How VR & Smartphones Harm Relationships, Attention Span, and Our Connection to Reality | Adam Alter

How VR & Smartphones Harm Relationships, Attention Span, and Our Connection to Reality

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There is a psychological self-deception called the end-of-history illusion, which refers to the feeling that—no matter where you are in the evolution of technology—your time seems incredibly advanced. However Adam Alter reminds us that the trajectory of progress keeps rising, and what we think is cutting-edge now—Snapchat, Facebook, the iPhone 8, the iPhone 12—will in ten years will seem laughably primitive. It's what we'll have in this new world that concerns Alter. He cites experts who predict that most of us will own VR goggles in the next 5 years, and if the success of clickbait and its irresistible effect on our psychology is any indication, the fully immersive alternative realities of VR will shake the foundations of our minds, relationships, and attention spans (which are already kaput). As we're lured into a life on the digital plain by corporations—who make money from every second they can capture our attention—virtual reality may threaten reality itself. Those of us who have known a life without it will have an slight advantage in managing its control over our behavior, but Alter raises concerns for children won't come at this technology pre-equipped and skeptical enough to see the intentions behind such lures—and what might be lost if we don't know how to disconnect. Adam Alter is the author of Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked.

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ADAM ALTER:

Adam Alter is an Associate Professor of Marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business, with an affiliated appointment in the New York University Psychology Department.

Adam is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces That Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave, which examines how features of the world shape our thoughts and feelings beyond our control. He has also written for the New York Times, New Yorker, Atlantic, WIRED, Slate, Huffington Post, and Popular Science, among other publications. Adam has shared his ideas at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, and with dozens of companies, including Google, Microsoft, Anheuser Busch, Prudential, and Fidelity, and with several design and ad agencies around the world. He is working on his second book, which asks why so many people today are addicted to so many behaviors, from incessant smart phone and internet usage to video game playing and online shopping.

Adam’s academic research focuses on judgment and decision-making and social psychology, with a particular interest in the sometimes surprising effects of subtle cues in the environment on human cognition and behavior. His research has been published widely in academic journals, and featured in dozens of TV, radio and print outlets around the world.

He received his Bachelor of Science (Honors Class 1, University Medal) in Psychology from the University of New South Wales and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Psychology from Princeton University, where he held the Charlotte Elizabeth Procter Honorific Dissertation Fellowship and a Fellowship in the Woodrow Wilson Society of Scholars.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Adam Alter: Young people today, in particular, but even adults don't have a tolerance for boredom—at all. There's some research looking at how our attention spans have changed across time. There's some evidence that they've shrunk by about 33 percent since the year 2000. One reason for that is because we interact with devices so much of the time and they don't demand anything of you. They are deliverers. They bring things to you. You don't need an attention span. If you're reading a book, if you have a lapse in attention for even a couple of minutes, you know you'll get to the end of the page, you'll realize that you haven't really been paying attention for the last half of page—that's a problem and you have to return back to where you were. That requires willed and directed attention.

That's just not true of smart phones. They are constantly competing for our attention. Every app, every social media platform, pretty much everything you encounter on a smart phone is designed to give you what you need. They are competing for you instead of you competing for whatever else is going on in the world.

And what that means is you don't need to have much of an attention span. And we've seen this in a lot of different respects, even beyond smart phones...

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