It feels as if the interaction of people with the internet especially through phones is causing a ADHD of sorts.
It is affecting peoples ability to interact with one another. I try daily to strike up a conversation with people I encounter. Years ago, you could have a really great conversation. These days it seems increasingly difficult to find anyone interest in having a discussion about anything.
It's like my mean-time-till-context-switch has gotten shorter out of habit.
Every time I do, I get that same urge to "open a tab", power up my phone, and start playing around.
Eventually the urge does go away, but I have to create a certain artificial environment for myself to force it to.
I used the internet for years without any attention-span decrease or distraction features. When it was gopher, telnet, IRC, email, and BBSes etc. running on a DOS PC with no multitasking. (OK, I cheated, I had a TSR that let me switch between up to 3 programs, but RAM was limited and you were only using one at a time.)
It's the combination of multitasking OSes, putting a lot more things on the screen(s), and ubiquitous pocket supercomputers. That's led us to a new standard way of living where we're always trying to do several things at once and expecting context switches every few seconds. That makes it hard to do anything deeply and fully, or focus on anything for a lengthy time; it feels unnatural.
It converts an article into screen height pages, much like reading a magazine article.
And i think way too many TV drams these days fail the "show don't tell" check. Meaning that you get two talking heads yapping at each other in a static shot more often than not.
The worst part is when my girlfriend (or anyone really) asks me a question, then starts staring at their phone before I even begin answering. I'd understand if I was boring and they didn't want to listen to me drone, but they don't even give me a chance to begin to be boring.
Maybe I'm just fundamentally boring. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm starting to wonder if staring at your phone isn't just becoming the default. I'm currently consulting at a large multi-national company in the Seattle area. I almost took a picture as I was walking down the hallway and saw everyone one of the six people walking toward me while looking at their phones (no, the irony of pulling out my phone to take a picture of people using their phones is not lost on me). It's like I woke up in a fucking zombie movie. And it's not just that one incident, I dodge phone zombies in the hall on a daily basis. I watched one guy run into a support column while staring at his phone, hit it hard enough to kind of spin him around. He never even looked up.
Maybe it's just where I'm at, maybe it's this area of the country, or maybe it's everywhere, I don't know. I'm just starting to feel like Wesley Crusher in that ST:TNG episode with the head-worn video game the whole ship got sucked into.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-06-21/zombification-ameri...
I am hoping there will be a luddite type revolt against this trend of phones.
My theory: American culture is individualistic and not heavily tradition based. This allows new tech, habits, rituals, and patterns of living to catch on quickly. This is both a good and a bad thing.
I've noticed just the presence of the game - even if my table doesn't play - greatly reduces screen time and habitual notification checks.
And yep, I know people that would ask a person something, and resort to the phone before the other person starts to answer.
But most people I see are not staring at a phone. This may be regional variance.
I'm terrified of losing track of the road around me. But maybe that's the difference; I'm not confident enough as a driver (despite having done it for 13 years now) to trust my autopilot while my brain checks out to hold some other conversation.
Ever noticed how a lot of young people say a long "Sooooo" before they start speaking? This is why. It's the handshake algorithm.
It's also annoying.
I agree it's affecting people's abilities to interact, and that it does have some downsides, but I'm not convinced it's a bad thing overall.
What I particularly dislike about oral communications is its real-time aspect. Sometimes it's indispensable, but most of the time I'd rather 're-formulate my phrase three times to make it convey the meaning best. It's easy with text, but haphazard with speech.
When people are out of their phones they are in their natural setting as individuals with meaning and purpose. They forget they know everything, so things are interesting again.
I like that, it's a really interesting way of phrasing it (and it eerily makes us sound a bit like the Borg).