EPISODE 164 | Derek DeWitt, communications specialist for Visix
In a world saturated with audiovisual stimuli, this episode dives into the growing issue of digital overload. We explore the psychological effects of constant connectivity, from phantom vibrations to cognitive fatigue, and examine how this impacts our ability to focus and engage.
Understanding the challenges audiences face is the first step towards more effective communication. Moving beyond simply acknowledging the problem, we provide practical advice for those working in digital communications. By focusing on genuine connection and recognizing the individual stories of our audience, we can create a more meaningful and less overwhelming digital experience.
- Learn to recognize the signs and impacts of digital overload on your audience.
- Understand the role of communications in contributing to or alleviating information fatigue.
- Discover how to design digital signage content that respects your audience’s attention.
- Leverage recognition and community-building for higher engagement and less digital noise.
- Use intentional, consolidated and automated content for a less overwhelming environment.
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Transcript
Derek DeWitt: We live in a time when digital devices are constantly vying for our attention. Way back in 1991, Joe Jackson’s song “It’s All Too Much” included the line, “They say that choice is freedom; I’m so free, it drives me to the brink.” This and similar warnings about different kinds of cultural overload throughout the years have become only more relevant today. These devices that we use all the time, while obviously useful, are also designed to keep us engaged, and this has led to a real issue, digital overload, even acknowledged by the WHO in 2019 as “an occupational phenomenon”.
In this episode, we’ll be looking at what digital overload is, why it’s not ideal and maybe what can be done about it. More importantly, we’ll also discuss how those of us involved in communications can help our audiences by using good best practices when using digital channels.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Digital Signage Done Right. I remind you that you can subscribe and review us, and you can follow along with a transcript that is on the Visix website.
We’ve become so used to a barrage of notifications, messages and updates that some of us are experiencing something called Phantom Vibration Syndrome. This is a tactile hallucination that makes you think that your phone or other digital device is vibrating when it isn’t. While experts try and figure out just what’s going on with this, others are looking into something called Phantom Phone Signals, PPSs and Hallucinatory-Like Experiences, HLEs. These are things like thinking that your phone has pinged you a notification even when it hasn’t. And we continue to be inundated with stimuli designed to intrude upon our everyday awareness. Welcome to the world of digital overload.
Seemingly innocuous things like thinking your phone is vibrating or sending you signals when it isn’t can lead to a number of problems like irritability, tiredness and difficulty relaxing to overvigilance, psychological stress, anxiety and even emotional disturbances, or even physical symptoms like headaches. Some researchers are even starting to think that the almost constant presence of smartphones and similar devices in our lives may constantly be using up small amounts of our cognitive resources leading to lower overall cognitive performance. Even just the physical presence of a smartphone has been shown to result in lower cognitive performance in people age 20 to 34, even when that phone is switched off. It’s like they see the phone and start thinking about that instead of whatever they’re supposed to be doing.
I, myself, am half-convinced at least that composers who score reality TV programs embed phone notification or ringing sounds into their sophisticated, layered music at key times in order to trigger increased attention in the audience. Now, I know this sounds a little bit like a conspiracy theory or the beginnings perhaps of a mental issue, and I have yet to find anything online that confirms this, but I am more and more convinced that this is true. Or maybe my phone has just infected my brain to such an extent that it’s kind of always on my mind.
And it’s not just phones. Most of us also use laptops and computers all day for work or school or whatever, and then when we go out into the world beyond our four walls, we’re immersed in an increasingly digital environment, all of which is trying its darnedest to get our attention. And yes, digital signage is part of that environment and we have many past episodes of this podcast, and blogs and other resources, that contain lots and lots of advice about how to get a moment of somebody’s attention. But living in a flow of constant communication is leading to a state of mental being that’s called digital exhaustion, sometimes info saturation or even screen fatigue.
Tung-Hui Hu, associate professor of English at the University of Michigan and a former network engineer, wrote a book last year called Digital Lethargy, his term for a state of exhaustion, disappointment and lethargy that increasingly permeates more and more people’s inner lives.
Digital overload can occur because a person spends too much time on their device or maybe does too much multitasking, simultaneously answering work emails, checking their socials and researching a recipe for dinner, all while also watching the latest Netflix dead-girl-in-the-woods thriller from Sweden. Or when a person just absorbs too much information in too short a time span. After all, we didn’t evolve in this kind of an environment, and so our brains get tired and need a break sometimes.
The most common advice is to limit one’s screen time. Easier said than done. Most of the stuff coming at us is being shown on a screen in some way, and the brain processes information from screens in a very particular way. Some researchers call this homogenized diversity, because the brain tends to treat everything that comes to us from a screen as somehow equal since it all comes from the same physical source.
There’s also cognitive load theory, which says that the amount of working memory in humans has an upper limit of seven plus or minus two units of information, which gives us a range of five to nine units. Experiments have shown that this same number holds true for how many seconds working memory can hang on to something before deleting it forever unless it’s otherwise interacted with by other parts of the brain, a range of five to nine seconds.
