What are our screens and devices doing to us? Psychologist Adam Alter studies how much time screens steal from us and how they’re getting away with it. He shares why all those hours you spend staring at your smartphone, tablet or computer might be making you miserable—and what you can do about it.
有屏電子產(chǎn)品為我們帶來了啥?心理學(xué)家亞當(dāng)·奧爾特致力于研究我們在這些產(chǎn)品上花費了多少時間且如何不以為然。本次演講中,他探討了我們花在手機、平板或電腦上的那些時間為何會讓我們更痛苦——并就此提供了對策。
輸12
WHY OUR SCREENS
MAKE US LESS HAPPY
So, a few years ago I heard an interesting rumor. Apparently, the head of a large pet food company would go into the annual shareholder’s meeting with can of dog food. And he would eat the can of dog food. And this was his way of convincing them that if it was good enough for him, it was good enough for their pets. This strategy is now known as “dogfooding,” and it’s a common strategy in the business world. It doesn’t mean everyone goes in and eats dog food, but businesspeople will use their own products to demonstrate that they feel—that they’re confident in them. Now, this is a widespread practice, but I think what’s really interesting is when you find exceptions to this rule, when you find cases of businesses or people in businesses who don’t use their own products. Turns out there’s one industry where this happens in a common way, in a pretty regular way, and that is the screen-based tech industry.
幾年前,我聽到一個有趣的傳言。據(jù)說,一家大型寵物食品公司的負責(zé)人參加年度股東大會時會帶一罐狗糧。他會在會上吃這罐狗糧,以此向股東保證,那些食品他吃毫無問題,對他們的寵物自然也足夠好。這種策略現(xiàn)在被稱作“吃狗糧”,這是商界常見的策略。這并不是指每個人都去吃狗糧,而是指商人會使用自己的產(chǎn)品來表現(xiàn)對自己產(chǎn)品的自信?,F(xiàn)在,這已是一種普遍的做法,但我認為真正有趣的是你會發(fā)現(xiàn)這個規(guī)則有例外——有些企業(yè)或業(yè)界人士不使用自己的產(chǎn)品。事實證明,這種情況在一個行業(yè)中經(jīng)常發(fā)生,這個行業(yè)就是基于屏幕的技術(shù)行業(yè)。
So, in 2010, Steve Jobs, when he was releasing the iPad, described the iPad as a device that was “extraordinary.” “The best browsing experience you’ve ever had; way better than a laptop, way better than a smartphone. It’s an incredible experience.” A couple of months later, he was approached by a journalist from the New York Times, and they had a long phone call. At the end of the call, the journalist threw in a question that seemed like a sort of softball. He said to him, “Your kids must love the iPad.” There’s an obvious answer to this, but what Jobs said really staggered the journalist. He was very surprised, because he said, “They haven’t used it. We limit how much technology our kids use at home.”
2010年,史蒂夫·喬布斯發(fā)布iPad時,將iPad描述為一個“非凡的”設(shè)備?!澳銓⒌玫綇奈从羞^的瀏覽體驗;比筆記本電腦好得多,比智能手機好得多。那是一種難以置信的體驗。”數(shù)月后,《紐約時報》的記者與他聯(lián)系,他們在電話里聊了很長時間。在通話的最后,記者提出了一個看似無關(guān)緊要的問題。他對喬布斯說:“你的孩子一定很喜歡iPad?!边@個問題的答案明擺著,可喬布斯的回答卻讓記者嚇了一跳。記者十分驚訝,因為喬布斯回答說:“他們還沒用過iPad。我們在家里限制孩子使用電子產(chǎn)品?!?/p>
This is a very common thing in the tech world. In fact, there’s a school quite near Silicon Valley called the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, and they don’t introduce screens until the eighth grade. What’s really interesting about the school is that 75 percent of the kids who go there have parents who are high-level Silicon Valley tech execs. So when I heard about this, I thought it was interesting and surprising, and it pushed me to consider what screens were doing to me and to my family and the people I loved, and to people at large.
