With cell phones chirping and playing music, wireless devices vibrating, and emails signaling their arrival at the computer’s inbox, is it any wonder that many people feel stressed and distracted by technology? Our minds may wander as we start to read a book, or we can be surprised to look at a browser window and see how many tabs we’ve opened. This can lead to feeling fatigued, anxious, disconnected from the real world, or overwhelmed by technology. For many, it has been a long time (if ever) since they took a true vacation where they were really “off” and not answering emails or voicemails. “Welcome to the Attention Crisis—also known as the ‘culture of distraction,’ ‘information-fatigue syndrome,’ or simply ‘modern life’ (Read, 2010, p. 32).
The world is increasingly using technology in every facet of life. Devices are more mobile, functional, and seemingly indispensable. We have integrated media and technology into more and more aspects of our everyday lives, we bring devices with us everywhere, and we depend on them for an ever-increasing range of work, school, play, and social functions (Felt & Robb, 2016). Consider these sobering statistics (Pillai, 2012; Samakow, 2012; Statista, 2018):
- Of the 7 billion people on the planet, approximately 5 to 6 billion are cell phone subscribers.
- China and India lead the way with 1 billion users each.
- There are 2.3 billion people using the Internet, with 70% of them in industrialized, wealthier nations and 24% living in poorer countries.
- Children between the ages of 12 and 17 in the United States text an average of 60 times a day—that’s over 3,400 texts per month, or 7 times every hour.
- The most frequent texters are girls.
- About 77% of teens own a cell phone and about 25% own a smartphone. Only 39% make calls daily.
- While 80% of teens use social networking sites, only about 30% of them send messages through those sites.
According to Jackson (2008), the amount of stimuli (especially related to technology) is multiplying, not just increasing. The average American sees, hears, or reads 34 gigabytes worth of information daily (about 100,000 words) from television, the Internet, books, radio, newspapers, and other sources, and that number has grown 5% per year since 1980. Our coping mechanisms, however, have not kept up with this unprecedented growth, so we rarely pay full attention to anything and instead pay “continuous partial attention” to everything. Thus, we “skim furiously, hoping not to miss anything. We fall into black holes of time and emerge blinking, hours later, having accomplished nothing” (Read, 2010, p. 34). Jackson (2008) observes that most individuals can contact millions of people across the globe, yet increasingly they connect to their most intimate friends and family via instant messages, virtual visits, and fleeting meetings that are often repeatedly rescheduled and then punctuated when they do occur by beeps, pings, and dings.