>> John Bartell: All right. Good afternoon. I want to thank everyone
for coming. I'm John Bartell. I'm actually with Microsoft IT. It's
my distinct privilege to welcome Dr. Alex Pang to the Microsoft
Research Visiting Speakers Series.
Alex is a professional futurist with a Ph.D. in the history of science.
He's a former Microsoft Research Fellow, a visiting scholar at Stanford
and Oxford, and his writings have appeared in Scientific American,
American Scientist and other academic publications.
He also happens to be one of my college professors and a dear friend of
mine. So I'm very pleased to be here today to introduce Alex and his
work.
He's here today to talk about "The Distraction Addiction." The book
which I will admit I have read with my phone and my Surface squarely
put away in another room, draws upon Alex's work in the contemplative
computing space, which he first came to in 2011 when he was a visiting
researcher at our Cambridge UK facilities. He'll be the first to tell
contemplative computing sounds like a bit of an oxymoron, but his work
the last several years has focused on how we can use that approach and
use information technologies to make us more focused, more mindful and
protect us from being perpetually distracted, which, given where we
work, doing what we do, and what we aspire to be as a devices and
services company, could definitely come in handy. So with that, please
join me in giving Alex a warm Microsoft welcome. [applause]
>> Alex Pang: Thank you. That was great. Thank you very much, John.
John, he was too modest to mention but John actually was probably -well, you're not supposed to have favorites but was my favorite student
when I was at Stanford.
And it is -- there is this deep Microsoft connection to the project
that I would be very remiss not to acknowledge at the outset and as
wholesomely as I can, because this project -- the book and sort of all
the work that I've done on this would never have happened were it not
for the amazing generosity of Richard Harper and the Sociodigital
Systems group who Richard was kind enough to offer me the opportunity
to come to Cambridge and spend three months in the dead of winter,
which if you've ever spent time in England is a really good time to
stay in doors and read and work on stuff.
And so at sort of a personal level and Richard's work himself and his
work and Abigail Sellems affordances in the myth of the paperless
office was stuff I pretty much committed to heart and so this is -there were parts of this book that follow very much on their work and
Richard's subsequent work in texture and communication of the digital
age.
Now, I should say that "The Distraction Addiction" is a book that's
focused very much on sort of everyday users, and it's written for, as
general an audience as sort of Little Brown, my publisher, could
encourage me to write for.
And so while I think that there are some potential -- there are sort of
implications in this work for things like software design or service
design, it's not something that I attack very directly today. But what
I'm going to do is read from a couple parts of the book that I think I
hope will be particularly interesting and particularly rich in
implications.
Now, as John had mentioned before I became a futurist and technology
forecaster I studied history of science, and I started work on this
project largely out of a kind of a personal interest but sort of a
personal crisis.
When you're a futurist you spend a lot of time working for it's a lot
of project stuff. It's very client focused, very order delivery
focused so you spend a huge amount of time bouncing from one thing to
another, putting out fires, traveling, that sort of thing. And after
years of that, I felt like it was having a significant effect on my
ability to think, my attention span. If any of you have read the
opening chapters of Nick Carr's book "The Shallows," I think he nicely
describes the situation some of us find ourselves in after years of
working at a kind of high pace wit trying to incorporate a lot of
information very quickly.
Now, as a historian one of the things I did in the course of trying to
make sense of this problem and to make sense of how to get past it was
to look to the past. And what I wanted was to figure out if it was
possible to move beyond the kind of assumption that our engagements
with technologies leave us, open us to the danger of being constantly
distracted or having our attention fractured as kind of an inevitable
consequence of either the way our brains work or the way that
technologies work, and that there is a kind of inherently sort of
dehumanizing aspect to this, that in essence living in a high tech age
makes us all into some sort of less than human cyborg.
But if you look at the very deep history of technology or the history
of our relationship with technologies, work like there's that field
called cognitive archeology, for example, that gets into the history,
essentially the history of the mind as revealed by material culture, as
well as evolutionary psychology and anthropology and the history of
tools.
