Emotional Design (22 page)

The real advantage of text messaging is that it can be used while you are doing other things. As long as your hands are free and you can sneak an occasional look at the screen, you can send and receive messages: in class, at business meetings, or even while conversing with others. There seem to be no bounds. Stick the device in your shirt pocket. Then, when bored, or when that pleasant vibrating sensation on the chest signifies the arrival of a new message, take it out and peek. Read the latest words and surreptitiously type a reply, using two thumbs on the tiny keyboard. Surreptitiously, because this is probably taking place at a meeting, where you are supposed to be attending to the speaker.

The ability to use short text messages so effortlessly has become a strong, emotional component of many people's lives. Numerous people who responded to my Internet request for experiences of bonding used the opportunity to tell me about their attachment to Instant Messaging (IM). Here are two responses:

The cell phone shares much of the emotional power of text messaging. It is much more than a simple communication device. Oh,
sure, business thinks of it as a way of keeping in touch, of getting critical information to people when they need it, but that misses the whole point of these devices. It is fundamentally an emotional tool and a social facilitator. It keeps people in touch with one another. It lets friends chat: even if the formal, reflective content is vague, the emotional content is high. But although it lets us all share thoughts and ideas, music, and pictures, what it really lets us share is emotion. The ability to keep in touch throughout the day maintains a relationship, whether it be business or social.

Speech is a powerful social and emotional vehicle because it enables communication of emotional state through its natural prosody—pauses, rhythm, pitch inflections, hesitations, and repeats. Although text messaging is not as effective as speech at communicating emotion, it is superior as a tool for communication because it is unobtrusive. It can be kept private and it can be done secretly. I am always amused at business meetings by the sneaky, but skillful, use of text messaging. I watch otherwise serious, staid executives glance furtively down at their laps so as to read screens and type responses, all the while pretending to be listening to the meeting. Text messaging lets friends keep in touch, even when they should be attending to something else.

Isn't it strange that, although telephone service is an emotional tool, the appliance itself is not? People love the power of cell phone interaction, but do not seem to love any of the devices that make it possible. As a result, the turnover of devices is high. There is no product loyalty, no commitment to company or service provider. The cell phone, one of the most fundamentally emotional services, garners little attachment to its products.

Vernor Vinge, one of my favorite science fiction writers, wrote
A Fire Upon the Deep,
in which the planet Tines is populated by animals with a collective intelligence. These doglike creatures travel in packs, whose members are in continuous acoustical communication with one another, giving rise to a powerful, distributed consciousness. Individuals leave the pack because of death, illness, or accident, and new, young members are recruited to replace them, so that the pack
maintains its identity far beyond that of any single individual. Each individual member of a pack lacks intelligence when all alone: the pack gains its intelligence through the collaboration of the many individuals. As a result, if an individual strays too far from the pack, the communication path is lost—for sound has limited range—and the resulting “singleton” is devoid of intelligence. Singletons rarely survive, and those that do are doomed to a mindless existence—literally mindless.

Walk down the street of any large city in any country of the world and watch the people who are talking on their cell phones: they are in their own space, physically adjacent to one location and one set of people but emotionally somewhere else. It is as if they fear being singletons in the crowd of strangers and opt instead to maintain connection with their pack, even if the pack is elsewhere. The cell phone establishes its own private space, removed from the street. Were the two people together, walking down the street, they would not be so isolated, for they would both be aware of one another, of the conversation and of the street. But with the cell phone, you enter into a private place that is virtual, not real, one removed from the surrounds, the better to bond with the other person and the conversation. And so you are lost to the street even while walking along it. Truly a private space in a public place.

I HAVE watched phones ring and be answered in the most amazing places. In the movie theater, in the middle of board meetings. I once attended a meeting at the Vatican where I was part of a scientific delegation presenting our findings to the Pope. Cell phones were everywhere: each cardinal wore a gold chain upon which was hung a gold cross, each bishop had a gold chain upon which was hung a silver cross, but the head usher, who seemed to be the real person in charge, wore a gold chain upon which was hung a cell phone. The Pope may have been the center of attention, but I heard cell phones ringing continually
throughout the ceremony. “Scusi,” they would whisper into their phones, “I can't talk right now, I'm listening to the Pope.”

On another occasion I was a member of a discussion panel in front of a large audience, when the moderator's cell phone rang just as he was in the middle of asking a question of one of the panelists. Yes, he answered it, disconcerting the panel members, but amusing the audience.

 

HURRAH FOR the communication technologies that allow us continuous contact with our colleagues, friends, and families, no matter where we are, no matter what we are doing! But, however powerful text and voice messages, phone calls, and emails are as tools for maintaining relationships or supervising work, note that one person's “keeping in touch” is another person's interruption. The emotional impact reflects this discrepancy: positive to the person keeping in touch, but negative and disturbing to the person being subjected to interruption.

There is a lack of symmetry in the perceived impact of an interruption. When I have lunch with friends who spend a considerable fraction of our time responding to calls on their cell phones, I consider this a distraction and an interruption. From their point of view, they are still with me, but the calls are essential to their lives and emotions and not at all an interruption. To the person taking the call, the time is filled, with information being conveyed. To me, it is empty unfilled time. The lunchtime conversation is now on hold. I have to wait for the interruption to end.

