I've never liked the "attention span" metaphor for describing the problems with technology. It feels like a convenient mistruth—a narrative close enough to the real thing to seem like it's what's wrong. Similarly, I'm sick and tired of "dopamine" being used as a catch-all for feedback loops of any kind. I'm not saying it's not scientifically accurate, but people don't use it because it's scientific: they use it because it's "science-y", a mystic ward used to simplify a complex thing, superstitious despite—and weirdly because of—its on-one-level truth.
I think the problem is more akin to one of inertia: namely, the inertia you must overcome to begin a new movement, and the inertia you must overcome to cease moving. Inertia is a byproduct of mass—here's my science-y Newton moment—and the bigger a thing is, the more inertia accompanies it.
The digital storm that besets us is a big thing made up of little things. Specifically, the game played by virtually every shark in the digital landscape is to create things with as little inertia as possible—tiny moments of interaction that can slip in anywhere, ideally between eyeblinks. And games and social media are the most prevalent forms of this, because each one has a system for generating more moments.
Games provide you with both a structure for instantaneous moments, little quick decision checkpoints, and broader movements, the progression towards which defines the most addictive games. Every half-second counts! Counts, that is, towards a goal that can only be measured in days or weeks. (The speedrunning community for Animal Crossing: New Horizons has only managed, despite astonishing insights into how to manipulate your way through a game, to complete the whole thing in over 17 hours. Imagine: even literal game geniuses, the ones who can finish an epic like Breath of the Wild in a matter of minutes, get caught up on an innocuous game like that for longer than a full waking day. What chance do the rest of us have?)
Social media, meanwhile, plays the more insidious move by making its notifications co-op—though they're really closer to a competition, since every notification must be responded to immediately, and a response guarantees that somebody else (or multiple people) are suddenly faced with the same instantaneous predicament. The white-collar community has long been obsessed with reducing the exhaustion of emails: things like mandatory three-sentence replies, the use of "EOM" ("end of message") in email titles to allow for empty bodies, and, of course, Inbox Zero—the idea that you should develop techniques to keep your inbox empty and your mind blank—have been practiced since I was in college. (HEY, the email service by which I write this thing, has perfected all this to a science. Great product. Worth your money.) Yet we haven't begun to extend that attitude towards texts, instant messages, and social media platforms: the idea that conscientious behavior means minimizing the pressure you place on others hasn't remotely begun to proliferate.
Different people, I suspect, have different tolerances for inertia: different willingnesses to direct their efforts towards that initially sluggish push towards something bigger and harder and more focused than usual. It feels like a mixture of innate tendency and exercised muscle; I am personally very bad at that kind of effort, to the point that it sometimes feels like the attempt to get better at it is Sisyphean. Yet I'm also very keen on app and game development, and my philosophy towards both is directly inspired by my own struggles—and by my awareness of just how profoundly fulfilled I am when I do manage to pull away from the path of ease.
What I think is important, more than anything, is to cultivate little pockets of nothing—to make emptiness an innate part of user experience. Diana Wynne Jones, in my favorite book of hers, describes a character with a way of "running you up against silence," saying things in a manner that makes it suddenly impossible to continue talking. My favorite apps have a similar way about them—to use them is to very quickly hit a point past which there's just no doing anything, no way to distract yourself, nothing new incoming. Yet they still have presence, and still serve a function, and there's the rub: I don't think that disconnection is the answer, unless you're truly able to survive and maintain your lifestyle without any of the things you separate yourself from. Practicing moderation is well and good, but ultimately the apps we use are toxic by nature, while simultaneously offering us function and connection that we need. So long as that toxicity and that need are paired, we'll find ourselves completely stuck in place.
What does it mean for a functional app, or a social environment, or a game, to really care about leading us towards little pockets of nothing? There isn't one answer so much as a lattice of possibilities, all excitingly unexplored. There are fascinating questions of when and how: when should we be engaging with whatever we engage with, and how ought we go about it during those moments when we do? When is the right time to receive a text, or have a digital conversation? How can we keep in touch with the communities in our lives in a way that frees us to best live our own? Is it possible for the things we play with to consider the space they take up in our days, or the culture they happen to create?
These are questions that tech is too adolescent to have considered. They're not unique to the world of technology: cultures evolve around all sports and games, and around all manner of function—both social and professional. There are places where we meet people, and times when we pull apart; the notion of events, circumscribed happenings with both beginnings and endings, is fundamental to our ordering of both days and societies. Yet these ideas don't translate wholesale into the digital world, because digital experiences are both lesser and more fluid: an individual digital experience can't replicate reality wholesale, but it can slip between those cracks, and arrive to us in far more flexible and permeable ways. Pushing against that fluidity castrates digital experience as a whole, just as attempting to replicate physical experience will cause it to fall short. Digital experience has a different form, and obeys different rules, and has a different grain altogether. Working with it is unlike working with anything else. But that's not to say it can't be worked with—just that our manner of working with it needs to take on exciting new forms.
