Focus

What profit will a person have if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life?

People who know me,  even people that have just happened to have been around me know that I have a special relationship to cell phones in general and smart phones in particular. Being smart, these phones don't like me. I figure it is because they've realized I don't like them. Now, this blog post is not going to be about mobiles, but they will serve as a good starting point to another weak point of the modern society. Lets call it the big distraction.

When you think of history it is easy to imagine that things have remained relatively unaltered for a long time. General statements like "there have always been crisis around, and it has always been solved" or "the pendulum always turns in society" serve as soothing mental pictures depicting a society where perhaps the surface changes, but where people remain people and the semantic core remains the same.
Now, lets jump 15 years back in time, and we'll be back in my school days. People had started having mobile phones at school. The ones with the Nokia could even play snake and there was a rumor that if you filled the whole screen, you would win the newest model. SMS was starting its revolution, but still it was limited how much things you did with your phone. Quite unlike the App frenzy of today.

Now, I see it as relatively undisputed that the usage of cell phones among young kids and the society as a whole has increased immensely compared to 15 - 20 years ago. People would probably agree with me on that. I would also say that this usage affects people. Not only social patterns but people in both a mental and physiological sense. Why do I think so? Well there is this study, but there have also been experiments conducted that I can't find online now, where students have been forbidden to use the cell phone in school. The result? The students felt less stressed and more focused. Just like you can train your muzzles to be strong, your ability to focus is also something that you can either strengthen or neglect. The ever growing flora of electronic devices, all of them screaming for peoples attention is making peoples ability to focus weaker.

Or seen from another angle. Today there exists a billion dollar industry involving engineers as well as sociologists whose only aim is to make you pay more attention to specific apps or web pages. The company King for example produces online games and games for phones and tablets. They employ not only software developers but also many statisticians and sociologists that analyze the big data to find out how they can make people stay longer in the game and click more. Did you ever stop using facebook for a while? Notice all the sudden e-mails you start getting, reminding you that facebook exists? For your convenience? Most likely it is proven that sending these e-mails will make the chance higher that you start using facebook again, even though you by your free will stopped using it. Did you know that the color of the links at google are engineered to maximize the likelihood of you clicking them? Many colors have been tested and the current color proved to be the most efficient. The point is, the average citizens usage of electronic devices not only stems from his/her needs, but also in big part from a multi billion industry that engineers how to affect you into using the devices more.

So the smart phone and the tablet are the Virus? Remove them and people retain their focus? Unfortunately - not likely. Travelled with a train or a bus with a TV with constant commercials on? Ever sit in restaurant with a TV in it? Ever see the commercial signs in the city where the picture changes ever so often? Watched any series lately? Any general TV? Listened to any pod casts? Could you imagine that say 80 or 90 years ago non of this existed. What did people focus on? Perhaps they had time to think? I remember studying for an exam in my engineering class. There was an assignments from an old exam. These exams will always have six questions, where number one is the easiest and number six the most difficult. The assignment was number three from it's old exam. Still it was by far more tricky and difficult than the last assignment was on the actual exam we got. It might be that school results still are OK, but after studying old text books it seems obvious that the way we study the subjects today is with a lot less depth than the way they used to study them. The technological society is a mentally lax society.