Homo Distractus

In a line of work related to my own, experts talk about climate change and say that we're engaged in an uncontrolled experiment - dumping gigatonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, changing its composition and, fundamentally, our world.

If you Google "uncontrolled experiment" you'll find that there are lots of experts talking about all kinds of uncontrolled experiments: in kinds of therapy, for example, or education. 

I'm no expert, but I've noticed what might be called an uncontrolled experiment in how people are learning how to communicate. 

Let me explain. When I was a young person, I would sometimes get a bit annoyed at the little old ladies walking on the sidewalk in front of me. They were going much more slowly than I was, and they really didn't seem to be fully engaged with their surroundings. 

Nowadays, I get a bit annoyed at teens and twenty-somethings walking on the sidewalk in front of me. They are also going much more slowly than I am and they neither seem to be fully engaged with their surroundings. But it is not great age that slows their steps and impairs their senses. It's their goddam iPhone, or MP3 player or some other glowing doodad they can't take their eyes off of.

These doodads are more than just a source of music or entertainment. They are some kind of communication appendage, a gizmo so distracting and attractive that they are becoming how their users communicate.

This may seem silly. Of course people use their iPhones to communicate. Duh, that's what they're for. I guess my point is that people have lots of ways to communicate - with their voices, their hands, their faces, their body language, but now they use these things less and their glowing doodads more. 

In the age-old wisdom, if you don't use it, you lose it. 

There was a recent example of what happens when the glowing doodads are lost. 

Earlier this week, internet services provided by Rogers winked out for a couple of hours in parts of eastern Canada. It was such a major event, CBC ran a bit on how being cut off from the Internet disconcerts folks.

The most interesting factoid in the CBC bit was the finding from a Pew study that university students freaked out when asked not to use the Internet... for a day. 

Social media - the medium of the young - is a major movement of our age, has connected and galvanized millions, and... all you need is a power outage (or the idea to disconnect for a day) and no one has a way to say anything. 

I am completely aware of the fact that I am using the Internet at this very moment to communicate these thoughts. And I'm not the person who created the term homo distractus (evidently, this guy is). But the single most powerful thing people do is communicate and, in a way, it is an experiment to have an entire (global) generation so focused on a communications tool at once so obsessively attractive and so fragile.

This picture, however, is worth a thousand words. This cat does not care about the Internet.

Have a great week!

Karen