The Philosophers' Cocoon

Midway through graduate school, following numerous arbitrary increases in my monthly bill, I abandoned Comcast’s cable and internet service. Afterward, I struck a deal with a friend in a neighboring apartment to use his wireless network and cover half the expense. Six months later, he moved to a different complex, and I was stuck with no cable or internet at home. But my bitter dislike and distrust of Comcast was so strong that I refused to go back to them, even if they were the only provider in my area. So for that summer and the semester that followed, I had no internet access in my apartment.

And this is where the story gets interesting – not because of what happened but because of what didn’t happen. My life did not get any worse.

There were moments of inconvenience – times when I had to wait until the next day to look up an article or had to make an impromptu trip to the campus library in an emergency. I also wasn’t able to stream live sports in the evenings, retrieve software updates for my PC, or download new video games from the Playstation Network. Yet the benefits still seemed to match these costs.

My time in the evenings was no longer plagued by the distractions of social media or YouTube. If a student emailed me on Friday night, I was no longer compelled to respond over the weekend. (I had no smartphone at that time, so often I would not even see the email until Monday.) When I came home for the day, it was far easier to disconnect from the online world and regard my evenings as genuine leisure time. When I did work at home, I worked more effectively, unhindered by the temptation to read a new blog post or download every article from PhilPapers that vaguely related to my paper topic.

Eventually, I struck a deal with another neighbor (who had recently installed AT&T’s internet package), and internet access in my apartment returned. But the lesson had been learned.

When I moved to Tampa, FL to start my new job, my mailbox quickly filled up with introductory offers from cable companies in the area. Among all the options available, I chose “none of the above.” So I don’t have cable or internet at my current residence. Moreover, since I have a smartphone now, responding to an emergency email is far easier than it once was, eliminating the largest source of inconvenience.

One of the challenges of being a productive scholar in the 21st century is that our attention is constantly under attack. It’s hard to do philosophy well, even under ideal conditions. It’s even harder when the world is constantly bombarding you with advertisements, social media notifications, and emails. We have become so fixated on our phones that their mere presence actually soaks up cognitive resources and makes us less intelligent. Worse yet is the fact that these technologies are addictive and were deliberately designed to be that way. People come to crave the likes, comments, and retweets that accompany their posts.

The time social media takes from us can be hard to appreciate, A few seconds to check FaceBook does not seem like much lost time, but when it is done hundreds of times a day, the time costs are harder to calculate. Additionally, there are massive cognitive costs to interrupting tasks to check social media. These costs should not be underestimated.

Some people are under the impression that they can multitask effectively and so their social media use doesn’t really impact their productivity much in the grand scheme of things. The problem is that they are almost surely wrong about this. The term “multitask” is a misnomer; what we actually do is switch between multiple tasks. And the literature on task switching is pretty conclusive: it makes us worse at whatever we’re doing, including media related tasks. Trying to multitask impairs our students’ ability to learn and makes people less efficient overall. Additionally, we are amazingly bad at measuring their task-switching abilities – those who do it the most often are frequently among the worst at doing it.

What does this all mean for the academic philosopher living in the 21st century? It means that producing high-quality work in an efficient manner is in tension with being a zealous technophile. If you want the ideal work-life balance – one in which you can juggle all the elements of a full academic life simultaneously – then you must exercise restraint when it comes to your engagement with social media, the blogosphere, and other aspects of the online world.

I’m not advocating that everyone quit FaceBook or start ignoring their emails, but I am advocating mindfulness about what and how much interaction one has with the digital world. (For a similar perspective, see Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism.) Social media might fill an important role in your life, but how much time are you willing to sacrifice for it? The average internet user now spends over 2 hours per day on social media and messaging services. That’s more than 14 hours per week. In total, a week only has 168 hours, and if you’re getting a healthy amount of sleep, you’ll only be awake for 112 hours. Is social media really so important that it should consume one-eighth of your conscious experience?

I don’t think so.

So what can you do to keep the digital distractions at bay? An obvious strategy would be to close or deactivate all our social media accounts, but few of us are probably willing to go that far. Social media does have some benefits, after all. So here are a few milder suggestions:

1. Turn off your phone when you’re working, and don’t keep it on your person. Check it when you’re on a break or have otherwise reached a stopping point in your work.
2. If you can’t part with your phone easily, then install apps that limit your use of other apps.
3. Check email twice a day – once in the morning and once in the evening. Do not leave Outlook or Gmail open in a browser window while you try to do other things: a new email immediately becomes a tempting distraction.
4. When you use social media, check your feeds, make your posts, and respond to messages all in one swoop. Then leave it be until tomorrow. As with email, frequent exposure to Twitter, FaceBook, and the like brings the constant threat of distraction.
5. Eliminate social media accounts you rarely use or otherwise do not need, and unsubscribe from blogs that you don’t need to be reading.
6. Resist making new social media accounts or adding blogs to your reader or feed. Determine whether these actions will really provide a meaningful benefit before you do so – too often, we add things to our lives that we do not need in the fear of “missing out” on something unaware of the long term costs of this extra distraction.

Realistically, most of us will not do all these things. But each of us can probably do some of them, and in doing so, we can make it easier to carve out large blocks of time that quality research and writing usually requires. Time is just too precious a resource to sacrifice large amounts of it to idle time on the internet.