 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. 有屏电子产品为我们带来了啥？心理学家亚当·奥尔特致力于研究我们在这些产品上花费了多少时间且如何不以为然。本次演讲中，他探讨了我们花在手机、平板或电脑上的那些时间为何会让我们更痛苦——并就此提供了对策。 输12 WHY OUR SCREENS MAKE US LESS HAPPY  So, a few years ago I heard an interesting rumor. Apparently, the head of a large pet food company would 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. 几年前，我听到一个有趣的传言。据说，一家大型宠物食品公司的负责人参加年度股东大会时会带一罐狗粮。他会在会上吃这罐狗粮，以此向股东保证，那些食品他吃毫无问题，对他们的宠物自然也足够好。这种策略现在被称作“吃狗粮”，这是商界常见的策略。这并不是指每个人都去吃狗粮，而是指商人会使用自己的产品来表现对自己产品的自信。现在，这已是一种普遍的做法，但我认为真正有趣的是你会发现这个规则有例外——有些企业或业界人士不使用自己的产品。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。
 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.” 2010年，史蒂夫·乔布斯发布iPad时，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，他们在电话里聊了很长时间。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。”这个问题的答案明摆着，可乔布斯的回答却让记者吓了一跳。记者十分惊讶，因为乔布斯回答说：“他们还没用过iPad。我们在家里限制孩子使用电子产品。”
  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. 这种作法在技术界非常常见。事实上，硅谷附近有一所华道夫半岛学校，该校学生在升到八年级之前不会使用有屏电子产品。这所学校真正有趣的地方是，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，同时也很惊讶，它促使我思考，屏幕对我自己、我的家庭、我爱的人甚至所有人都做了什么。
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. 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。我想从关注屏幕花去了我们多少时间开始，然后就能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，分别是三个时间点的数据：2007年的，也就是10年前；2015年的；以及我上周刚刚收集的。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；有人说这个时间略有下降，但变化不大。工作每天花费我们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——每天花费我们大约三个小时。 
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. 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，维持亲密关系，思考人生，获得灵感和创意，回顾过去及试图厘清我们的生活是否有意义。当然，我们在工作中也做过这些，但当人们在生命结束之际回顾一生时，你会发现他们念念不忘的那些事——他们在说发生在图中空白私人时间的那些事。所以，这些时间是神圣的，它对我们非常重要。
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. 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。那是苹果发布第一台iPhone的年份。8年后，是这样的。现在，是这么多。这就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。 
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. 那我们该怎么做呢？第一个问题是：那个红色区域是什么样的？当然，现在看来，屏幕在很多方面都很不可思议。我在纽约生活，许多家人住在澳大利亚，我还有一个1岁的儿子。我能通过屏幕将远方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。
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. 你可以做一件事，问问自己：那段时间你做了什么？我们使用的应用程序有多丰富？有些很丰富。如果你打断正在使用手机应用的人说：“告诉我们，你现在感觉如何。”他们会说这些应用很好——这些应用分别是关于休闲、锻炼、天气、阅读、教育和健康的。人们平均每天在每个应用上花费9分钟。而这些应用让人们更不开心。当你打断他们并问：“你感觉如何？”大约一半的人回答感觉并不好。有意思的是，这些应用——约会、社交、游戏、娱乐、新闻、浏览网页——人们每天在每个上面花费27分钟。我们在让自己不开心的应用上花费了三倍的时间。这看起来并不太明智。 
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. 我们在这些使我们不高兴的应用上花费很多时间的原因之一是，它们没有“停止信号”。在20世纪，“停止信号”曾经无处不在。它们几乎存在于每件事。本质上，“停止信号”就是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：最终读完报纸后，你就会把报纸叠起来，放到一旁。杂志和书与之相同——读到一章的结尾时，你就需要考虑是否继续。你观看电视节目，最终节目会结束，而你要等待一周才能看到下一期。“停止信号”曾经出现在生活的方方面面。但当今我们消费媒体的方式已不再有“停止信号”。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，你可以一直看一直看。 
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. 至于该怎么做，我们可以从西欧得到一点儿提示，他们对职场似乎有很多好想法。有这么一个例子。这是一家荷兰的设计公司。他们将工作桌与天花板连在了一起。每天晚上6点，无论你在写邮件还是做其他事情，桌子都会升到天花板上。 
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.” 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结束了，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。当员工度假时，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，所以我们删除了您的邮件。他将永远看不到您刚才发的邮件。”
“You can email back in a couple of weeks, or you can email someone else.” “你可以几周后再发，或者干脆给其他人发邮件。”
And so—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. 嗯——可以想象那是什么样。你在度假，真的在度假。这个公司的员工感觉，他们真正获得了休息。
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. 当然，这并没有告诉我们在日常生活中我们自己应当怎么做，所以我想给一些建议。我可以很轻松地说：晚上5点到6点，我不会用手机。但问题在于，晚上5点到6点的安排似乎每天都不同。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，有时和其他人一起，有时在餐厅，有时在家。但我的规则不变：绝对不在餐桌上使用手机。手机不在身边，离得要多远有多远。因为我们真的很难抵制诱惑。但当你有这个“停止信号”，每到晚餐手机就会离得很远，于是你就远离了诱惑。
 At first, it hurts. I had massive FOMO. 起先，我很难受。我产生了严重的错失恐惧。
I struggled. 我艰难地挣扎。
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. 但接下来，你会慢慢习惯。你度过这段艰难的过程，就像成功戒毒一样，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。你与身旁的人真正有了联系。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——我已经发现许多人尝试了这种方式——它就会传播开。他们觉得这是个好方法，他们从早上的第一个小时就开始这么做。他们开始在周末将手机调为飞行模式。那样，你的手机就成了一个相机，而不再是电话了。这个主意真的很棒，同时我们知道，人们这么做的时候，感觉生活更美好。
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. 那么重点是什么呢？屏幕无比神奇；我已经说过这一点，而且我认为这千真万确。但我们使用屏幕的方式却很像开在一条长长的快速路上，你坐在车里，油门踩到了底，很难踩到刹车。你可以选择。在经过美丽的海景时，你可以不做停留，对着窗外拍几张照片——这很容易做到——或者，你也可以离开这条路，将车开到路边停下，走下车，脱下鞋和袜子，在沙滩上走几步，体会脚下踩着沙子的感觉，走向大海，让海水拍打你的脚踝。你的生活会更加充实、更有意义，因为你可以尽情感受那种美妙，因为你把手机留在了车上。
Thank you. 谢谢。 |
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