You are what you click
On a rainy October morning, the port of Cannes was swelling in waves, both sky and sea the color of charcoal. I was drowning in my MIPCOM agenda. It was a hurricane of my own making: meetings overlapped with meetings, Wednesday clients showed up on Monday, while important looking strangers dropped by to set up appointments which I would not be able to keep. The moral of the story was clearly “Don’t change assistants mid-stream” – something I did, quite stupidly, a month before the convention.
In the overall confusion, my phone ran out of the battery and the iPad was missing in action. Choking for time and losing my bearings, I stopped reading email. I was left to focus on real world conversations, and, over the span of three days, unwillingly kicked the habit of checking my mailbox every minute or so.
On the plane back to Geneva, a silly smile kept creeping on my face. It was a really good MIP, each meeting meaningful and next steps crystal clear in my head. An article caught my eye in the in-flight magazine: diet gurus have now replaced the mantra “ You are what you eat” with “You are what you think”. I was going to ponder this over the well-deserved weekend.
But on the Saturday morning a thousand plus emails dropped into my mailbox, all urgent somehow, even those about Viagra. In a flash of slowly waning clarity, I realized that the magazine mantra was at least a decade late.
We are no longer defined by what we think. We don’t have time to think. We are defined by what we click on our screens – opening emails, websites, links, letting them guide us through our increasingly virtual life. We are so busy reacting, that every silent moment of our day– a moment where, in a movie, George Clooney would close his eyes and ponder his next move – triggers an almost automatic reflex of checking email, which invariably leads to clicking on a link someone sent you, launching a video, reacting to someone’s “urgent” message, then letting a bookmark or other draw your attention.
It is natural to see progress in our ability to check a Blackberry on the beach or to reply to a client from an iPhone while getting ready to give birth (guilty). Research, however, shows that this permanent multitasking actually lowers our ability to stay focused and to distinguish important information from noise. A study commissioned by HP in 2005 (pre-historic, by Twitter terms) showed that frequent email checking actually lowers subject’s IQ by 10 points. 5 years, and many a social network later, brain researchers have established without a doubt that permanent messaging stimulation is actually “rewiring our brains”.
The New York Times recently quoted a University of California neuroscientist : “The nonstop interactivity is one of the most significant shifts ever in the human environment”. It’s not just that we waste time and lose track of our own priorities when descending the circles of email hell. Or that this permanent stimulation triggers dopamine squirts in our brain, creating a not-so-virtual dependency. At the end of it all, when we come “off” email, shutting down the computer and trying to reenter the real world, our attention is still fragmented and we are less able to focus and connect to other people. We may be what we think, but our thoughts are no longer ours, filled with digital noise and programmed by someone else. You are the emails you read… a scary thought, if your spam filter is not up-to-date.