What you find is that far from being a kind of process that is
alienating or dehumanizing, that very deep constant engagement with
technology, really sort of profound level, is part of what makes us
human. That humans have literally never lived in a world without
tools; that our ancestors' brains a couple million years ago began
expanding dramatically at about the time they began to make and use
stone exes like these. This is one that's about 1.2 million years old.
It still has its edge. And you can see our hands have evolved over the
last million years but not so dramatically that you can't hold it
perfectly still today.
And the expansion of our brains at about the time
making and using tools like this, helped increase
capacity not just to make these tools but to make
how they could be used to remember those uses and
others.
that we began using,
our ancestor's
abstract ideas about
to teach them to
And furthermore, other parts of our bodies have changed to enhance our
ability to use technology, but also increased our reliance upon it. So
the development of bipedalism allowed our ancestors to specialize in
feeling and grasping rather than walking, and this in turn made them
more tool friendly but also made us more dependent upon those tools to
survive.
And a nice example of this is that for the last million or so years,
humans have eaten more meat than gorillas or chimpanzees, our nearest
sort of order of simian cousins, but our species have not developed
sharper teeth or greater speed as a consequence of this. In fact, our
teeth and jaws have become weaker as the amount of meat we eat has gone
up. And why is this?
Well, the argument is our teeth evolved to consume cooked meat. Cheese
came later, but still. Animals were killed using technologies like
spears and traps and the meat was cooked over fire and there are good
reasons for this. The proteins are easier to breakdown, the food
easier to digest and you get more energy from the same amount of flesh.
And we're also less furry than our primate cousins and walk and balance
differently which allows us to make and use to other ancient
technologies dating for about 170,000 years ago, clothes and the first
rudimentary shoes.
Now, this is a kind of deep relationship that's not just confined to
sort of objects that we use to kill and eat other things. The
development of writing also allowed us to begin several thousand years
ago to offload memory on to devices, to communicate at great distances,
to abstract and analyze everything from stellar motion to long distance
trade. In other words, sort of the kinds of effects we began to see,
the consequences of writing were really not dissimilar to the ones that
we see with computing technologies today.
So it turns out there's a long history of our increasing ability to not
just use technologies, but to become deeply engaged to become entangled
with them. To build what Andy Clark calls extended minds. Now Clark
who is a philosopher at the University of Edinburough and his friends
argue that the boundaries between mind and body, even the boundaries
between mind, body and tools are actually fuzzier than we realized and
within philosophy and cognitive science I will acknowledge this is sort
of a contentious argument and there are plenty of people like Jerry
Foder who say this is total nonsense. But I'll run with it. They
argue that it's wrong to think of the mind as being principally
contained by the brain but, rather, propose a model of an extended mind
in which brain, body and devices and even to some degree social
networks are all entangled together.
And this kind of entanglement allows us to extend our physical and
cognitive abilities. You always have to have a baby picture in a
talk -- to do things that we could not do with our bodies alone, to
accomplish tasks more efficiently and easily or quickly.
And to achieve a kind of mastery that lets us lose ourselves in our
activities and our work. And it stretches our body schema. They can
have unconscious mental map of where your body ends and where the world
starts. And this is why a common statement like my smartphone feels
like part of my brain can actually express some fairly deep sort of
perhaps unintentional truths.
And so it seems that the kind of entanglement is nothing new or
revolutionary. This is time squared, by the way. It's what makes us
human. Our sense of ourselves, our bodies and our minds are all shaped
by it. And indeed our evolutionary success, surviving in a world of
much larger predators, outwitting our Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon
cousins proliferating as a species, completely spreading around the
globe some 40,000 years ago all depended on this ability to make, to
use and to merge with tools.
And it also helps explain why we take great pleasure from using these
tools tools well, why we learn to work so intimately and effortlessly
with instruments or machines. So much so that the device can cease to
feel like something being used and come to be experienced as an
extension of ourselves, another sense through which we interact with
the world.
