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“Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price” from NYTimes is #oldnews


Time Magazine: Wired Kids
Time Magazine: Wired Kids

This week, the NEW YORK TIMES finally wrote an article about a study that WEB WATCH wrote about in a September 2009 piece entitled “MULTITASKING SUCKS”.  Glad to see that the NY Times is on top of today’s news…

In the NYTimes article called “Your Brain on Computers – Attached to Technology and Paying a Price” (or, depending on which version you’re reading, also titled as “Your Brain on Computers – Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price”, take your pick), the NYTimes examines the impact that computers and portable gadgets have on people today, and whether being so surrounded by information and multitasking our way through the Internet marsh is worth it.

Going back about 50 years to compare 1960 to 2008 statistics, studies show that people are surrounded by three times more daily information over that period of time.  One can only imagine what the shift has been between 2008 and 2010, with Facebook and Twitter becoming more important communication tools in people’s lives.

And we see these people every day – walking around the office or around town, with their heads held in a continual slouch as they continually peer at their iPhones, Blackberrys, and Android devices – oblivious to everything in the world around them. Proverbially looking like they are constantly contemplating their own belly buttons. 

What could be so important that they have to stay in touch that constantly?  Humanity got along just fine for hundreds of years without instant contact – and now that we have it, that same connectivity may be our downfall.  Musician Tom Lehrer may have been ahead of his time when he wrote SO LONG MOM, with the lyric about Mom watching World War III live on her TV, and:

I’ll look for you
when the war is over…
an hour and a half from now

These were new ideas to the general public when that song came out.  Newspapers were still the primary way that people got their news, along with the 30-minute nightly newscast with Huntley, Reasoner, Chancellor, or Brinkley.

And it’s not as if the iPhone and its ilk have made us more productive.  Quite the contrary – we only appear to be more productive, with our constant typing and texting and answering to every electronic chirp like Pavlov.  Looks can be deceiving, especially when typing a work email can be easily disguised as Farmville to anyone not looking directly over your shoulder at your phone.

A study at the University of California Irvine looked at HOW PEOPLE WERE AFFECTED BY MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF EMAIL and it concurs with the study about how multitasking is becoming worse due to electronic interruptions. 

What the study found was that people like to organize work around specific themes or goals, and that people averaged about three minutes per task before moving on to the next one on their list — and if they were using an electronic tool, that time was shortened to two minutes per task before moving on.

Some would say that is because the technology makes us one minute more efficient; others would say that the person was interrupted and distracted away from the task at hand with one minute left to go.   It it helps, when tasks are organized into complete working spheres of activity, people would spend about 12 minutes on that sphere before moving on to another.  Organization is key for productivity, and being interrupted by something as miniscule as an email during a time of proper concentration on the task at hand can actually lead to increased stress levels.

That study is in line with what Carl Honore said in 2005, that the typical office worker is interrupted every three minutes by phone calls, emails, and co-workers — yet it takes eight uninterrupted minutes for our brains to focus and be most productive. 

2005 must have been a good year for email-related studies.  Did you see the study that said that EMAIL LOWERS IQ?

  • Almost 2/3 of respondents checked their email when out of the office or on vacation
  • 50% of all workers respond to an email within 60 minutes of receiving it
  • 90% of respondents thought that texting during in-person meetings was rude

But here’s the ringer: the study also found that the IQ of those who tried to multitask between messaging and work fell by 10 points.  That’s the same drop in IQ as missing one whole night’s sleep, and 2.5 times the IQ drop seen from smoking pot.

Web Watch has seen this IQ drop in action.

Web Watch was sitting in the waiting room of an office the other day, where a father and his 10 -year-old son were also.  The son was happily playing on his Nintendo DS when he jumped up and eagerly asked his dad if the office had free Wi-Fi.  Dad told his son that he didn’t know, but why not try?   The son fired up the Internet connection on his toy, and to his delight declared that he could connect!  No joke – he did a little dance in the corner of the office while he proclaimed his love for sending and receiving email.  Web Watch could almost see the IQ points escaping out of the boy’s head, trying to find a more suitable brain to take up residence.

But he didn’t want to send an email to just anyone.

No. He then yelled across the waiting room, “Dad, what’s your email address?”   

That’s right – the kid was excited just to be able to send an email to the person sitting two sofas away from him. 

He continued, “What should I say?”

Emailing just for the sake of emailing.  If that’s not an indication that today’s kids are too plugged in for their own good, then we don’t know what is.