54 GENIUS INTERVIEW Adam Alter
reward on a screen, and the slow accrual of benefits that comes from learning to read, which would you choose? There’s also evidence that adults are less productive and more disengaged socially in the presence of screens. If you struggle with procrastination, as so many of us do, phones, tablets and screens in general aggravate the problem. And then there’s boredom: before screens, generations of humans learned to be bored, to be inventive, to work through boredom by thinking and sitting comfortably with their own thoughts. With screens, no one has to be bored, or to learn to cope with boredom, so as a species we’ve become intolerant of mental downtime. Many of the greatest inventions and ideas come from moments of mental stickiness. Without boredom, and with a band-aid in the form of phones or screens, we’re likely to be collectively less innovative than our ancestors were. Some of these costs are hypotheses – they need to be tested – but others form a big part of our lives already. FEED: What is the worst case of screen addiction that you’ve come across? ADAM ALTER: The worst cases seem to come from video game addicts. One person I interviewed told me he spent
five weeks playing World of Warcraft – a massive multiplayer online role-playing game – almost continuously. He was an athlete and a star student, but during that time he lost much of his hair, put on fifty pounds of fat, failed his classes and lost touch with his family and friends. He paid a doorman to bring boxes of pizza to his room twice a day, and by the end of that five-week period he was surrounded by stacks of pizza boxes that reached to the ceiling. Some people in his position – though he assured me this didn’t apply to him – wore adult diapers so they wouldn’t be forced to leave the screen to use the bathroom. FEED: Can media companies survive without making their products as addictive as possible? ADAM ALTER: The attention economy – a huge chunk of the wider economy that relies on our attention rather than our money – is an arms race. Each human only has so much attention to give, and to capture that attention, you need to make a product that’s more compelling than its competitors. Social media companies know this, as do online shopping and streaming services. If you make your platform less engaging, people will decamp to others that are more compelling. It’s hard to see
THE THING ABOUT SCREENS IS THAT, ONCE THEY CONTAIN IRRESISTIBLE CONTENT, THEY’LL ENSNARE ALMOST ANYONE
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