are surely reaching the addiction levels.
Ease of use is not a bad thing after all, maybe i am making it sound a bit harsh, but what matters to me is the reflective human mind is surely becoming weak. We as human beings have multiple capabilities over other animals like creativity, understanding and above all reflectivity. Our capability to reflect on our thoughts or the information that we understand is very critical to the actions that we take. Like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book called finding flow...getting into the zone is one of the critical measures of performing in the most efficient and creative manner. But with modern day interruptions it looks tough.
Interruptions are surely not just a thing of today and not that our mobile devices to be completely blamed for it...but maybe digital interruptions are all over...and they are the biggest time killers, they are slimy because the way they slow down time makes u feel miserable and ineffective and guilty when u realize the time that u have wasted. Say for example all the users of windows are well aware of the breaking of flow due hanging of your computers. Or from the now archaic time of dial up connections...we were interupted in our thought processes when we needed information quickly to think about something...those were the slowing u down interruptions...and then there are the interruptions which take u away...those which make u multi task for no reason...when was the last time u sat at one place and read a book for long...with ur phone next to u.
Thats what i am concerned about the interruption takes ur attention away...Remember the scene from matrix where Neo is being trained about the matrix and the programmer smartly inserts a lady in red and NEO gets distracted.
Such interruptions that distract you away from the task at hand can be sometimes leading u to some sort of attention deficiency. This article from the 2000 i.e. exactly 15 years from today talks about how youngsters are getting impacted due to reduced attention spans. Because if you were to believe in Pavlov's conditioned response theory we are eventually habituating ourselves to not be focused.
We are making a race that will have an attention span of a gold fish and yet an attention seeking behavior....
So all you designers out there, before you start suggesting all those quick notifications and instant updates think twice...lets draw the line between interrupting and informing...
...i think i have a whats app message...let me check that and get back to write in a jiffy...
Comments