This is my young cousin who just turned two. Now, you can see this,
for example, with musical instruments. Where when you first begin to
play an instrument you're very aware of where your fingers are, what
key you have to be in. Eventually with practice, though, that kind of
clumsy awareness of strings and finger positions or valves gives way to
a sense that the instrument is as one jazz musician put it effectively
becomes a natural extension of yourself.
There's a pilot and military historian Tony Kern who wrote likewise
that fighter pilots need knowledge, understanding and trust of the
airplane and a genuine desire to make the machine an extension of
yourself, a real attempt to bond human and machine into a single
functional unit.
We also become more aware of entanglement and its pleasures when novel
technologies let us do things that unaugmented bodies cannot. So 19th
century accounts of the bicycle highlight this.
There's one author in 1869 wrote to an audience that presumably
sometimes had never seen a bicycle and had never ridden on it that it's
worth than useless than animated by the guiding intelligence of which
it becomes a servant and a part. It increases your sense of personal
volition the instant you are on its back. It's not so much an
instrument you use as an auxiliary you employ. It becomes part of
yourself.
30 years later, another writer described riding the machine as riding
bicycles as a process where the machine is an extension of yourself.
On any other vehicle, you are freight. But here you are moving by your
own will and strength. So the bicycle may be the first machine that
users describe in such intimate terms, at least mechanical devices. If
so, its invention is an unheralded milestone in the history of cyborgs.
At its most intense, entanglement dissolves the awareness of any
difference between person and object. You can work with it so
perfectly it becomes impossible where you end and the device begins.
And this is a state that's been described by students of Zen arts like
Ogen Haragow [phonetic], the author of great, though if now slightly
controversial, book of archery where he talks about after years of
studying archery in Japan, that in the end the pupil no longer knows
which of the two, mind or hand, was responsible for the work.
At its best, bow, arrow, goal and ego all melt into one another so that
I can no longer separate them. And its ability to merge one awareness
and body schema with the device, be it a million year old hand axe,
musical instrument, writing instrument, bicycle or weapon is one that
the body richly rewards.
Entanglement has a cognitive and mnemonic dimension as well. We
outsources a trusted auxiliaries, things we have trouble remembering or
which we can more efficiently store elsewhere. I think I'm probably
not the only person who has memorized maybe half a dozen phone numbers
since I first got a cell phone. I know my wife's number and my kids'
cell phone numbers and that's it. All the rest of them I put into the
phone and forget about them.
We also store some data at the interface of bodies and technologies.
So to give a concrete example of this, I spell with my hands. So I
learn to touch type as a kid and after years I can get up on a good day
to about 70 words a minute. But when I'm writing, just as -- when you
become fluent reading a language you no longer are parsing, identifying
individual letters and constructing the words out of the phonetic
sound.
Likewise, when I'm writing things, I will type based on a tactile sense
of how a word feels. The rhythm that your fingers make, the tilt of
the wrist and when I misspell something I can't always identify exactly
what the misspelling was, but I can feel the typo before I see it.
And as a consequence, when my children ask me to spell a really long
word, I don't visualize an imaginary dictionary and then read each
letter, what I do is I watch my fingers on an imaginary keyboard and I
read out the letters that my fingers are typing.
And this isn't the only example of outsourcing some information to
muscle memory. Lots of people recall phone numbers and passcodes by
imagining the patterns that our fingers make on the keypad. This was
hard to do in the days of rotary dial phones but today it's a very
simple thing. We used to let our fingers do the walking, now we can
let them do the remembering.
And one of the last, very striking examples of intellectual knowledge
being encoded in the hands is the case of a typesetter at Oxford
University Press sometime in the 1950s or so who caught an error in a
Greek book that he was typesetting.
Now, he himself did not read or speak Greek. But he had been setting
books in the language for decades, pulling the type from trays and
arranging the letters in print frames and as he explained to the
editors, he knew he had never made that particular combination of
motions before. He had never reached for that set of letters in that
way.
It just felt wrong. And it turned out he was right. Now, becoming
familiar with technologies in this way. So become extensions of
ourselves, using them effortlessly, feeling them extend our physical or
cognitive or creative abilities can be a really terrific thing. And it
can be intensely pleasurable. And it is a state that the great
Hungarian American psychologist [indiscernible] has studied
extensively, which he calls flow.
