A new study from the school of Journalism at the University of Maryland shows how tightly tied students are to their digital devices.  200 students were asked to go without all media for 24 hours and then to blog about their experiences.  The results?

• Students often referred to themselves as addicted, or described themselves as experiencing severe withdrawal symptoms.
• Their main use of media is to connect with friends and family, and one of their biggest complaints involved feelings of social isolation.
• Students seemed to miss their ipods the most, relying on music to set their mood or to help them overcome bad feelings.

What do you think?  Are we all somewhat addicted to our digital devices?  Would you feel symptoms of withdrawal if you had to go without your gadgets for a day and interact only with the people around you? Would you feel uncomfortable without some sort of music or stimulation in the background?

If you’re constantly connected digitally, try going without for just an hour or two, and see how it makes you feel.  Try driving in your car with the radio off.  Spend a quiet evening with yourself and maybe a book.  Would that be a relaxing relief or torture?

If it’s difficult, try it for a shorter period of time next time.  Serenity takes some getting used to.  With constant stimulation we’re apt to lose the ability to concentrate, to integrate the things we know, or to gain perspective over our lives.  I’m talking about being “in the moment” without necessarily meditating. A little quiet time each day can produce both cognitive and emotional benefits.  There’s no risk either.  You can always turn the your devices back on!

An interesting article in today’s (12/21/09) New York Times talks about teens who are disengaging from their Facebook accounts because their obsession with being online is interfering with their school work or other aspects of their lives.  The article also says that as of October, Facebook was being used by 55 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds in the US, up from 28 percent only a year ago.  The article talks about the overuse of social networking sites as an addiction, and mentions a variety of ways that people are helping themselves overcome the temptation. Cancelling their accounts or asking a friend to change their password  are two of the approaches mentioned.

For many adults as well, time on the Internet expands and expands, preventing them from getting things done at work and home, and  interfering with family relationships and increasing stress.  This is one reason I wrote Conquer CyberOverload: Get More Done, Boost Your Creativity, and Reduce Stress, which not only explains why the problem is hard to combat, but also give  strategies for overcoming the temptation of always being connected to one gadget or another.

The book just came out last week.  It’s available on my web site and on Amazon.com, and will soon be in bookstores.

An article in today’s New York Times, titled “The Cell Refuseniks, an ever-Shrinking Club” notes that 85% of Americans now have cellphones.  The inconveniences of not having one are mounting, such as the inability to find  pay-phones, and difficulties in meeting up with friends. Still, there are some people who don’t want to be constantly accessible to others, who enjoy having time to themselves, and resist for that reason.  As I argue in my forthcoming book Conquer CyberOverload: Get More Done, Boost Your Creativity, and Reduce Stress, in order to stay creative, productive, and sane, we need to balance our connectedness with times when we’re on our own and allow ourselves time to think and unwind.  Our electronic gadgets add many positive things to our lives, but unless we turn them off from time to time, we are slaves to our gadgets instead of being their masters.  What about you? Are you able to balance the connectedness your gadgets offer you with your need to have your own time and space at some time during the day?

There’s an interesting article in today’s (6/22/09) New York Times, titled “Mind Your Blackberry or Mind Your Manners.”  It says,

“As Web-enabled smartphones have become standard on the belts and in the totes of executives, people in meetings are increasingly caving in to temptation to check e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, even (shhh!) ESPN.com.”

What’s happening is that people in face-to-face meetings are not necessarily paying attention to each other, and this is causing problems between companies and their clients, and between managers and employees. One issue apparently is that people are getting bored in face-to-face meetings and even in one-on-one encounters, so they’re turning to their multifaceted gadgets for entertainment.  (Could it be that having grown up watching fast-paced TV, we find another person talking just too slow-moving for us?)  Another issue is that some people feel they need to be available to their clients 24/7 (and some clients agree), and so they cannot afford to ignore any communication that may come in.

