声音简介
演讲者：Adam Alter，Psychologist
What makes us incessantly check our phones? Adam Alter dives into the fascinating psychology that drives our tech addictions.
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.
This talk was presented at an official TED conference, and was featured by our editors on the home page.
00:12
So, a few years ago I heard an interesting rumor. Apparently, the head of a large pet food companywould 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.
01:00
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."
01:39
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.
02:09
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.
02:54
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.
03:28
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.
03:56
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.
04:18
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.
05:04
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.
05:57
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.
06:16
(Laughter)
06:17
(Applause)
06:19
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."
06:48
(Laughter)
06:49
"You can email back in a couple of weeks, or you can email someone else."
06:53
(Laughter)
06:54
And so --
06:55
(Applause)
07:00
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.
07:09
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.
07:51
At first, it hurts. I had massive FOMO.
07:54
(Laughter)
07:55
I struggled.
07:57
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.
08:35
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.
09:24
Thank you.
几年前，我听到一个有趣的传言。据说，一家大型宠物食品企业的负责人会参加年度的股东大会，并带着一罐狗粮。他会吃这罐狗粮。这证明那些食品对他而言足够好，自然也对宠物足够好。这个策略现在被称作“吃狗粮”，这是商业中常见的策略。这个策略并不是指每个人都去吃狗的食物，而是商人会用他们自己的产品来证实他们的感觉——他们对自己的产品很自信。现在这已是一个普通的做法，但我认为真正有趣的是你会发现这个规则的例外——当你发现在许多商业案例中，企业不使用自己的产品。事实证明，这种情况在一个行业中经常发生，这个行业就是基于屏幕的技术行业。
在2010年，当史蒂夫·乔布斯发布 iPad 时，他将 iPad 描述为一个“非凡”的设备。“你将得到从未有过的浏览体验；比笔记本电脑好得多，比智能手机好得多。那是一种难以置信的体验。”数月后，《纽约时报》的记者与他联系，他们通了一次很长的电话。在通话的最后，记者提出了一个看似无关紧要的问题。他对乔布斯说：“你的孩子一定很喜欢 iPad。”这个问题有一个显然的答案，但乔布斯的回答使把记者吓了一跳。记者十分惊讶，因为乔布斯回答：“他们还没用过 iPad 呢。在家中我们限制他们使用电子产品。”
这是一件在技术界非常常见的事。事实上，硅谷附近有一所学校叫做华道夫半岛学校，这所学校在学生们升到八年级前不会使用屏幕。真正有趣的是，这所学校75%的学生家长是硅谷的技术高管。所以当我听到这件事时，我觉得很有趣而且很惊讶。它促使我思考屏幕对我自己、我的家庭、我爱的人，甚至对所有人做了什么。