There are lots of people who have other terms for it. But flow, as he
describes it, has four major components. Concentration is so intense
that there's no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant.
Self-consciousness disappears. Sense of time becomes distorted.
An activity that produces such experiences is so gratifying that people
are willing to do it for its own sake, with little concern for what
they will get out of it or even whether it is difficult or dangerous.
It's notable how often people reach flow states when using technologies
well, when being fully engaged and entangled with bicycles or games or
smart devices, and I think that there are a couple of implications here
that I'll just call out very briefly. For one, the pleasure people get
from these uses is not merely a kind of diversion, though certainly
some game companies have learned how to create clever kind of simulacra
flow. [indiscernible] behind his colleagues instead find, that, as he
puts it, the best moments in our lives are not the passive receptive
relaxing times but, rather, ones that occur when a person's body or
mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish
something difficult and worthwhile.
So challenge, exhilaration, worthwhile, rewarding, difficult activities
and an intense awareness of them are what produce flow, and then that
in turn turns out, they argue, to be one of the keys to happiness.
People who are able to maintain these states are able to find them are
more resilient in the face of disasters, be them personal, natural or
what have you, because when you pay attention to the point that it
really reflects who you are, as he told me, what you've done, what you
want to do, you fulfill your role in this world. You feel good about
yourself and your work. And this ability to pay attention, to control
the contents of your consciousness, as William James put it, is
critical to a good life. We've known this for a very long time, at
least going back to the stoics. This explains why perpetual
distraction is such a big problem. When you're constantly interrupted
by external things, by self-generated interruptions, by our own efforts
to multitask, juggle several things at once, these chronic distractions
erode your sense of having control of your life. They don't just
derail your train of thought, of course they do that, they don't just
make you less productive, and it turns out they do that as well, and
they don't just have negative effects on your home life, though they
can do that as well. In a very real way, they make you lose your self.
Now, we shouldn't turn off technologies because of this. And as I've
argued, using them can be an immense pleasure. We like them because
we're humans. And, rather, we should demand better ones or demand more
from ourselves. And they're practically I think good design is
practically our right as human beings. But we also don't have to wait
for others to solve this problem for us.
And I would look for inspiration to a group of people who interviewed
when I was working on the book who were regular users of social media
but seem immune to its effects. These are people who spend hours a day
online without the media feeding what they call the monkey mind. This
is the Buddhist term for that part of the mind that is endlessly
self-distracted, that can't sit still, that jumps from one subject to
another, that kind of chatters constantly.
They maintain relationships with information technologies that leave -that keep them firmly in control. And they have a perspective on
digital distraction that is unique. They are monks who blog. There
are Dane Buddhist monks and nuns as well who spend hours a day in
studying and meditating and physiologic and psychological order of
benefits have been well studied at this point. We can talk about it at
the Q&A if you don't know about it, but you probably do. But also
hours more posting instructional videos on YouTube and writing blog
posts and maintaining discussion groups. Some are members of orders
that let them pursue secular lives, some live alone in the jungles of
Asia. And some monasteries and other parts of the world. Every
religion uses the Internet to evangelize among nonbelievers and
organize events within the faith and Buddhism is no different. In fact
some of the very earliest printed books were Buddhist texts, the
Diamond Sutra from the Seventh Century. They were carved into blocks
of wood than using movable type.
Still, given their deep historical involvement in printing technology
and contemporary needs as a globally dispersed community of Buddhist
appreciation of the Internet's value for communication and coordination
shouldn't be a particular surprise.
And as Yutodamo [phonetic], this guy right here, explains, he got on
line because if you want to share something you have to go where the
people are. So central is the Internet is a resource today that
writing a book on the Dama is a bit pointless unless you offer a PDF as
well. Now at the same time there is also a group very conscious about
putting limits on their technology use.