How much time does the interruption seem to take? To the person being interrupted, forever. To the person taking the call, just a few seconds. Perception is everything. When one is busy, times flies quickly. When there is nothing to do, it seems to drag. As a result, the person engaged in the cell phone conversation feels emotionally satisfied, while the other feels ignored and distanced, emotionally upset.

Human conscious attention is a component of the reflective level of the mind. It has limited capability. On the one hand, it limits the focus
of consciousness, primarily to a single task. On the other hand, attention is readily distracted by changes in the environment. The result of this natural distractibility is a short attention span: new events continually engage attention. Today it is customary to argue that short attention spans are caused by advertisements, video games, music videos, and so on. But, in fact, the ready distractibility of attention is a biological necessity, developed through millions of years of evolution as a protective mechanism against unexpected danger: this is the primary function of the visceral level. This is probably why one byproduct of the negative affect and anxiety that results from perceived danger is a narrowing and focusing of attention. In danger, attention must not become distracted. But in the absence of anxiety, people are easily distracted, continually shifting attention. William James, the famous philosopher/psychologist, once said that his attention span was approximately ten seconds, and this in the late 1800s, far before the advent of modern distractions.

We carve out our own private spaces where needed. At home in our private study or bedroom, door locked if need be. At the office, in a private room or, struggling to accomplish privacy, in cubicles or shared space. In the library, helped by the no-talking rules and convention, or by private carrels for the privileged few. In streets, where people will gather to form clusters of conversations, seemingly oblivious to those around them, if only temporarily.

But the real problems of modern communication come from the limitations of human attention.

The limits on conscious attention are severe. When you are on a telephone call, you are doing a very special sort of activity, for you are a part of two different spaces, one where you are located physically, the other a mental space, the private location within your mind where you interact with the person on the other end of the conversation. This mental partitioning of space is a very special facility and it makes the telephone conversation, unlike other joint activities, demand a special kind of mental concentration. The result is that you are partially away from the real, physical space, even as you inhabit it. This division
into multiple spaces has important consequences for the human ability to function.

Do you talk on a cell phone while driving an automobile? If so, you are dividing your conscious attention in a dangerous fashion, reducing your capacity to plan and anticipate. Yes, your visceral and behavioral levels of processing still function well, but not the reflective, the home of planning and anticipating. So driving is still possible, but primarily through the automatic, subconscious visceral and behavioral mechanisms. The part of driving that suffers is the reflective oversight, the planning, the ability to anticipate the actions of other drivers and any special conditions of the environment. That you can still appear to drive normally blinds you to the fact that the driving is less skillful, less able to cope with unexpected situations. Thus, the driving becomes dangerous, the cause being that distracting mental space. The danger does not stem from any requirement to hold the cell phone to your ear with one hand while steering with the other: a hands-free cell phone, where speaker and microphone are fixed to the car so that no hands are required, does not eliminate the distracting mental space. This is a new area of research, but the early studies seem to show that hands-free phones are just as dangerous as hand-held ones. The decrease in driver performance results from the conversation, not the telephone instrument.

Drive a car and hold a conversation with the passengers and, yes, some of the same distraction is present, especially because our social nature means that we tend to look at the person with whom we are conversing. Once again, the safety research is still at an early stage, but I predict that a conversation with real passengers will prove to be not as dangerous as one with far-away people, for the mental space we create for real passengers includes the auto and its surround, whereas the other one distances us from the auto. After all, we evolved to interact with others in the midst of other activities, but the evolutionary process could not anticipate communication at a distance.

We cannot take part in two intense conversations at the same time, at least not without degrading the quality and speed of each. Of
course, we can and do take part in multiple instant- and text-messaging conversations “simultaneously,” but the quote marks around “simultaneously” reflect that we don't really do the operations at the same instant, but rather interweave the two. Conscious, reflective attention is only necessary for reading and for formulation of new messages, but once formulated, the automatic behavioral level mechanisms can guide the actual keystrokes while reflection switches over to the other conversation.

Because most activities do not require continual, full-time conscious attention, we are able to go about our daily activities continually dividing attention among multiple diversions. The virtue of this division of attention is that we keep in touch with the environment: we are continually aware of the things around us. Walking down the street chatting with a friend, we still have considerable resources left for a multitude of activities: to notice the new stores that have opened on the block; to glance at the newspaper headlines; even to eavesdrop upon neighboring conversations. The difficulties arise only when we are forced to engage in mechanical activities, such as driving an automobile, where the technological demands can require immediate response. Here is where the apparent ease with which we can often do these tasks misleads us into thinking that full attention is never required. Our ability to handle distractions and to divide attention is essential to social interaction. Our ability to time-share, to do multiple activities, enhances these interactions. We are aware of others around us. We keep in touch with a large number of people. The continual switching of attention is normally a virtue, especially in the world of social interaction. In the mechanical world, it can be a peril.