Digital Discord
While technology-driven instant gratification will undoubtedly continue to have a place in our lives, how we interact today is so skewed towards being rewarded in the moment that we are not exercising muscles that are key to human resilience.
By Elisa O’Donnell
Digital tools and technology platforms have become embedded in our lives. They are foundational to the way we live, work, and play, and our dependence on them has only grown in recent years. But something else has emerged in concert with their ubiquity: a digital discord which not only highlights the complex and contradictory relationship that we have with our digital tools, but may also impact our very human ability to be resilient.
Technology offers the illusion of choice, leading to instant gratification. When you’re on a streaming website, the decision of what to watch is yours — and choosing the perfect option is instantly satisfying. This is good, right? And yet, sometimes you exercise your power of choice over and over again (flipping through shows, channels, and more) to no avail. You don’t find anything appealing and you end up frustrated. What was supposed to feel empowering wasn’t empowering at all: that’s digital discord.
Digital dependence and digital discord can lead to a number of negative outcomes when it comes to our ability to process information. Dependency on digital devices and information overload can have adverse effects on physical, mental, and psychological health in myriad ways. It can also lead to misunderstandings, negative or violent interactions on websites, or even global panic when communication failures happen under the framework of health, financial, or political crises.
As humans, we are wired to need both instant gratification AND the motivation to persevere over the long term (with delayed gratification being the reward for persevering). Angela Duckworth’s “Grit” explores the importance of delayed gratification as the foundation of our human capacity for resiliency. With our digital tools over-feeding instant gratification and under-nourishing perseverance, our ability to be resilient may in fact be in jeopardy. We don’t consciously recognize it, but constant instant gratification is actually making us feel out of balance. Enter digital discord.
Think about it: you can Google anything and instantly have an answer at your fingertips. Want to hear a song that you haven’t heard in thirty years? Just ask Alexa. Need the weather forecast? It’s on your phone’s home screen. We are feeding urges that are opposed to resiliency and perseverance — valuing what is convenient and easy to use, but not investing in tools or strategies that help us to stay motivated over time. This is in turn limiting our capacity to problem solve and innovate in the face of adversity.
While technology-driven instant gratification will undoubtedly continue to have a place in our lives, how we interact today is so skewed towards being rewarded in the moment that we are not exercising muscles that are key to human resilience. This is a problem: climate change, inequality, and other society-scale challenges require long-term horizons and tenacity to truly build solutions, along with courage and determination in the face of difficulties. Instant gratification does not and will not help us solve the systemic problems we have in the world today, and — contrary to its promise — leaves us feeling ungratified over time.
We need to start thinking of both instant gratification and perseverance as two somewhat opposing forces: a yin and yang that need to show up in our digital lives in balanced measure. And we need to consider the important role that brands and corporations play in achieving this balance across digital spaces and tools.
This is the kind of innovation we need for the future.
It’s about reimagining and redesigning our digital interactions for resiliency – for long term perseverance, impact, and reward. By consciously reducing the subconscious digital discord that we are all experiencing, we can reknit society and communities in ways that feel aligned with who we are at our human core. This is good for us as individuals, as business leaders, as members of society, and ultimately good for the future.
1-www.cureus.com/articles/112862-increased-screen-time-as-a-cause-of-declining-physical-psychological-health-and-sleep-patterns-a-literary-review
2-observatory.tec.mx/edu-news/21-century-skills
