We allow technology to govern our consciousness every time we choose to pay attention to it, because whatever we pay attention to shapes our experience of consciousness, and has the power to direct our intentions, and therefore our actions.
Therefore, when we allow our smartwatch to regularly tap us on the wrist to tell us that we’re not moving enough, or standing enough, we become more anxious that we are not exercising sufficiently. Never mind that the fairly arbitrary targets that the user themselves can set could simply be ignored; we somehow feel impulsed to obey our new Smart Overlord.
How did people in the era pre-smartwatches survive? Or were they in fact better off?
When we allow our smart devices to ping us, or vibrate, or both, with messages and notifications, our attention is instantly arrested from whatever else we may have been doing, and whatever-it-was that buzzed now has immediate priority. Even if we try to ignore it, a small amount of attention is hooked on the fact that something has happened, and our addiction to dopamine hits will almost inevitably mean that sooner rather than later, we get the phone out to check whatever dumb notification it might have been. And whatever we had been doing won’t even get our full attention back for a good while, if ever, because of attention residue now stuck on that thing that we had to check on our phone.
How did people survive in the era pre-instant-distraction? Much more happily, I expect.
When we allow social media algorithms to deliver to us messaging that we are already addicted to – the only way social media sites and algorithms work – we lose the opportunity to encounter the unknown, the unfamiliar, the unexpected, to discover something new through the happy accidents that accompany non-algorithmically-driven experiences, such as browsing a mildly disorganised bookshelf, or recognising someone at a Cafe, or exploring a new path through a familiar park or woodland. Instead our consciousness is inexorably driven deeper and deeper into the same interests and obsessions, but is never offered an elixir to counter them. We become more narrow-minded; we forget that not everyone in the world cares about the same things we do; we become more extreme in our views, and think ourselves completely righteous in the process.
How did people fair pre-social-media? Much, much happier, I’ll wager. And our democracies were much less extremely polarised.
So what does happen when we allow technology to govern our consciousness? To take just these three examples – and I say this knowing that all these phenomena are well documented and well rehearsed, but it’s worth stating again because as a species we are still deeply entrenched in all the problems – well, to take these three examples given above: we are more anxious, we are more stressed and distracted, and we are more polarised.
We need to retrain our consciousness, by coming off dopamine addiction – going through all the symptoms of the addicts’ withdrawal no doubt – by restraining our technology so that we are in command of when and how we give attention to it (or to things through it), not allowing it to distract us. We need to discover the power of attention again, that which has been harnessed for too long by Silicon Valley especially, and market forces more generally, and choose each day where and how we want to devote our attention, in order to form the best possible intentions.
Ben David Trigg 