How do you create digital experiences that don't feel artificially limited? Ultimately, it comes down to understanding individual digital mediums, and probing to find their limits—then devising new mediums, new forms, whose shape is part of their appeal. Presence and absence define each other; every designer knows that negative space, room for nothing, is important, but just as importantly, the beauty of that blankness is defined by the elegance of what surrounds it. Rhythm and tempo dearly matter. If you want to persuade someone into logging off, you have to give them something satisfyingly worth disconnecting from.
As for myself, I've started looking at my digital experiences through this lens before any other. What pockets do the various experiences in my life give me? What things are so positive in their presence that I come away from them feeling fulfilled—and what things only linger in my life because they're so nearly dissatisfying that I keep at them, hoping for a payoff that never comes? What aspects of my digital life integrate neatly in with my physical life, and which ones keep me from moving on? What kinds of social interaction leave me feeling close to others, and which leave me feeling distracted and cold?
The honest answer is that there are very few digital experiences (or apps, or products, or what-have-you) that leave me feeling genuinely good about myself afterwards. Most everything feels like a compromise. And the things I enjoy most are generally the things that feel most trivial to my life; the most meaningful things I need to do, the most meaningful connections I try to make, are all encased in the mediums I feel the worst about. I try, as best as I can, to look for non-digital solutions, ways to leave myself feeling somewhat better about myself, but that isn't always doable. If I stay focused on what I should be looking for, though, I can at least tell when I'm wildly off course, and interject some pockets of nowhere on my own.
We undervalue gorgeous desolation. We are so frightened of silence, so afraid of the dark, so averse to genuine solitude, that we've created an empire of bright lights and sounds to fill the void. But that emptiness is where the garden of us grows: only when we find ourselves doing nothing, going nowhere, do we have a chance to genuinely become ourselves. Avid readers know that the silence between words is where all of the most interesting things happen; music enthusiasts who appreciate longer-form experiences, whether album-oriented or symphony or jazz, know that good music is something you sink into, less wallpaper for your life than a place to lose yourself, then find yourself again. To the extent that film is a more interesting experience than TV, it's because it permits itself to end, and is less frightened to use its longer form as an excuse to create pockets of absence, quieter poetry that uses sensation, not to overwhelm, but to invite you in. And when TV works better than cinema, it's often when it takes the form of koans, little nuggets that take you in and let you out and are gone.
There's nothing unknown about any of this. We just have to learn to value it, and to insist upon it, and to start seeing the world around us in these terms. There's a way out, and it's likely simpler and closer to being available than we think—the hard work has nothing to do with algorithms or massive data structures, and everything to do with the simple human question of how we want to live, and how we might help others live the lives that they'd want most.
I think the problem is more akin to one of inertia: namely, the inertia you must overcome to begin a new movement, and the inertia you must overcome to cease moving. Inertia is a byproduct of mass—here's my science-y Newton moment—and the bigger a thing is, the more inertia accompanies it.
The digital storm that besets us is a big thing made up of little things. Specifically, the game played by virtually every shark in the digital landscape is to create things with as little inertia as possible—tiny moments of interaction that can slip in anywhere, ideally between eyeblinks. And games and social media are the most prevalent forms of this, because each one has a system for generating more moments.
Games provide you with both a structure for instantaneous moments, little quick decision checkpoints, and broader movements, the progression towards which defines the most addictive games. Every half-second counts! Counts, that is, towards a goal that can only be measured in days or weeks. (The speedrunning community for Animal Crossing: New Horizons has only managed, despite astonishing insights into how to manipulate your way through a game, to complete the whole thing in over 17 hours. Imagine: even literal game geniuses, the ones who can finish an epic like Breath of the Wild in a matter of minutes, get caught up on an innocuous game like that for longer than a full waking day. What chance do the rest of us have?)
Social media, meanwhile, plays the more insidious move by making its notifications co-op—though they're really closer to a competition, since every notification must be responded to immediately, and a response guarantees that somebody else (or multiple people) are suddenly faced with the same instantaneous predicament. The white-collar community has long been obsessed with reducing the exhaustion of emails: things like mandatory three-sentence replies, the use of "EOM" ("end of message") in email titles to allow for empty bodies, and, of course, Inbox Zero—the idea that you should develop techniques to keep your inbox empty and your mind blank—have been practiced since I was in college. (HEY, the email service by which I write this thing, has perfected all this to a science. Great product. Worth your money.) Yet we haven't begun to extend that attitude towards texts, instant messages, and social media platforms: the idea that conscientious behavior means minimizing the pressure you place on others hasn't remotely begun to proliferate.
Different people, I suspect, have different tolerances for inertia: different willingnesses to direct their efforts towards that initially sluggish push towards something bigger and harder and more focused than usual. It feels like a mixture of innate tendency and exercised muscle; I am personally very bad at that kind of effort, to the point that it sometimes feels like the attempt to get better at it is Sisyphean. Yet I'm also very keen on app and game development, and my philosophy towards both is directly inspired by my own struggles—and by my awareness of just how profoundly fulfilled I am when I do manage to pull away from the path of ease.