So as a very practical matter, machines tend to stay on desks or in
closets, even those who have iPads, this is sort of a room in a
monastery in Domisala. They tend to keep their machines on desks or in
closets. They rarely carry around cell phones, and they treat going
online explicitly as a challenge to practice compassion and mindfulness
and in an environment that can easily divert them. But I think what's
really interesting about their ideas about online life and technology
go a little bit deeper. And I began to discover this when I was
interviewing a monk named [indiscernible] who manages the website What
Buddha Said and an e-mail list with about 8,000 followers and has a
very active presence on Twitter and Facebook and when he wants to be
alone Google Plus.
Now, you would not imagine the silence you get with that joke in
Mountain View. But still -- [laughter] -- talk about wanting to be
alone.
Anyway, he spent several hours a day managing all this stuff, and he
does it from here. This is Cypress Hermitage which is a small white
washed house 4200 feet above sea level above a tea plantation in the
mountains of Sri Lanka. He sees other people about one day a month
when he walks into town for supplies and maybe once or twice a year
someone will come to visit him. Yet he spends four or five hours a day
on line in front of his laptop powered by a solar panel array and a
micro hydroelectric generator that draws on a nearby stream.
How does he maintain these two apparently very different kinds of
lives? I started talking to him about e-mail, asking about this. And
I started first by asking what is it that's reward and what's
challenging about being a forest monk. And he replied: Completing the
noble way is both the most rewarding and challenging.
Okay. Well, what's life in Sri Lanka like? What is forest life like?
Peaceful, calming, happy. Simple, he replies, smiling as the forest.
The other answers to questions are a mix of telegraph if I can prose
and poems and hyperlinks and his English is absolutely impeccable but
after a while I begin to feel like I'm interviewing someone who no
longer really has much use for language. It's a bit like talking,
let's say, to Yoda. But in this case it turns out a tall Nordic Yoda,
because [indiscernible], he's so tall you actually can't get all of him
into the picture.
He was born in Denmark. Before his ordination, he was a physician. He
was a specialist in tropical diseases, and he was a researcher in
bioinfomatics at the Technical University of Denmark. I don't need to
tell you if you do bioinformatics you're spending a lot of time
wrangling terabytes of data. You really know your way around a
computer. For an ambitious researcher at the turn of the millennium it
was a great field to be in. He was unhappy with his life. He had
issues with depression. And a chance encounter with a Tibetan monk led
him to take up meditation and cured his depression and gave him a
glimpse of a new life. He started what Buddha said in 2000 when he was
still in Denmark and the next year gave up his teaching position,
entered a monastery in Sri Lanka, and two years after that moved to
Cypress Hermitage. This is a remarkable transformation. I take it as
a promising sign because if someone accustomed to wrangling data and
being on call at a hospital can go from a life of technology enhanced
distraction to one that balances the quiet of life in the forest with
life online, then maybe the rest of us can learn to be a little more
contemplative in our use of technology as well. When I asked if
there's a paradox in using the Web, which is a medium that lots of
people find to be distracting to teach about Buddhism which concerns
itself with, among other things, eliminating distractions and desires.
If one does not crave it and use it rightly, he replies, then the Lotus
can grow even in the mud. Now, in Buddhism, craving is sort of at the
root of suffering. It's bound up with impassioned appetite and it's
the thing that seeks fresh pleasures here and then there. And feeding
these desires sort of satisfies them temporarily but eventually they're
going to come back probably stronger than ever.
Now, I ask, okay, well, okay, so this is a fairly canonical sort of
reply. But what about -- so if you spend hours a day online, can you
really never mindlessly surf the Web, this is another view of his
house. He seems not to understand the question at first. Whether
internal memories, flash backs or external world IT, TV, it has to be
dealt with accordingly. I think I'm not making myself clear so I try
one more time. Does the Internet itself pose special challenges that
other things do not?
The beauty and the piece here makes the Internet dull and noisy in
comparison was his reply. I know people who can't get through a
traffic light without wanting to check their e-mail. Yet here is
someone who is a former professor, who is exactly the kind of -- who
was the information saturated alpha type, you can imagine having
trouble being out of touch for even a minute talking about a two-room
white washed house in the middle of nowhere making the Internet seem
dull. When you do interviews of people, one of the really interesting
moments comes if you're asking questions that reveal based on what you
think is a perfectly obvious assumption that it turns out they
absolutely do not share.
