Is six hours a day on my phone too much?

This is the third year I have done an unscientific survey of my students in Media Economics about how they use their smartphones.

"WhatsApp Redesign" by Ayoub Elred is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0

The point of the exercise is for them to do their own assessment and make observations. In previous years they simply counted how many notifications or alerts they received on their phones in one hour or a class session. An alert is any ping, buzz, vibration, or lock-screen flash that tells them they have a message or news update from their various applications.

The distraction industry is getting ever more sophisticated in finding ways to get us to pay attention to their messages, because time, or attention, is money. Specifically, it allows tech platforms and news services to deliver targeted ads and make money from our attention.

An alert a minute

This year, 27 students counted notifications received in a 60-minute period. The average was 58, almost an alert a minute. The median --with half registering more, half less-- was 36. (The total alerts received was slightly more than last year and roughly three times the year before, although the unscientific methodology was slightly different each time.)

WhatsApp, Instagram top classroom distractions

If I am not careful, my cellphone will wake me up in the wee hours with buzzes or pings to let me know that news organizations and family members on the other side of the world, in different time zones, are trying to get my attention.

Is it too dramatic to say that "there is a global war" for our attention? I don't think so.

Last year I did a little experiment with students in my Media Economics course. Each of them was asked to keep track of how many notifications or alerts they received on their phones or computers during a 45-minute lecture. The average was about 15 alerts, or one every three minutes. WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat were the chief distractions.

For a professor leading a class, these alerts could be considered competition.
(At left, Christian Zibreg tells how to remove distracting messages from the locked screen.)

The distraction industry

The competition for user attention has never been greater, and every news site and app is finding new ways to lure people away from whatever they are doing with ever-more-insistent alarms, buzzes, pings, beeps, lights, you name it.

This year, the Media Economics class is slightly larger, with 57 students, and the instructions were different: pick any 60-minute period and measure the number of alerts or notifications received--in essence, any signal that attempts to distract you from what you are doing.

On average, in 60 minutes students reported receiving 41.3 alerts (median 26).