這種作法在技術(shù)界非常常見。事實上,硅谷附近有一所華道夫半島學(xué)校,該校學(xué)生在升到八年級之前不會使用有屏電子產(chǎn)品。這所學(xué)校真正有趣的地方是,75%的學(xué)生家長是硅谷的技術(shù)高管。所以,當(dāng)我聽到這件事時,我覺得很有趣,同時也很驚訝,它促使我思考,屏幕對我自己、我的家庭、我愛的人甚至所有人都做了什么。
So for the last five years, as a professor of business and psychology, I’ve been studying the effect of screens on our lives. And I want to start by just focusing on how much time they take from us, and then we can talk about what that time looks like. What I’m showing you here is the average 24-hour workday at three different points in history: 2007—10 years ago—2015 and then data that I collected, actually, only last week. And a lot of things haven’t changed all that much. We sleep roughly seven-and-a-half to eight hours a day; some people say that’s declined slightly, but it hasn’t changed much. We work eight-and-a-half to nine hours a day. We engage in survival activities—these are things like eating and bathing and looking after kids—about three hours a day.
所以最近五年,作為一個商業(yè)和心理學(xué)教授,我一直在研究屏幕對我們生活的影響。我想從關(guān)注屏幕花去了我們多少時間開始,然后就能討論這些時間是什么樣的。我現(xiàn)在展示的是工作日的平均數(shù)據(jù),分別是三個時間點的數(shù)據(jù):2007年的,也就是10年前;2015年的;以及我上周剛剛收集的。很多事情并沒有發(fā)生太大的變化。每天我們大約花7個半小時到8個小時睡覺;有人說這個時間略有下降,但變化不大。工作每天花費我們8個半小時到9個小時。而生存活動——例如吃飯、洗澡、照看孩子——每天花費我們大約三個小時。
That leaves this white space. That’s our personal time. That space is incredibly important to us. That’s the space where we do things that make us individuals. That’s where hobbies happen, where we have close relationships, where we really think about our lives, where we get creative, where we zoom back and try to work out whether our lives have been meaningful. We get some of that from work as well, but when people look back on their lives and wonder what their lives have been like at the end of their lives, you look at the last things they say—they are talking about those moments that happen in that white personal space. So it’s sacred; it’s important to us.
這里留下了空白。這些是我們的私人時間。這段時間對我們至關(guān)重要。因為它使我們成為與眾不同的人。在這段時間里,我們探索愛好,維持親密關(guān)系,思考人生,獲得靈感和創(chuàng)意,回顧過去及試圖厘清我們的生活是否有意義。當(dāng)然,我們在工作中也做過這些,但當(dāng)人們在生命結(jié)束之際回顧一生時,你會發(fā)現(xiàn)他們念念不忘的那些事——他們在說發(fā)生在圖中空白私人時間的那些事。所以,這些時間是神圣的,它對我們非常重要。
Now, what I’m going to do is show you how much of that space is taken up by screens across time. In 2007, this much. That was the year that Apple introduced the first iPhone. Eight years later, this much. Now, this much. That’s how much time we spend of that free time in front of our screens. This yellow area, this thin sliver, is where the magic happens. That’s where your humanity lives. And right now, it’s in a very small box.
現(xiàn)在,我要向你們展示的是這些空白中有多少時間被屏幕占據(jù)。2007年,這么多。那是蘋果發(fā)布第一臺iPhone的年份。8年后,是這樣的?,F(xiàn)在,是這么多。這就是我們在空閑時間里花費在屏幕上的時間。這個黃色區(qū)域,這個細條,是最神奇的地方。你的人性存在于這段時間里。但現(xiàn)在,這個區(qū)域已經(jīng)很小了。
So what do we do about this? Well, the first question is: What does that red space look like? Now, of course, screens are miraculous in a lot of ways. I live in New York, a lot of my family lives in Australia, and I have a one-year-old son. The way I’ve been able to introduce them to him is with screens. I couldn’t have done that 15 or 20 years ago in quite the same way. So there’s a lot of good that comes from them.
那我們該怎么做呢?第一個問題是:那個紅色區(qū)域是什么樣的?當(dāng)然,現(xiàn)在看來,屏幕在很多方面都很不可思議。我在紐約生活,許多家人住在澳大利亞,我還有一個1歲的兒子。我能通過屏幕將遠方的家人介紹給我的兒子。但在15或20年前,我完全無法這么做。不難看到,屏幕帶給了我們許多好處。
One thing you can do is ask yourself: What goes on during that time? How enriching are the apps that we’re using? And some are enriching. If you stop people while they’re using them and say, “Tell us how you feel right now,” they say they feel pretty good about these apps—those that focus on relaxation, exercise, weather, reading, education and health. They spend an average of nine minutes a day on each of these. These apps make them much less happy. About half the people, when you interrupt them and say, “How do you feel?” say they don’t feel good about using them. What’s interesting about these—dating, social networking, gaming, entertainment, news, web browsing—people spend 27 minutes a day on each of these. We’re spending three times longer on the apps that don’t make us happy. That doesn’t seem very wise.
