Data-day living

Last week I wrote about the idea of digital detox as an escape from technology for an extended period of time. I’ve had lots of interesting feedback from readers, including links to this recent New York magazine article on our tech addiction, and this one about a summer camp for your midlife crisis(!), the latter sounding like privileged crap but also so intriguing I would quite possibly love it.

But there is another side to technology use, and that is the sheer size of data we are trying to process when we use the internet in everyday life. Think of it as data-day living (I’m so punny).

Data overload

It is clear that we are connected to technology in more ways than ever before: as well as desktop PCs and laptops, we now have excellent online capabilities via mobile phones, iPads, smartwatches, FitBits, public wifi, 4G, live updates, and more. I think few of us would take issue with the fact these connections allow us almost instant access to a huge array of information, from video to audio, science to literature, statistics to measurements. All this data ostensibly gives us ways to save time, speed things up, shop more easily, research information more easily, and access online content from all over the world. But the flip-side of this is that there is far too much data to process meaningfully at any one time. It is a data overload, and it often sucks up more time that it promised to save.

Don’t get me wrong, the internet is an amazing thing. I don’t regret emerging from a Wikipedia-hole an hour after googling ‘world’s tallest skyscrapers’ having learnt all sorts about non-skyscraper related stuff like New York’s population and the mixed fortunes of Dubai’s new carbon-neutral city. In this sense, the internet is not so far removed from a traditional physical encyclopaedia where one entry leads you another, and another, and another. In fact technology means those links are effortless and intuitive, as well as furnished with images, videos, and user-created content. But there is more information to sift than ever before, and this tests our capacity to filter the most important stuff and not get overwhelmed by the amount on offer.

How we consume data

This change in how we are invited to consume online content has happened in just a few years. The internet has allowed us in an everyday context to have the world at our fingertips, but our cognitive filters haven’t yet found a way of processing that richness. It’s dizzying stuff. Across the space of a mere decade or so, the average adult has had to change their information consumption style from in-depth focus on several sources, often vetted to prioritise the highest quality contributions, to grazing on multiple platforms all vying for your attention.

As for younger online users, the expediency of finding information online is certainly attractive compared to desk-based research. Imagine: you just type in your homework terms and rely on search engine algorithms to bring you the most relevant source first, at which point your own motivational powers dictate how much further you drill down. My experiences of teaching small-group work in secondary schools and after-school tutoring suggests that the answer is: not much. I’ve seen a tendency for students to uncritically ‘herd’ online resources or information into their written work, either failing to reference their sources appropriately, or using unreputable or user-generated sources as fact without critically evaluating those sources for who has written them and how objective they are. That said, schools are still better than many universities at teaching students how best to use the internet, not least because each course taught at university stands alone and relies on the student having taken courses before that adequately taught them the skills now needed.

Everyone’s a writer

Online information represents quantity but not necessarily quality. The contemporary explosion in user-created content – and my god, isn’t there a lot of it – means that quality is harder to control, and it raises the question of who even should be controlling it. Maybe one person’s idea of academic rigour is outdated, not to mention ineffectually slow, compared to another’s. Maybe content shouldn’t be controlled if we believe that the internet is a democratic space to which anyone can contribute.

I’ve written before about the diminishing future for editors in online content – after all, anyone can write a blog. I’m doing it right now, whilst surfing #brangelina memes (here you go). Who can even tell if it’s any good? Well, economically speaking, hit-counts provide a pretty good measure, and it is hit-counts for which we can blame ‘clickbait’ articles, which pull in advertising money based on increased online traffic from readers.

The question of who contributes to the internet is so interesting to think about because each answer has all sorts of repercussions. For example, as journalism skews more to free content, writers are less likely to get paid for submissions, meaning that the only people who contribute to the site will be those willing to contribute for free as young writers with a portfolio to gather, or those in a comfortable enough position not to need an income from their writing, or at least not all their writing.

Journalism has always been pretty cut-throat in that if you won’t write a piece for a limited fee, there’s plenty lining up behind you who happily will. Yet for any platform not using paywalls (The Times) or maintaining healthy income from advertising and sponsored content (Buzzfeed, who are going from strength to strength in their LGBT and #blacklivesmatter coverage), then the future relies – seems dependent, even – on unpaid writing.

Catching up

All this brings us back to evaluating the internet as both an amazing resource and something that has really changed modern life, in good ways and sometimes in difficult ways. Here’s where academia plays a useful part (I know right, never a guarantee is it). In-depth research on technology use is slowly catching up with the technology itself, and as it does so we will be able to learn more about how to make technology work better for us – and the extent to which that is differently figured for different people.

 

Digital detox: fact or fiction?

Anyone who’s seen my browser will know it looks like multiple tabs of doom. For proof, here is this morning’s selection (extra points if you spot the Metro article):

I know, I know, it all looks dire. How can I concentrate on what I’m doing with all those other tabs, and how can I hope to get through any of it? (answer: I can’t, and once a month when my laptop shuts down properly it loses the tabs. Ignorance is bliss, etc).