所以最近五年，作为一个商业和心理学教授，我一直在研究屏幕对我们生活的影响。我希望从关注屏幕花去了我们多少时间开始，然后我们再来讨论这些时间是什么样的。我现在展示的是工作日的平均数据，分别是在三个时间点：2007年，也就是10年前，2015年，以及我上周刚刚收集的数据。很多事情并没有发生太大的变化。每天我们大约花 7 个半小时到 8 个小时睡觉；有人说这个时间略微有下降，但变化不大。工作花费我们 8 个半小时到 9 个小时。而生存活动——例如吃饭、洗澡、照看孩子——花费我们三个小时。
这里留下了空白。这些是我们的私人时间。这段时间对我们至关重要。因为它使我们成为与众不同的人。在这段时间里我们探索爱好、维持亲密的关系、思考人生、获得灵感和创意、回顾以及试图思考过去的生活是否有意义。当然我们在工作中也做过这些，但当人们在生命结束之前回顾他们的生活时，你会发现许多事情他们始终仍念念不忘——他们在说那些发生在图中空白私人时间中的事。所以，这些时间是神圣的；它对我们非常重要。
现在，我要向你们展示的是这些空白中有多少时间被屏幕占据。2007 年，这么多。这是苹果发布第一台 iPhone 的年份。8 年后，是这样的。到现在，这样。这是我们在空闲时间里花费在屏幕上的时间。这个黄色区域，这个细条，是最神奇的地方。你的人性存在于这段时间里。但现在，这个区域已经很小了。
那我们该怎么做呢？第一个问题是：那个红色的区域是什么样的？当然，屏幕从现在的很多方面看来都是一件不可思议的事。我在纽约生活，我有许多家人在澳大利亚生活，我还有一个一岁的儿子。我通过屏幕将我的家人介绍给我的儿子。但在 15 或 20 年前，我完全无法这么做。不难看到，屏幕带给了我们许多好处。
一件你可以做的事情是问问你自己：在那段时间里发生了什么？我们使用的应用很丰富吗？有些很丰富。如果你打断正在用手机的人并说：“告诉我们，你现在的感觉如何？”他们会说感觉很好——当他们使用休闲、锻炼、天气、阅读、教育和健康的手机应用时。人们平均每天在这些应用上花费 9 分钟。而这些应用让人们更不开心。大约一半的人，当你打断他们并问：“你感觉如何？”他们回答感觉并不好。有意思的是，在这些应用上——约会、社交、游戏、娱乐、新闻、浏览网页——人们每天花 27 分钟。我们在使我们不开心的应用上花费了三倍的时间。这看起来并不明智。
我们花很多时间在这些使我们不高兴的应用上，原因之一是它们没有“停止信号”。在 20 世纪，“停止信号”曾经无处不在。它几乎存在于每件事里。“停止信号”提示我们是时候前进，去做些新的事情，做些不同的事情。不妨想想报纸；最终你读到了结尾，于是你把报纸叠起来，放到一旁。杂志和书与之相同——你读到了最后一章，于是你考虑是否要继续。你观看电视节目，最终节目结束，于是你要等待一周才能看到下一期。“停止信号”曾经在生活中的方方面面出现。但当今我们消费媒体的方式已不再有“停止信号”了。信息滚动出现，一切都没有尽头：Twitter、Facebook、Instagram、电子邮件、短信、新闻。当你查看各种来源的信息时，你可以一直继续下去。
我们可以从西欧得到一点如何做的提示。他们似乎对于工作场所有很多好的想法。这里有一个例子。这是一家荷兰设计公司。他们将工作桌与天花板连在了一起。每天晚上 6 点，无论你在写邮件或者做其他事情，桌子会升到天花板上。
（笑声）
（掌声）
每周有四天，这个空间变成瑜伽室；另外一天则变成舞蹈俱乐部。你喜欢哪个由你自己决定。但这是一个非常棒的停止规则，因为它意味着这一天的结束，一切停止，不能再工作。德国汽车公司戴姆勒有另一个好方法。当员工前去度假的时候，他们不会说：“这个人去度假了，但他会回来的。”他们会说：“这个人在度假呢，所以我们会删除你发给他的邮件。他将永远看不到你刚才发的邮件。”
（笑声）
“你可以在几周后再发，或者干脆给其他人写邮件。”
（笑声）
所以——
（掌声）
你可以想象那个样子。你在度假，你真的在度假。这个公司的员工感觉他们真正获得了休息。
当然，这并没有告诉我们在日常生活中应当怎么做，所以我想给一点建议。我可以很轻松的说：在晚上 5 点到 6 点之间，我不会使用手机。但问题在于，5 点到 6 点的安排在每天是不同的。因而我想到了一个更好的方法：我每天都会做某些特定的事情，有些情况每天都会发生，比如说晚餐。有时我会独自一人吃晚餐，有时候和其他人一起，有的时候在餐厅，有的时候在家。但我的规则是：绝对不在餐桌上使用手机。这很难，能做到的可能性不大。因为我们真的很难抵制诱惑。但当你有这个“停止信号”，每到晚餐时，手机就会离你很远，于是你就远离了诱惑。
起先，我很难受。我有了严重的错失恐惧。
（笑声）
我艰难地忍受着。
但接下来发生的事情是，你已经习惯了。你度过了这段艰难的过程，就像成功戒毒一样，接着迎接你的，是更加多彩、丰富、有趣的生活——你与他人有了更好的交流。你与身旁的人真正联系在了一起。我认为这是一个非常棒的方法，而且我们知道它有效，因为当人们这样做的时候——我已经发现许多人尝试了这种方式——它已经传播开了。他们觉得这是个好方法，他们从早上的第一个小时就开始做了。他们开始在周末将手机调为飞行模式。那样的话，你的手机成了一个相机，不再是手机了。这是一个强有力的想法，同时我们知道人们在做这些的时候，感觉到生活更加美好。
所以重点是什么？屏幕无比神奇；我已经说过了，而且我认为这千真万确。但我们使用屏幕的方式却像是开过一条长长的路，你坐在车里，将油门踩到底，你踩不到刹车。其实你可以选择。你可以开过旁边美丽的海景，对窗外拍几张照片——这很容易做到——或者你可以离开这条路，将车开到路边，踩下刹车，走出车去，脱下鞋和袜子，在沙滩上走几步，体会沙子在你脚下的感觉，走向大海，让海水抚摸你的脚踝。你的生活会更加充实、更加有意义，因为你在那种美妙的环境里尽情呼吸，因为你把手机留在了车上。
谢谢。（掌声）