你可以做一件事,問問自己:那段時間你做了什么?我們使用的應(yīng)用程序有多豐富?有些很豐富。如果你打斷正在使用手機應(yīng)用的人說:“告訴我們,你現(xiàn)在感覺如何?!彼麄儠f這些應(yīng)用很好——這些應(yīng)用分別是關(guān)于休閑、鍛煉、天氣、閱讀、教育和健康的。人們平均每天在每個應(yīng)用上花費9分鐘。而這些應(yīng)用讓人們更不開心。當(dāng)你打斷他們并問:“你感覺如何?”大約一半的人回答感覺并不好。有意思的是,這些應(yīng)用——約會、社交、游戲、娛樂、新聞、瀏覽網(wǎng)頁——人們每天在每個上面花費27分鐘。我們在讓自己不開心的應(yīng)用上花費了三倍的時間。這看起來并不太明智。
One of the reasons we spend so much time on these apps that make us unhappy is they rob us of stopping cues. Stopping cues were everywhere in the 20th century. They were baked into everything we did. A stopping cue is basically a signal that it’s time to move on, to do something new, to do something different. And—think about newspapers; eventually you get to the end, you fold the newspaper away, you put it aside. The same with magazines, books—you get to the end of a chapter, prompts you to consider whether you want to continue. You watched a show on TV, eventually the show would end, and then you’d have a week until the next one came. There were stopping cues everywhere. But the way we consume media today is such that there are no stopping cues. The news feed just rolls on, and everything’s bottomless: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, email, text messaging, the news. And when you do check all sorts of other sources, you can just keep going on and on and on.
我們在這些使我們不高興的應(yīng)用上花費很多時間的原因之一是,它們沒有“停止信號”。在20世紀(jì),“停止信號”曾經(jīng)無處不在。它們幾乎存在于每件事。本質(zhì)上,“停止信號”就是提示我們是時候前進去做些新的事情,做些不同的事情。不妨想想報紙:最終讀完報紙后,你就會把報紙疊起來,放到一旁。雜志和書與之相同——讀到一章的結(jié)尾時,你就需要考慮是否繼續(xù)。你觀看電視節(jié)目,最終節(jié)目會結(jié)束,而你要等待一周才能看到下一期。“停止信號”曾經(jīng)出現(xiàn)在生活的方方面面。但當(dāng)今我們消費媒體的方式已不再有“停止信號”。信息滾動出現(xiàn),一切都沒有盡頭:Twitter、Facebook、Instagram、電子郵件、短信、新聞。當(dāng)你查看各種來源的信息時,你可以一直看一直看。
So, we can get a cue about what to do from Western Europe, where they seem to have a number of pretty good ideas in the workplace. Here’s one example. This is a Dutch design firm. And what they’ve done is rigged the desks to the ceiling. And at 6pm every day, it doesn’t matter who you’re emailing or what you’re doing, the desks rise to the ceiling.
至于該怎么做,我們可以從西歐得到一點兒提示,他們對職場似乎有很多好想法。有這么一個例子。這是一家荷蘭的設(shè)計公司。他們將工作桌與天花板連在了一起。每天晚上6點,無論你在寫郵件還是做其他事情,桌子都會升到天花板上。
Four days a week, the space turns into a yoga studio, one day a week, into a dance club. It’s really up to you which ones you stick around for. But this is a great stopping rule, because it means at the end of the day, everything stops, there’s no way to work. At Daimler, the German car company, they’ve got another great strategy. When you go on vacation, instead of saying, “This person’s on vacation, they’ll get back to you eventually,” they say, “This person’s on vacation, so we’ve deleted your email. This person will never see the email you just sent.”
每周有四天,這個空間變成瑜伽室;另外一天則變成舞蹈俱樂部。你喜歡哪個由你自己決定。但這是一個非常棒的停止規(guī)則,因為它意味著這一天結(jié)束了,一切停止,不能再工作。德國汽車公司戴姆勒有另一個好方法。當(dāng)員工度假時,他們不會說:“這個人去度假了,但他會回來的?!彼麄儠f:“這個人在度假呢,所以我們刪除了您的郵件。他將永遠看不到您剛才發(fā)的郵件?!?/p>
“You can email back in a couple of weeks, or you can email someone else.”
“你可以幾周后再發(fā),或者干脆給其他人發(fā)郵件?!?/p>
And so—You can imagine what that’s like. You go on vacation, and you’re actually on vacation. The people who work at this company feel that they actually get a break from work.