Some people, understandably, consider it rude to tweet, text, or email someone else or to seek refuge in sports scores or entertainment while being spoken to. Although people differ on this point of etiquette, it is fair to say that if you’re reading or writing something on your electronic device, you are not processing the verbal information that’s being directed at you face-to-face.  Oh, you may get bits and pieces of what is being said to you, but information-processing research shows that the brain can pay attention to only one thing at a time.  What seems like multitasking is really rapid task-switching, which interferes with both simultaneous tasks.

What’s the solution for businesses?  Banning Smartphones from meetings has been tried by some companies — but many environments and many individuals may not accept this approach.  Perhaps one should ask: If people are constantly using their Smartphones for irrelevant tasks during meetings, could it be that some meetings are inessential or that they are going on for too long?

As for the need to be constantly available to corporate clients, that may not be negotiable, but perhaps it can be.  It has been estimated that unnecessary interruptions (much of this via technology) cost U.S. businesses $650 billion per year.  Perhaps if it became more commonly known how devastating constant interruptions are to both productivity and creativity, people who need to stay in touch would work out arrangements for connecting with each other in ways that allow for emergencies, but do not consider every contact urgent.  Or, co-workers could spell each other at the PDA so that each of them could take turns having uninterrupted creative time on a regular basis.

Last year, an employee at Intel reported a pilot study on an attempt to improve productivity by instituting a 4-hour “Quiet Time” on Tuesdays in which interruptions were minimized.  Not only did the research report improvements in “effectiveness, efficiency and quality of life,” but if you look at the comments that follow the blog post of the report, you’ll see much agreement with the concept, and mentions of similar solutions at other companies.

In order for solutions like “Quiet Time” to work, employees have to be on board and agree with the concept. Companies will find more success by motivating their employees to be as effective as they can and by providing suggestions like “Quiet Time” than by dictating what can and should be done and when.  This is why in my keynote/workshop titled “You’ve Got (too much) Mail! — Preserving Productivity Under Information Overload,” I provide demonstrations of how (poorly) the brain works under Multitasking and Information Overload, and then provide strategies for working creatively and productively by harnessing our communication devices rather than letting them ride roughshod over us.

On April 18th, I made a brief presentation to the Madison Civics Club about the impact of technology on adults, with some tips on reducing stress and enhancing creativity in our media-dominated world.  This was done in conjunction with a presentation by Anastassia Goodstein, expert on the media-saturated lives of tweens and teens.  Many members of the audience agreed with me that this is as important an issue for adults as it is for young people.  Follow this link to  my presentation.

An new study in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, (reported on PsychCentral.com) reports that in a sample of more than 800 college students from around the country, the more time students spent playing video games, the poorer the quality of their relationships with their parents and peers.  This finding occurred to the surprise and disappointment of one of the authors, a graduate student. Of course, it’s unclear from a study like this whether video game play harms relationships by taking time away from interpersonal contact or whether students with poor relationships turn to video games to fill their empty time. The researchers suggest that it may be a curvilinear relationship.

But leaving aside the video game debate (and especially the violent video game debate that I’ve discussed before), I’ve been wondering about how much our constant connection to electronic gadgets in general interferes with that old-fashioned face-to-face communication that our brains were designed for. Of course, the more time we spend on solitary pursuits, the less time we have for each other.  But even when we’re in electronic contact with our friends and families — when we email, IM, twitter, and even call each other on our cellphones, we miss face-to-face communication. We can’t see how the other person is responding to what we say — are they understanding us? are they bored? are we on the same page? And they can’t see our arched eyebrow to know we’re just kidding, or our quivering lip to know we’re nervous or distressed.  

And we can’t share smiles! Brain research shows that when we smile and when we see someone genuinely smile at us, certain reward centers in the brain become active, and this makes us feel great. We lose this when we communicate mainly via our gadgets. Of course, our gadgets let us stay in contact with many more people, and with people who are far away, whom we may get to see only on rare occasions.  But if electronic communication becomes the main way we connect, we lose something very important.

The next time you have to stand in a long checkout line, rather than whipping out your cell phone and making a call to someone you know, try engaging the person behind you in a pleasant conversation (even if it’s about the weather or the length of the line!), and then give a big smile to the checker — no matter how sullen or bored she looks — and see if you can get her to smile back.  You’ll be surprised how wonderful this feels.