The Stresses Of The Digital Age

13 Aug 2023 - Reader

Have you also noticed your attention span decrease drastically? Well you are not alone…

The information age has given us the ability to access entire libraries in a blink of an eye and at the same time enabled new behaviors such as doom scrolling the news feeds of various apps hoping to find new gems whilst lead astray by AI systems that completely hijacked our brain’s reward system to keep us captivated and harvest our attention for ad revenue. As attention became a currency it seems we lost the ability to pay attention. In this context, how are the current and next generation of researchers ever going to collect their thoughts long enough to formulate the next revolutionary shift in paradigm? Send me a tweet if you figure this out… I guess the answer is easy, put down your devices! Easily said than done, especially when you need them for your research. You are always only one click away from a dopamine hit, how to resist? One trick that seems to work for me is setting aside time for scrolling social media or perusing the internet. With this I’ll get my ground breaking discovery anytime now !

The academic pressure

Contrary to what some people think, researchers are not mostly sitting in their offices thinking about ideas all day. If it was the case, I for one would not complain about it as this is fundamentally their job. Maybe that used to be the case in some past utopic era and then, being jealous, the rest of the world conspired to add useless tasks to the researcher’s role. This is an exaggeration, however, when you hear the former president of France Nicolas Sarkozy say that British researchers are publishing more whilst French ones are using light and heating (I am paraphrasing) you know someone is ready to pull the rug from under you if you happen to be a researcher in France. Research is not an activity that can be assessed on the same basis as engineering, as a researcher you are inventing the way to think about things no one has ever thought about. Of course you might not succeed for a while and this is a risk society should be willing to take as we are probing the unknown. Moreover, it takes time to digest and formulate a clear understanding of something at the edge of human knowledge. Assessing researchers on some deterministic metric might not be the best approach and trying to get your money’s worth of work by adding additional responsibilities onto them is counter productive. All that is achieved is increased levels of stress and lower levels of productivity. But of course if the funding needs to be justified based on the number of publications then one can always publish immature ideas and get an extra month of heating covered. The solution to this issue is more structural and probably also deeply social. We discuss this in some ways in our blog post coping with literature.