Doug Ross, 31, wakes every morning to a screen full of notifications.
He receives updates from news apps, chats from coworkers and emails from East Coast clients, all beckoning to be answered before the workday even starts. Working during the day as a consultant for the software company Adobe, the alerts pour in on a near-constant basis. He usually answers within seconds.
“I never have it away from my person,” said Ross, a California, resident, about his phone. “That gives me anxiety. It bothers me, because I know what is going to be on the phone when I get back to it, or what I’m going to miss.”
Many people find the constant dings, rings, buzzes and beeps that come from their computers and mobile phones impossible to ignore. Experts say it’s a sign of our dependency on technology, which validates and entertains us while also cutting into our productivity and altering our attention span for the worse.
When a mobile phone, laptop computer or smartwatch makes a noise, it produces mental and physical reactions in people, said Larry Rosen, a psychology professor emeritus at California State University, Dominguez Hills, and author of The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World. Their heart rates increase. Their skin tingles. They grow increasingly antsy with every minute they don’t look at the screen.
Source: The Sydney Morning Herald
