The promise of digital technologies is the ultimate kind of ‘distributed cognition’ – the ability to use different digital environments in order to help our thinking be streamlined – focused on one thing or another: on writing a report, or planning a project, or communicating with co-workers or loved ones.
The fact is, though, that open digital eco-systems have resulted in fragmented, rather than distributed cognition, in that they do not offer discrete thinking environments, but rather – because of machines’ ability to multi-task (an ability we do not share) and because services to perform various tasks online and offline are not standardised – workers are finding their cognition frequently fragmented (where did I save The Thing, who was I talking with about The Thing and in which app?), with terms like ‘attention residue’ and ‘open loops’ being thrown around in a way that wouldn’t have been familiar to pre-digital era workers.
Distributed Cognition
I’ve just written two sentences a whole paragraph long each, so let me try and state it more simply, with a bit more explanation. ‘Distributed cognition’ refers to the concept that our brains naturally use the environment around us to help us ‘do’ our thinking. This is both proactive and reactive.
First of all, we react to our environment in our thinking: A traveller trying to find their platform at a noisy train station won’t be distracted by deep thoughts about life, the universe and everything; conversely, when they’ve finally arrived at their retreat and are lying under the quiet night sky staring at the stars, they almost won’t be able to help thinking deeply about the universe and their place in it. They’re less likely to be thinking about which platform went to Inverness.
But secondly we can be proactive with our environment to help our thinking: everybody knows the power of tidying up an office or desk space before getting to work on something. Once all the things are in their proper place, work just seems to flow that much more effectively. Perhaps the most common form of distributed cognition is leaving something by the front door that you need to remember to take with you the following day. Or at least a note about the Thing.
In theory this can be true of digital environments also. If we can correctly harness the power of the right apps, we can keep our calendar organised in one app, our notes in another, and our to-do lists in another. This is proactive distributed cognition. Those apps can further help us with extra organisational tools such as tags to categorise things, so that we don’t have unnecessary items showing when we don’t need to see them. This has the power to help streamline our thinking.
Fragmented Cognition
So why does it feel so stressful trying to juggle the things in our lives using digital tools? Unless you’re really locked-down, a self-employed worker with strict boundaries around your tech, you’re likely to find that people you work with across your organisation, voluntary organisations, and family, are all using different tools to get similar jobs done. Often even within one organisation, various services could be deployed simultaneously, either formally (due to different line managers or IT managers running the show at different times) or informally (where co-workers use personal phone numbers and email addresses for communication or their own personal cloud services where they find these easier or more convenient for sharing).
Bearing in mind that each app or service requires a learning curve, one that most of the time we’re not willing to go on, assuming that it will work as we expect, or not bothering to learn it in the first place, most of us muddle along feeling a little lost in the sea of information and communication.
Again, compare this situation to the pre-digital era, when correspondence was only by paper or by phone, or in person, and filing similarly was all by paper in files and cabinets. Slower, yes; clearer, less fragmented, also yes. How much time and money is wasted on multi-system-fragmentation-attention-loss, I wonder? (To coin a phrase that I’m sure is going absolutely nowhere.)
Dis. vs. Frag
So in summary: Cognition is distributed when the materials we need to appropriately engage with and think about or work on something are in the place we expect them to be when we need them. Cognition is fragmented when the materials we need are (or could be) in a multiplicity of locations, possibly in different states, such as across different apps and services, or when the environment it is in is one that we are unfamiliar with and cannot navigate without a learning curve which we are unwilling to scale.
Movements such as ‘Digital Minimalism’ (based on Cal Newport’s book by the same name) are efforts to counter this kind of fragmentation, though they can often be exercised only on a personal basis; it takes bolder and more difficult strokes to affect institutional change in such a way that helps streamline processes for everyone in an organisation. But unless those institutional changes can take place, with managers recognising the toll that systems-agnosticism (another forgettable term I’m sure) is taking on cognition and attention, personal discipline around ‘Digital Minimalism’ can only be so effective.
Ben David Trigg 