And I realized I was in one of those moments. And I started putting
this question to other monks and nuns and the responses were puzzling,
and then fascinating. Some of them didn't understand the question when
I had to explain what I thought was evident. The technology is a
special source of distraction. Once I made myself clear, they turned
it around. Why do you think that distraction comes from the
technology? If you start with a distracted mind, the ping of your cell
phone and the buzz of the Web is going to tug at it but they don't
cause it as one of them said. The distraction doesn't come from the
outside world to bother a mind that's untroubled. The distractions
exist with or without PCs, as one monk said. And indeed Samahita said
external distractions like technologies are much easier to handle than
distractions coming from inside the mind itself.
Now, this makes monks uniformly unimpressed with programs like Mac
Freedom or Write Room or other sorts of Zen ware a term they found
rather musing they said programs and blogs like that are okay but
ultimately we have to develop our own will power, only we can be
responsible for ourselves and what we are doing.
Now, here's why this matters even if you're not a monk. The bad news
is that there are limits to how much any design effort can make people
more mindful. We can support these sorts of efforts but ultimately
dealing with the technologies more mindfully, practicing contemplative
computing is something that users do. It's not something that you can
impose or create through kind of nudges and choice architectures.
Now, the good news is that we're told often that smartphones and games
and social media are kind of like brain catnip. They hook into the
pleasures of our brain, feeding us dopamine in cleverly erratic bursts
and changing our brains and leaving us helpless to resist.
And the example of Samahita and the blogging monks suggests that this
is profoundly wrong. They show how, if we learn to treat technologies
not as an inevitable source of distraction, but as tools that we can
use wisely while mastering our own monkey minds, our indistractible
sides, that the shiny, blinky Internet which supposedly appeals to the
most primitive impossible to turn off lizard brain in each of us can in
fact be nothing.
And it reminds me of one of the wisest Buddhistation which is that pain
is inevitable but suffering is a choice. And this is an idea that's
expressed in virtually every religion. And what it means is that loss
and death are unavoidable. Catastrophes are going to strike,
eventually we have to come to terms with our own mortality, and it's
not within our power to escape any of these things, but what is within
our power is the ability to develop a capacity to deal gracefully with
these challenges. To learn from experience, to become wiser and
better, and become better prepared for future setbacks.
And I think you face a similar situation in the super connected high
tech world. The information technologies are now inescapable. They're
part of how you work, how you keep in touch, how your kids play, how
you think, how you remember. They clamor for your time and crave your
attention. They rely on the fact that your relationships with
information technologies are deep and profound and reflect an
entanglement with tools that defines us as a species. And they promise
to be helpful and supportive to make you smarter and more efficient.
But too often they can leave you feeling busier, distracted and dull.
And some say that the unavoidable price of being always on and
connected is a point of tensions perpetually fractured, the mind
subject to endless demands and distractions but that's wrong we're the
inheritors of a contemplative legacy used to retake recontrol of your
technologies to tame that monkey mind and redesign your extended mind.
In other words, connection is inevitable.
Thank you.
[applause]
But distraction is a choice.
We have time for a couple of questions. I don't know if there's any
particular protocol for calling, do people stand up or whatever. And
you know this better than I do. So question in back.
>>: For generation blind -- particularly for a generation that's grown
up with multiple conversations going at a time and whatnot, does the
research show that they're better able to manage those distractions as
first line [indiscernible] I was talking with my neighbor yesterday he
was seeing me use four instant messengers and Facebook and Skype at the
same time. Having five conversations, she couldn't figure out how I
was doing that.
>> Alex Pang: I think that the record is mixed, though, partly it
depends on how much -- part of the answer is that it depends on how
intensely you need to focus on any one of those activities, right? So
maintaining several slightly asynchronous conversations is less of a
challenge than several intensive simultaneous ones. But it's like
dinner table conversation.
