Building, as I am, a companythat delivers user benefit from observing behavior and processing that data, I spend a lot of time looking into the latest research on human/internet behaviour.
The thing is, all this research is obviously very new. We don’t yet fully understand how daily integration of online affects our brains, and our behaviour. But more studies are being done, like this one (subs required) in SciAm mind.
The premise is that a new condition is emerging in the “wired” user (and can develop very quickly even in unwired users) - continuous partial attention. In other words, we are continually partly aware of a lot of different sources of information: Our blackberry, our Skype IM, the site we’re currently on, the TV in the background, the iPod playlist, and so on. They all get an even attention as we attempt to balance out the data streams.
This distracted mental state means that everything is in our peripheral attention, and almost nothing gets our undivided attention. This applies really well to web behavior (I’ve spent a lot of time in a previous position watching people use the web), and is starting to seep out into social behaviour, eating patterns and life in general. Online, it goes something like this…
Click, glance, read, glance, click, IM, scroll, email, ad, recommendation, skim read, tweet, click, glance…..
Today’s wired human, the article suggests, suffers from this kind of “digital fog”, gets irritated, distracted and socially less active. Our brains just weren’t built for this.
Well, they will be soon.
One thing that’s clear about the human brain, is it’s remarkable ability to change itself in response to what’s required of it. Question is, whether we’re capable of continually partially attending lots of data streams, or we’ll need more and more tools to process them on our behalf, and bring us back to what we’re biologically built for – single-focus attention.
My thoughts about targeting, psychology and data - all things that drive my company, 