嗯——可以想象那是什么樣。你在度假,真的在度假。這個公司的員工感覺,他們真正獲得了休息。
But of course, that doesn’t tell us much about what we should do at home in our own lives, so I want to make some suggestions. It’s easy to say, between 5 and 6pm, I’m going to not use my phone. The problem is, 5 and 6pm looks different on different days. I think a far better strategy is to say, I do certain things every day, there are certain occasions that happen every day, like eating dinner. Sometimes I’ll be alone, sometimes with other people, sometimes in a restaurant, sometimes at home, but the rule that I’ve adopted is: I will never use my phone at the table. It’s far away, as far away as possible. Because we’re really bad at resisting temptation. But when you have a stopping cue that, every time dinner begins, my phone goes far away, you avoid temptation all together.
當(dāng)然,這并沒有告訴我們在日常生活中我們自己應(yīng)當(dāng)怎么做,所以我想給一些建議。我可以很輕松地說:晚上5點到6點,我不會用手機。但問題在于,晚上5點到6點的安排似乎每天都不同。我想到了一個更好的方法:我每天都會做某些特定的事情,有些情況每天都會發(fā)生,比如說晚餐。有時我會獨自一人,有時和其他人一起,有時在餐廳,有時在家。但我的規(guī)則不變:絕對不在餐桌上使用手機。手機不在身邊,離得要多遠有多遠。因為我們真的很難抵制誘惑。但當(dāng)你有這個“停止信號”,每到晚餐手機就會離得很遠,于是你就遠離了誘惑。
At first, it hurts. I had massive FOMO.
起先,我很難受。我產(chǎn)生了嚴(yán)重的錯失恐懼。
I struggled.
我艱難地掙扎。
But what happens is, you get used to it. You overcome the withdrawal the same way you would from a drug, and what happens is, life becomes more colorful, richer, more interesting—you have better conversations. You really connect with the people who are there with you. I think it’s a fantastic strategy, and we know it works, because when people do this—and I’ve tracked a lot of people who have tried this—it expands. They feel so good about it, they start doing it for the first hour of the day in the morning. They start putting their phones on airplane mode on the weekend. That way, your phone remains a camera, but it’s no longer a phone. It’s a really powerful idea, and we know people feel much better about their lives when they do this.
但接下來,你會慢慢習(xí)慣。你度過這段艱難的過程,就像成功戒毒一樣,迎接你的是更加多彩、豐富、有趣的生活——你與他人有了更好的交流。你與身旁的人真正有了聯(lián)系。我認為這是一個非常棒的方法,而且我們知道它有效,因為當(dāng)人們這樣做——我已經(jīng)發(fā)現(xiàn)許多人嘗試了這種方式——它就會傳播開。他們覺得這是個好方法,他們從早上的第一個小時就開始這么做。他們開始在周末將手機調(diào)為飛行模式。那樣,你的手機就成了一個相機,而不再是電話了。這個主意真的很棒,同時我們知道,人們這么做的時候,感覺生活更美好。
So what’s the take home here? Screens are miraculous; I’ve already said that, and I feel that it’s true. But the way we use them is a lot like driving down a really fast, long road, and you’re in a car where the accelerator is mashed to the floor, it’s kind of hard to reach the brake pedal. You’ve got a choice. You can either glide by, past, say, the beautiful ocean scenes and take snaps out the window—that’s the easy thing to do—or you can go out of your way to move the car to the side of the road, to push that brake pedal, to get out, take off your shoes and socks, take a couple of steps onto the sand, feel what the sand feels like under your feet, walk to the ocean, and let the ocean lap at your ankles. Your life will be richer and more meaningful because you breathe in that experience, and because you’ve left your phone in the car.
那么重點是什么呢?屏幕無比神奇;我已經(jīng)說過這一點,而且我認為這千真萬確。但我們使用屏幕的方式卻很像開在一條長長的快速路上,你坐在車?yán)铮烷T踩到了底,很難踩到剎車。你可以選擇。在經(jīng)過美麗的海景時,你可以不做停留,對著窗外拍幾張照片——這很容易做到——或者,你也可以離開這條路,將車開到路邊停下,走下車,脫下鞋和襪子,在沙灘上走幾步,體會腳下踩著沙子的感覺,走向大海,讓海水拍打你的腳踝。你的生活會更加充實、更有意義,因為你可以盡情感受那種美妙,因為你把手機留在了車上。
Thank you.
謝謝。
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