“Right now I’m having amnesia and déjà vu at the same time. I think I’ve forgotten this before.” —Steven Wright
My wife and I got married on August 31, 2008.
What was our first joint purchase?
A GPS for our car.
If this seems like a strange purchase, we knew it was brilliant.1
The first month after our wedding, we traveled to various places around the East Coast before moving to Israel for the year. What’s one of the easiest ways to get into a fight in the car? Arguing when you get lost! What’s the best way to avoid this? Get something to eliminate the need for a map.
I suspect many of you have a story like this, where something you used to do manually was overtaken by technology. Yet, while I miss going to AAA to buy TripTiks,2 I only consider my submission to the power of a GPS a net positive when driving somewhere unfamiliar. Waze is superior to my sense of direction, so why fight it?
However, I know I’ve lost things, like remembering phone numbers. I know certain phone numbers by heart: my childhood home, parents, brother, wife, synagogue,3 etc. But eventually, my cellphone eliminated my need to learn new numbers, even for important people.
It’s not that I can’t.
It’s that I don’t.
And it brings us to this week’s big idea.
Digital Amnesia
“Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in swich licóur Of which vertú engendred is the flour; Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth Inspired hath in every holt and heeth The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne…”
Take a trip back with me to high school English class…
This is from the prologue4 to The Canterbury Tales; my AP English class with Dr. Janet Davis had to memorize much of it (spoiler: it did not come up on the AP Lit Exam.) To this day, I still remember the words, although I barely understand what they mean. It’s the James Bond version of memorization.5
Everyone has a memorization story: maybe you had a teacher who made you memorize the Gettysburg Address, a soliloquy from Hamlet, or Rashi on Bereishit 3:8.6 However, if you went to school 50 years ago, you probably think that your children memorized less than you did. And that your grandchildren are memorizing even less than they did.
You’re probably right: Allow me to introduce you to “digital amnesia,” sometimes called the “Google Effect.”
Memory, like any skill, requires practice. But more than that, memory requires desire. Someone who needs to memorize large portions of text can learn it. But if they don’t want to, they won’t. In 2011, Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu, and Daniel Wegner (SLW) found that “The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.”7 My brain can memorize many phone numbers or directions from here to there; now that my iPhone does both, I no longer commit myself to memorizing.
SLW performed several experiments demonstrating that accessing information via Google or a similar resource weakens our working memory, largely because we’ve lost the need to keep our memory sharp. In other words, it’s not that I can’t memorize details if I put my mind to it; however, since “The Internet…has become an external memory source that we can access at any time,” I am no longer incentivized to commit certain details to memory. Instead, SLW argues we now focus more on remembering where we can access the information versus memorizing the information itself, ultimately becoming “symbiotic with our computer tools.”8
Naturally, whether or not digital amnesia is “good” or “bad” is complicated.
On the one hand, I have a decent memory and feel no guilt about digitally accessing information I previously needed to memorize. Most of what I do is important but not urgent, and taking a few seconds to look something up online hardly makes a difference.
However, because I know I can access information on my devices whenever I want and frequently need to, I am incentivized to keep the devices open and readily available as much as possible.
And THAT’s where the real problem starts.
Indistractable
I should not be advising anyone to minimize device usage.
I’m a major offender.
Walking into my home office, you will see three monitors plus an iPad with news or sports running in the background. I never got my message that there is no such thing as multi-tasking. And this is where Nir Eyal’s Indistractable becomes particularly useful.
Eyal was our featured author last week, only that book was about how to get consumers hooked on someone’s product (hence the book’s title, Hooked.) And if it seems odd if Eyal published two seemingly contradictory books, I get it. But this is the paradox of a digital world: The most effective products are the ones that get us hooked, but the people most likely to create them are the ones who understand how to focus consistently on deep work.
Eyal could take the typical route and make all the familiar cases for less time using technology. Still, he acknowledges that this is ultimately a losing battle, particularly because avoiding technological distractions may result in us replacing one distraction for another. What isn’t a losing battle is the fight to avoid being a person whose “attention…[is] controlled and coerced by others.”9
If this is where you start glumly nodding, you’re welcome!
While everyone has varying attention spans, much of the problem stems from the fact that we manage our attention alongside others attempting to hijack it (whether they know it or not.) And since most people are average in time management, it is more likely that the person trying to hijack your attention is not a time management ninja but a person struggling with their attention. Every time you debase your attention tactics to theirs, you could be getting sucked back into the world you wish to avoid.
This sucking sound is particularly bad in highly dysfunctional organizations.
When I choose distraction over productivity, I am typically tired or bored, and these feelings are much more common in less-than-ideal workplaces. Stephen Stansfeld and Bridget Candy found in a 2006 study that certain kinds of workplaces can cause clinical depression,10 particularly under two conditions:
Job Strain: Workplaces where “employees were expected to meet high expectations could not yet control the outcomes”11 (e.g. “I am continually asked to do more and more by leadership who will inevitably undermine me.”)
Effort-Reward Imbalance: Workplaces where “workers don’t see much return for their hard work” (e.g. “My portfolio at my job keeps growing and growing, and I don’t even get a cost of living increase.”)
Returning to technology, Eyal makes the case that distracted employees may be expressing personal pain due to a lack of control and appreciation, thus “we often reach for our tech tools to feel better when we experience a lack of control.”12
For managers and supervisors, think deeply about the previous paragraph. When one sees colleagues distracted by their devices, the easy path is to attribute those behaviors to a lack of motivation or commitment. While sometimes that is the case, how many leaders see technological distraction, look inward, and ask what they can do to make people more engaged? In this sense, the power and pitfalls of technology are merely a reflection of how we engage with one another. We have more agency than we realize.
Stay Focused
11,000,000
Buffalo Wild Wings serves 11,000,000 buffalo wings on Super Bowl Sunday.
What I Read This Week
No, Aliens Haven’t Visited Earth: I know very little about UFOs, although I’ve been trying to up my game in terms of reading. This was a powerful piece.
The Secret History of Charisma: The title alone primed me to want to read this article (see what I did there?)
Dangerous Chicken Littles: Doomsaying becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, whether it is something small in one of our organizations or the future of our planet. This article does not make the case for toxic positivity but something more subtle and important.
Firing the Right Customers is Good Business: I know few Jewish organizations that make a concerted effort to “fire” customers that drain energy from the staff. Maybe we should reconsider.
Cal Newport AND Heschel?: Yes, please.
I know, normally I make fun of my shortcomings. This is a rare exception.
Shout-out to fellow former group leaders for USY on Wheels, who used to befuddle staff at local AAAs by requesting these manuals for every city in the United States every summer. Now, group leaders use a GPS…
410-654-0800.
The West Wing, season 3, episode 17, “Stirred.”
Granted, the line was about Beowulf instead of The Canterbury Tales, but still works.
Shout out to Rabbi Robbie Harris, who made students memorize this commentary, and to whom I still recite this when I see him:
Ibid.
Nir Eyal, 166.
Ibid., 167.