Now, I think that there is good work that indicates that really trying
to intensively multi task, to pursue two different mental activities
simultaneously really does have degrading effect and you feel like
you're getting more done but actually your performance drops and in
laboratory tests your accuracy also declines.
So I think that the answer is that I think it seems even for Gen Y
people who are digital natives, that the pursuit of multiple
challenging activities is problematic. The pursuit of lower level ones
this is actually what humans have done for a very long time. If you
grow up in a household with a lot of kids, for example, you are in
effect having multiple -- the equivalent of multiple IM conversations.
So that's my answer.
>>: I have a question.
>> Alex Pang:
Please.
>>: This is more just your opinion, to follow off of that gentleman's
question. Do you think that Gen Y growing up in the environment where
all this technology and handsets and tablets is so readily available,
that they have a better chance of being able to find a happy medium
versus us who kind of have gotten used to being brought up in the pen
and paper, snail mail, and now all of a sudden we now have this thing
called tell communicate which doesn't really describe remote work. It
feels like we're the ones having the problem because we're trying to
balance out this new technology with old world metaphors.
>> Alex Pang: I will take the optimistic route and say that I think
every generation has the capacity to figure this out. You know, the
degree to which we are better able to or can more quickly come up with
our own solutions may vary with age, but one of the great things about
neuroplasticity it means never having to give up on yourself, right?
And furthermore, I think that -- I don't want to make too much of
arguments about how spending a lot of time online like changes kids'
brains, because everything you do changes your brain. For better or
worse. And so part of the problem that I think we have had in thinking
about these issues is that we have a really well-developed kind of
neuro scientific language for describing pleasure or why it is that
Facebook likes give us dopamine charges but we don't have an equivalent
language for describing why it is that let's say solving incredibly
complicated problems generates feelings of profound satisfaction.
What's the neuro chemistry behind finishing your Ph.D.? And who the
hell knows. However, for people who have done intensely difficult
things who have gotten degrees, who solved theorems, graduated from
officer candidate school, who raised children, you know, clearly these
things are satisfying in a way -- satisfying in ways we can accept even
if we can't talk about exactly how much serotonin or dopamine get
generated when we look at our thesis or pain.
Anyway, so I think that the fundamental human capacity is, to figure
these things out, is available to everyone. You know, so...yes.
>>: Essentially you're saying that it's up to us not to get distracted,
right? So does your book provide some guidance on how not to get
distracted?
>> Alex Pang: Yes. So it goes through six major chapters that talk
about the unconscious and physical dimension of our order of
engagements with information technology. So talk about things like
Linda Stone's work on e-mail apnea and continuous partial attention.
About Zen ware and why it works. And it turns out it works not because
it's incredibly simply designed but because the people who use it want
it to work. There's a big element of this that you're making a social
contract with yourself when you use that kind of software rather than
some other kind.
There's a chapter on meditation and contemplative practices and how
those can be helpful in getting you to recognize what focus is like.
Then talk about self-experimentation or order of experimentation with
really your relationships with your devices. And then a section on
digital Sabbaths and restorative activities.
But frankly the book doesn't talk about either -- doesn't really talk
about specific devices because in the year that it takes a book to come
out, gee, the advice on the Galaxy Tab 1 would really be helpful now
but also because I think it's part of what -- I think it's also really
important for people to explore and to play around with these things
themselves. I think it's sort of like the old advice about what's the
best diet or the best exercise. It's the one that works for you. It's
the one that you can stick to.
And I think part of the point of the book is that an essential step to
becoming more focused or more mindful when you're using these awesome
devices is becoming more mindful about how you use them, about what
kinds of assumptions you make about them or that they and their
designers make about you.
Surfacing that kind of stuff is a challenge but it's one that I think
you've got to really undertake yourself if you're going to get life
long benefit. So yes.
>>: Who set up the Wi-Fi in the jungle of Sri Lanka?
