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Key points
- Digital technology has shortened attention spans, made us more distracted, and can impede social interaction.
- It's also degrading our capacity for moral attention—noticing morally-salient aspects of a given situation.
- The result is less empathy and compassion, individually and collectively, and more polarization.
Once, while sitting in my car waiting to get onto the Bay Bridge, I was physically assaulted by a man with a bag of rocks who seemed to be strung out on drugs. The experience was disconcerting, to say the least, but what I also remember is the shock of looking around at nearby cars that were likewise stopped. One guy was chatting on his phone, casually glancing back and forth between me and my car being attacked and the road ahead. A woman next to me was holding up her phone in my direction, presumably filming the event. The person in the car ahead adjusted whatever device was hanging from the front window, then pulled closer to the car ahead, as if the violence might be catchy.
As I fumbled for my own device, which had fallen to the floor in the commotion, I realized that traffic had yet to move—and still no one had tried to intervene or checked to see if I was all right. Apparently, the police were not informed either, as I learned when I was finally able to call them. The irony was that we were a block away from a police station.
My story is nothing compared with those of countless others who have experienced a mobile device thwarting human decency. The dopamine deluge that comes from the instant gratification of getting likes on social media can make capturing a spectacle more enticing than heeding our conscience. Conversely, the Pavlovian response to incessant notifications gives us an excuse to avert our eyes, mitigating uncomfortable situations and distancing us from them.
All told, there is a sense that our capacity for moral attention is degrading. Moral attention is the ability to notice the morally salient aspects of a given situation so that we can best respond. It’s not a new concept. The Stoics considered attention (or what they called prosochê, a continuous vigilance and presence of mind, a “self-consciousness that never sleeps,” a constant tension of the human spirit) to be the fundamental spiritual attitude.
Simone Weil, a 20th-century French philosopher and mystic, was also interested in the subject of moral attention. She wrote in First and Last Notebooks, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Attention is not directed by selfish concerns, she maintained, but simply by the desire for good, come to life through a sense of open and receptive presence and justness towards another person. In other words, doing good comes from getting out of our own way.
Weil called this self-emptying and other-focused process of attention “decreation.” The problem is that decreation is antithetical to digital technology.
The Devil Is in the Digital
It’s now widely acknowledged that digital technology is shortening our attention span and making us more distracted. In 2000, research showed the average person could pay attention for 12 seconds; by 2013, this had shrunk to eight seconds—shorter than the attention span of a goldfish. The average millennial picks up their smartphone 150 times a day. People who are online an average of five hours a day have trouble remembering other people’s names. 89% of Americans admitted to pulling out their cellphones during their last social interaction. Nearly 60% of adults have checked their work email while on vacation, and 6% have checked their email while a spouse was in labor. Another 6% have checked email at a funeral, and 10% at a child’s school event. 33% of respondents in a recent study said they felt anxious if they hadn’t checked messages on their phone for a given period.
The issue of digital technology impeding social interaction is particularly alarming, because it speaks to empathetic concern, that is, the tendency to experience sympathy or compassion for another person, especially someone in distress. Empathetic concern is generally considered to be a fundamental component of morality and moral competence and a natural outcome of moral attention.
In a study by the Pew Research Center, 82% of respondents said that taking out their phones during a social interaction not only deteriorated the conversation, but also lessened the empathic connection they felt toward the person they were engaging with. Another study found that children at a device-free camp more accurately read other people’s emotions and facial expressions than those who had access to a device; similarly, face-to-face interaction improved their attentional and emotional abilities.
Speaking to CNN, Dr. Gary Small, M.D., and Gigi Vorgan, co-authors of iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind, suggested that we have transformed into a society of detached voyeurs, our brains having become so desensitized by a “24/7, all-you-can-eat diet of lurid flickering images that we’ve lost all perspective on appropriateness and compassion when another human being apparently suffers.”
Increasing Societal Polarization
The toll of this tech transformation can also be felt in the polarization that is consuming society like the wildfires in America’s West. Throughout time and across cultures, both empathy and compassion have been considered essential aspects of human nature. More recently, some researchers have questioned if empathy is a universal good, arguing that while empathy can guide moral judgments and moral action, at other times it can interfere with them.
Elizabeth Simas and her colleagues at the University of Houston found in two recent studies that empathetic concern is biased towards one’s group, which can cause hostility to an outgroup, thereby exacerbating political polarization. The effect was especially prevalent among partisans. In the case of people at the higher end of empathetic concern, they were even more likely to enjoy a moment of schadenfreude—the suffering of their “opponents.”
Social media companies like Facebook and Twitter never tire of waving the banner of connection; through increased social interaction and communication, they tell us, we will all be brought together. While few would deny that these platforms have connected and reconnected people, it is also undeniable that their business models are dependent on creating “opponents.” Not only do their platforms erode our attention, but they also divide and redirect our attention by providing an incessant ingroup feedback loop or “affirmation feed” that doubles down on the “us versus them,” “good versus evil,” “I’m right, they’re wrong” trope and by exploiting negative emotions—like fear, anger, disgust, and resentment—that are long-lasting, highly gripping, and extremely contagious. In this narrowing of attention, these companies are fueling the growth of ideological bubbles that rely on the dark side of empathy to stay constituted.
Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google and co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, calls the problem of this distraction, addiction, polarization, and radicalization “human downgrading.” He believes the deal with the devil that digital technology companies have struck to hijack the human brain, weaken human capacity, and corrupt human culture in exchange for monetizing human attention is one of the greatest social ills of our time. He is calling for a broader conversation about the social costs of these digital platforms and products in the hopes of realigning technology with human good.
It may sound Pollyannaish to say that society would be better if there were tools that made it easier for people to do good; likewise, that a good use of technology is one that improves individual and collective well-being. Helping people become healthier and more educated, cooperative, responsible, loving, generous, morally competent, and capable of ethical action would go a long way toward that end. Given that tech companies have shown their allegiance to the high-stakes financial rewards of fragmenting human attention, continuing to embed design components that magnify the effect and degrade moral attention, this is unlikely to change anytime soon.
Mahatma Gandhi told us that if we want to change the world, we must start with ourselves. For Weil, this self-transformation requires decreation. “We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will,” she wrote in Gravity and Grace. If we are to hear the voice of our conscience, we must put aside pride—“there is a lack of grace in the proud man,” Weil says, a lack of generosity of spirit—and empty ourselves so that we can become receptive to someone else, to some other concern “out there.” Only then will we become aware of our deeply held moral principles and find the motivation to act upon them.