I’m talking here about digital detox to make better use of leisure time, rather than digital detox from the distracting tasks that slow down productivity, more on which next week. In my last post I wrote about the idea of digital detox – unplugging from the internet, social media, or your mobile phone for an extended break to maximise your chances for relaxation or concentration. Innocent drinks even ran a (free!) festival for it. The issue of digital detox has been around for a while but there must have been a real strength of feeling in the general population because the issue blew up in the media after this relatively solid survey by OfCom of 2,025 adults and 500 teenagers showed that 59% of respondents considered themselves ‘hooked’ on their technology device. 34% had disconnected from the internet for up to a month, meaning that nearly half of those surveyed didn’t change their behaviour despite themselves professing to feeling hooked. I know how they feel.

Through my time off in August I tried really hard to digitally detox myself, but it’s weirdly hard to do. On holiday, many of the places I stayed had rubbish wifi, and I didn’t have 3G data because I was abroad, which gave me a kind of automatic digital detox. But straight away I realised how useful Google maps is – whilst you can still use the map offline, the distance and route function don’t work. You can’t look up a bus timetable in the middle of nowhere, or check the sea tide times online, or what restaurants are good when you’re faced with hundreds in a row. Putting social media aside for the moment, I realised the internet is good at making my decisions for me, or at least advising me. What can I say? I like recommendations from other people, and they’re all there, ordered by usefulness, at the click of a button.

That’s me in Croatia examining at a suspected spinefish. But we’ll ever know because there was no internet.

As for social media: it’s annoying but also addictive. Take Facebook – there’s something appealing about the intensely colourful experience of people’s updates, photos, music clips, party invitations, and videos of micro pigs running in grass that is like drugs to your brain: stimulation! Excitement! …and also jealousy that your nemesis from your first job has an impossibly glamorous life. Ugh. Everyone is having the best time. You’re sunburnt, bitten to sh*t and you just got royally ripped off by your taxi driver.

Of course, people aren’t actually always having the best time. They don’t publicly update when they have the runs from a bad dinner or they are arguing with their partner (well, some people do, but that’s something else entirely). But that’s not even the point. The point is that at face value, Facebook invites us to follow our friends’ progress and catch up with everyone all at the same time and at a glance. In a way I really like that – my friends have scattered all over the world and I can’t very well Skype them at work, so the next best thing is seeing their progress in having a baby or buying a new house – and that’s a genuine pleasure.

The problem is that Facebook helps you to follow all your friends on your feed, and all the interesting links and articles and websites therein (and not just me writing ragey pieces about Labour’s mess). Since 2014, Facebook’s ordering algorithm means you won’t see the same thing twice in a day without a long time scrolling (totally hypothetical. This has not happened to me.) With almost limitless scoping opportunities, why wouldn’t we waste our time on the platform? Whilst it irritates me when people say ‘I’ve got friends to see in real life, no time for Facebook’ (yes, we get it, but you’re overlooking its pretty impressive worldwide success as a good way to keep in touch), they might have a point.

One answer is to ditch the offending app altogether. My friend has deleted Facebook, moving their social network across to Instagram, where the more pictorial style discourages endless stalking or tedious wordiness. But social media is social media, and Instagram still shows us the curated highlights of our peers’ lives. After all, these glamorous specimens basking in the sun on their holidays do have office jobs for most of the year and are unlikely to snap a selfie with the photocopier at work. Maybe it’s more about being realistic with what these sites mean and what feelings they encourage in us, and using them accordingly.

In my own research, participants have spoken a lot about their ambivalent thoughts on dating apps. They download an app, spend a lot of time on it surfing the prospects, have mixed success in dating and then, in what they see as a moment of clarity, they delete the app altogether, either because they’ve found a partner or because they’re sick of what they see as a time-wasting cycle. But those who are single tend to re-download the app or similar apps again in the near future. And why not? After all, these apps filter many more matches than we could possibly hope for in person, and they skip the barrier of knowing who is single (or so you’d hope). In the case of LGBT apps in particular, it gets past the awkwardness of hoping that the person you are talking to is also non-heterosexual. Yet the utility of these apps comes with a time commitment that participants found could take over other parts of their non-digital life.

It’s hard to know what the answer is because, even for those of us who think we have the balance right, there are more questions. Is the idea of a ‘detox’ unhelpful, because it suggests going cold-turkey on a behaviour that isn’t, all things considered, really bad? Are we throwing out the baby with the bathwater by denying ourselves those useful functions the internet gives us by trying to give it all up? In fact, we could see these questions as irrelevant if we change the debate: we could recognise that these days we really do need the internet to stay connected with our friends and family. Rather than giving it up, we could re-situate it as an efficient tool for helping us continue to connect with them.

Digital detox: nice idea or unhelpful rhetoric? (Velib Paris 2016).