What I think is important, more than anything, is to cultivate little pockets of nothing—to make emptiness an innate part of user experience. Diana Wynne Jones, in my favorite book of hers, describes a character with a way of "running you up against silence," saying things in a manner that makes it suddenly impossible to continue talking. My favorite apps have a similar way about them—to use them is to very quickly hit a point past which there's just no doing anything, no way to distract yourself, nothing new incoming. Yet they still have presence, and still serve a function, and there's the rub: I don't think that disconnection is the answer, unless you're truly able to survive and maintain your lifestyle without any of the things you separate yourself from. Practicing moderation is well and good, but ultimately the apps we use are toxic by nature, while simultaneously offering us function and connection that we need. So long as that toxicity and that need are paired, we'll find ourselves completely stuck in place.
What does it mean for a functional app, or a social environment, or a game, to really care about leading us towards little pockets of nothing? There isn't one answer so much as a lattice of possibilities, all excitingly unexplored. There are fascinating questions of when and how: when should we be engaging with whatever we engage with, and how ought we go about it during those moments when we do? When is the right time to receive a text, or have a digital conversation? How can we keep in touch with the communities in our lives in a way that frees us to best live our own? Is it possible for the things we play with to consider the space they take up in our days, or the culture they happen to create?
These are questions that tech is too adolescent to have considered. They're not unique to the world of technology: cultures evolve around all sports and games, and around all manner of function—both social and professional. There are places where we meet people, and times when we pull apart; the notion of events, circumscribed happenings with both beginnings and endings, is fundamental to our ordering of both days and societies. Yet these ideas don't translate wholesale into the digital world, because digital experiences are both lesser and more fluid: an individual digital experience can't replicate reality wholesale, but it can slip between those cracks, and arrive to us in far more flexible and permeable ways. Pushing against that fluidity castrates digital experience as a whole, just as attempting to replicate physical experience will cause it to fall short. Digital experience has a different form, and obeys different rules, and has a different grain altogether. Working with it is unlike working with anything else. But that's not to say it can't be worked with—just that our manner of working with it needs to take on exciting new forms.
How do you create digital experiences that don't feel artificially limited? Ultimately, it comes down to understanding individual digital mediums, and probing to find their limits—then devising new mediums, new forms, whose shape is part of their appeal. Presence and absence define each other; every designer knows that negative space, room for nothing, is important, but just as importantly, the beauty of that blankness is defined by the elegance of what surrounds it. Rhythm and tempo dearly matter. If you want to persuade someone into logging off, you have to give them something satisfyingly worth disconnecting from.
As for myself, I've started looking at my digital experiences through this lens before any other. What pockets do the various experiences in my life give me? What things are so positive in their presence that I come away from them feeling fulfilled—and what things only linger in my life because they're so nearly dissatisfying that I keep at them, hoping for a payoff that never comes? What aspects of my digital life integrate neatly in with my physical life, and which ones keep me from moving on? What kinds of social interaction leave me feeling close to others, and which leave me feeling distracted and cold?
The honest answer is that there are very few digital experiences (or apps, or products, or what-have-you) that leave me feeling genuinely good about myself afterwards. Most everything feels like a compromise. And the things I enjoy most are generally the things that feel most trivial to my life; the most meaningful things I need to do, the most meaningful connections I try to make, are all encased in the mediums I feel the worst about. I try, as best as I can, to look for non-digital solutions, ways to leave myself feeling somewhat better about myself, but that isn't always doable. If I stay focused on what I should be looking for, though, I can at least tell when I'm wildly off course, and interject some pockets of nowhere on my own.
We undervalue gorgeous desolation. We are so frightened of silence, so afraid of the dark, so averse to genuine solitude, that we've created an empire of bright lights and sounds to fill the void. But that emptiness is where the garden of us grows: only when we find ourselves doing nothing, going nowhere, do we have a chance to genuinely become ourselves. Avid readers know that the silence between words is where all of the most interesting things happen; music enthusiasts who appreciate longer-form experiences, whether album-oriented or symphony or jazz, know that good music is something you sink into, less wallpaper for your life than a place to lose yourself, then find yourself again. To the extent that film is a more interesting experience than TV, it's because it permits itself to end, and is less frightened to use its longer form as an excuse to create pockets of absence, quieter poetry that uses sensation, not to overwhelm, but to invite you in. And when TV works better than cinema, it's often when it takes the form of koans, little nuggets that take you in and let you out and are gone.
There's nothing unknown about any of this. We just have to learn to value it, and to insist upon it, and to start seeing the world around us in these terms. There's a way out, and it's likely simpler and closer to being available than we think—the hard work has nothing to do with algorithms or massive data structures, and everything to do with the simple human question of how we want to live, and how we might help others live the lives that they'd want most.