>> Alex Pang: That's a good -- there's a satellite connection. And
it's accessible for like 90 minutes a day or something. I didn't -- I
didn't think to ask very much about how much that costs or -- there is
actually -- he also has PayPal. So there were various people who
subsidize those kinds of -- who subsidize the service and so on.
>>: So I can't -- you probably will talk earlier about how to improve
the situation like the one we have here. Is that ->> Alex Pang:
one time.
This is pretty much -- this is pretty much my family at
>>: [indiscernible].
>> Alex Pang:
So.
>>: [indiscernible].
>> Alex Pang: Well, I talked a little bit about why it is that these
things are so compelling. And I think working out the specifics is
something that is I can provide guidelines for how to do that but we
all really have to figure it out ourselves, and then once you get to
the level of families there's a whole other level of challenge there.
I think that the best thing that you can do, the first and most
important is just to model good behavior at home. If your kids are
texting at the dinner table, sometimes that's because they saw us
doing.
But I think that another important thing to do in the family context is
to actually not flip out about it. There's a huge amount of alarmism
over you know if your child goes on Facebook when they're 12 they're
going to commit suicide because they're going to be -- because their
reputations will be ruined. Now, bad things happening to teens is
always bad. But this can -- but these kinds of things happen in many
different kinds of circumstances. And the best -- and I think that the
challenge as parents is to help kids learn to be sort of smart and
thoughtful about stuff like social media and technologies and games.
Just as you want them to be smart about let's say advertising to
recognize that toy will actually not turn you into a transformer.
And marketing works this way. Likewise, you can -- there were similar
explanations that you can provide for kids about social media or games.
The other important thing I think is to do plenty of stuff online with
them. I regularly play video games with my kids. Part of because I'm
part of the generation whose brains were supposed to be destroyed by
video games. And you can't let a good prediction go to waste. It
hasn't happened yet. But maybe it will. But as a way of both finding
out what they're playing and figuring out why in the world is Mindcraft
so compelling. Looks like I could have played this in 1978. And as a
way of you hope kind of teaching them some good behavior and if you're
good helping them learn to be graceful losers is these things are all
valuable. So I'll quit there. If there was any other questions? Yes.
>>: You described yourself as a futurist, can you share some of your
predictions with us?
>> Alex Pang: Yes, but I would have to kill you then. No, okay, so
the first thing is that futurists, smart futurists don't really -- we
don't predict I mean in the sense -- I mean some of them do. And when
you say something that turns out to be spot on, you try and dine off
that for years. At that point, yeah, it wasn't chance, it was genius.
I called the 1973 oil embargo and so there's a guy named Peter Schwartz
who became very famous for forecasting the oil embargo.
And he's never let anyone live it down. Now, so what we do instead,
it's a bit like being -- at least I approach it as being kind of like
an anthropologist. Technologies that are going to be hitting the
marketplace in several years generally you can go to labs and see
what's coming, things don't move so quickly that you can't get some
kind of preview of what's going to be in the living room of 2017 or
2015 now. And the challenge is to help clients, usually companies,
occasionally governments, understand how people might use these, what
sort of, what kinds of opportunities it's going to create, whether it's
going to be a challenge for them, so on and so forth.
And so that's -- that's the short answer to the stuff that I do.
one prediction I will give is if any of you were working on RFID
Internet of things, the canonical idea of the Internet of things
officially dead. We're into something fundamentally new and the
of having unique identifiers for every single object that worked
way that DNS worked forget it.
The
and
is
idea
the
>>: [indiscernible].
>> Alex Pang:
No it's not.
>>: Next week.
>> Alex Pang:
Hmm.
>>: Operate cars.
>> Alex Pang: That's a prediction I won't be able to take to the bank,
oh well but -- so and then the rest of the work involves trying to get
companies to think a little bit more -- a little longer term in their
everyday lives. That, of course, is a real challenge for everybody.
And it's difficult to know how well, how to do that and how to do it
successfully. But a good part of what you do is sort of helping to try
and get clients when they're not in your presence to think a little bit
further out into the future, to try and think two or three moves ahead
rather than just one.
>>: That's a great place to stop.
>> Alex Pang:
[applause]
Thank you.