College Kids, Middle-Aged Carrie Underwood Fans, and the Distraction Addiction

Last Monday evening, October 19, 2015, a group of my friends from the Stevens Game Development Club traveled to Arthurs to enjoy their Monday night $7 burger special. As we walked to the restaurant, we decided that this group of people was a well-defined social construct and as such warranted a specific group chat. Using the group chat service Telegram (which is well-suited for computer scientists because of its bot support), the group immediately began engaging in group chat culture, such as memes and inside jokes, even on the walk to the restaurant while together in person.

Upon our arrival at Arthurs, we were speedily seated, took a glance at the menu, and choreographically reached for our phones. With the intent to go on Twitter and Snapchat, I myself found my phone in my hand within seconds of knowing my order. The rest of my friends had similar intentions: varying from Reddit to using the new Telegram group chat, we were all ready to begin ignoring each other for the entirety of our social gathering. After just a few seconds, however, we began to individually discover that we did not have cell service in the back corner of Arthurs. Instantly annoyed, members of our group whined tirelessly as they began to search for any type of connection, including unlocked WiFi hot-spots.  With no means of connecting ourselves to the digital world, we slowly resigned to the fact that we were going to have to interact the old fashioned way: in-person. This would initially seem convenient, seeing as we were already seated together at a table with the intention to socialize. It was of course, however, not that simple.

Constant fidgeting and short-term memory combined with a common addiction caused the social interaction to focus largely on the lack of reception. Rather than talking about each other's lives, politics, social gossip, or other common discussion topics, we focused on our unified frustration with the inability to spam one another slightly funny images. The lone engineer in a group of computer scientists, I watched as my friends all steadily adapted to a scenario where they were forced to look at one another while speaking and enjoy thoughtful discussion. With occasional periods of silence, a new type of interaction formed within  our social group: a physical one. Eye contact, body language, humanity itself was revealed from behind the constant search for service. I, of course, was also guilty of this. Even after accepting the situation and putting my phone into airplane mode, I still frequently checked the time on my phone despite having no reason to keep such a constant account of the time.

This phenomena that is so potent in our society is known as the Distraction Addiction. As discussed in this article, these symptoms experienced by my friends are extremely common in our generation. Surprisingly, even the middle-aged women who I stood in line with for a Carrie Underwood concert felt the need to constantly "post to Twitter" and "send a pic" of every single occurrence. With others of their kind flooding the concert, I was surprised to find myself more in the moment than most of the older audience members.

The question certainly isn't whether or not this condition exists in our culture, but rather whether or not it is a problem. While it would seem to detract from standard definitions of social interaction, it introduces infinitely many new versions. Is it bad that the middle-age women spent more time watching Carrie through their phone screens than in person? Or is it good that they were able to bond together through technology and share this experience with absent friends? Or is it neither? These are questions we will have to ask as humanity enters further into this brave new social and technological paradigm. Alcoholism is regarded as a negative type of addiction; should the Distraction Addiction be too?