Looking without seeing

Part of the experience of being human is realizing that our attention is like an angry master that is very difficult to please: throw a taxing activity at it and it will soon become exhausted and unable to continue; if the task is too easy, the interest will quickly dwindle and the work will lay there neglected and unfinished or, at best, finished haphazardly and with little regard for the outcome. As usual, the optimum is some where in the middle, and our own ability to ease hard task and to make dull ones more appealing can be a great help. The opposite is also true: making a task too easy will remove any incentive capacity from the accomplishment and completely kill our interest.

One of the best examples of excessive simplification (at least in my view) are the modern navigation devices: its use has become so trivial that we devote close to zero mental resources to following its instructions, in particular in the easiest of all ways of using it, when the screen essentially displays the same view that we can see through the windshield. The problem that I find with this setup is that it effectively isolates us from the reality: with the only exception of the situations where the information in the navigator does not seem to match our immediate environment, we become completely oblivious to which direction we are traveling, how near or far we are from the closest city, even in which state or country you are at the moment. Back in the day when maps were the state of the art navigation was definitely more taxing (sometimes excessively so) both for the driver and the navigator, because the latter had to keep comparing the surroundings with the depiction in the map, while the former had to keep the instructions (names, directions, distances) in their mind as they drove along. The obvious cost was that a bad navigator could definitely get you lost and without the assistance of the GPS it could take a while to be able to pinpoint your position on the map. The great advantage was that both were aware of the surroundings, to the point that, if need be, they could at least reasonably guess how to get back the way they came or how to continue even if the map were lost. Try to do that with the user of a navigation device. That is why I always set mine with the North up and with a significant view, so that I can see cities, rivers and borders while keeping a sufficiently close orientation.

Photo: Wrapped Up

However, the most astonishing and scary example of attention drift is the case of talking on the cellphone while driving (also with a hands-free set). According to some studies, after one minute of interrupted conversation on the phone the performance of the driver is comparable to having alcohol levels in the blood at the legal limit, looking at the road but not seeing much, and it only gets worse after that. Of course this problem is way more serious in the urban environment, where the density and variety of moving objects in visual range is much greater than in the countryside or on the motorway. And if you are just driving along it is perfectly possible that you reach your destination that you have been driving all that time.

Today I have come to think about this because I have been forced to reinstall some software. Based, as it was, in Linux, the set up has required north of thirty keyboard interactions (and their associated waiting times). Luckily, I had a very detailed cookbook that allowed me to complete the task without much pain. Unfortunately, the cookbook was so detailed that I just had to cut and paste all the commands, to the point that I did not even have to understand any of what was happening. Given that things were smooth, the isolation between the status of the software and the instructions to set it up were not a problem, but had anything failed during the installation, I would have been essentially as helpless as a driver without a GPS.

Technology should in principle be just a means to an end, it should make our life easier not for the sake of easiness but to allow to do other things instead of the cumbersome ones that get phased out. But it can also hijack our lives by making us dependent on them. These days almost nobody remembers anybody else's phone number, because smartphones do the job for us, but the day we lose it we have to painstakingly collect them all again from friends and family, and some of the number are likely to never be back. Is this relying too much on the technology? What about the GPS? If you feel inclined to it, your comments are welcome. Have a nice evening.