In the workplace, all of this can result in lowered performance, less effective decision making and negative job satisfaction. One assumes that this is similar in other environments as well, like on a university campus. And far from freeing us up and giving us more time to ourselves, this amazing technology actually often intrudes upon our me-time. I mean, how many of us have received a work email at eight in the evening and then felt compelled to respond even though we punched out hours ago? This is all further compounded by more and more people working at least part of the time from home. If there’s no clear delineation between office and home, then there’s also less between work-me and me-me.
In 2001, the Labor Chamber of the French Supreme Court ruled that employees are under no legal obligation to bring working tools, files and so on home with them. Another case they heard in 2004 clarified this and extended it, saying “the fact that an employee was not reachable on his cell phone outside working hours cannot be considered as misconduct.” Some years later, the French government passed what’s known as the loi travail or the El Khomri Law. While much of this was about overtime being taxed, it did include a provision wherein lawmakers could amend the National Labor Code by including the “right to disconnect”.
Now, this term had been in discussion the year before when an MP introduced the idea of “professional disconnection” as being a right of French workers. Many employers, federations and unions signed an agreement that employers cannot contact workers after 6 pm without additional compensation. News reports relayed astonishing video footage of people sitting around at an outdoor cafe in Paris all suddenly switching their phones off at 6 pm sharp, ordering some wine and having conversations with friends.
Other countries are considering similar laws and agreements, and last year the state of California in the United States also started thinking about it. Some advocates are actually wording this as an essential human right.
One thing is certainly clear. More and more workers say that work-life balance is a dealbreaker. From quiet quitting to maybe not-so-quiet outright resignations, today’s younger employees are at the forefront of forcing this issue.
And yet even in private life, screen consumption is at an all-time high. According to some statistics gathered by BackLinkO, globally, people spend an average of 6 hours and 40 minutes a day on some sort of screen. Americans beat that with 7 hours and 3 minutes, and more than half of US teens are on screens for more than 8 hours a day. For the record though, South Africa gets the top spot with 9 hours and 24 minutes a day on some sort of a screen.
Practicing good information management techniques can help. This is prioritizing the information you consume, curating what you see, essentially, and when you see it.
Turning off notifications is the most obvious way to cut down. Check your digital world at regular times instead of all the time. If that little beep or boop or whatever your sound is doesn’t prompt you to pick it up, then you’ll probably spend less time staring at pixels.
Limiting your time on screens is certainly one way to stave off screen fatigue or digital overload or whatever you want to call it. Setting time limits is another strategy. I’ll browse the news for 10 minutes, my socials for 10 minutes, then put the phone down and do something in meatspace for a while, for example. In fact, there are many articles out there with advice on reducing digital overload and burnout that include a section about increasing face-to-face time and reducing screen-to-screen time. Now, of course, this might not be that easy if you have a distributed workforce or if many people work from home most of the time.
Still, even for those doing remote work, there’s help. There are tools out there to remind people to take a break once in a while, things like RescueTime and Flipd. A reminder pops up to step away for a few minutes. Some go further, actually locking the screen for a preset amount of time. However, I can tell you from personal experience, these are easy to circumvent, and I’m pretty sure that most of us do just that. Oh, yeah, I’ll take a break the next time that reminder pops up, but right now I’m kind of on a roll, and then you do this 13 times throughout the day, never actually stepping away from your screen.
Other apps, like Freedom, actually block access to certain websites or apps during a predetermined time window because you know that, despite your best intentions, you’ll be unable to stop yourself checking your Instagram feed throughout the day. So, you use Freedom to block access on your device to Instagram between say, 8 (am) and 6 pm, and now you can’t see it at all until the workday is over. A little nanny statey maybe, but things like this can be effective.
There are some things we can do as individuals, but not every screen is under our control. Especially in a work environment. And we communicators certainly don’t want to contribute to this problem. But we still have to get our content out there and we use tried-and-true techniques that we’ve learned (by listening to this podcast, for example) to get people’s attention, especially when it comes to those few fleeting moments of people just passing by a digital sign.
Fortunately, there are some practical things that we can do in our job. Going about the business of communicating with intentionality and focus can go some ways towards reducing the overload our audience experiences.
Another method is to combine messaging into as few tools as possible, streamlining the entire process. Many platforms out there attempt to do just that. Microsoft Teams, Slack, Discord. Each of these tries in its own way to tackle the problem of unifying an ad hoc system that was built up piecemeal over time.
Another way we get overloaded is by duplicative data. That is, we often get the same information coming at us at different times from several different sources. So, the brain starts by thinking, oh, something new, I should pay attention to it, but then quickly realizes, oh no, I already knew that. This can make us feel kind of hassled or nagged, and it also makes the various information channels feel less authoritative or less useful and more like a nuisance. So, if you have to use different platforms, maybe make sure you’re using the same design or format to present that single message, so it’s seen as more of a reminder than a bunch of different new things.
Now, anything that can be automated should be. Any tasks that repeat can be automated. This might include delivering communications, collecting data and measurement stats, improving how information is organized and so on.
I think we can all agree that meetings, online or in person, should be shorter. So often, participants don’t prepare in advance but only take a look at what the meeting is about once the clock starts ticking, using the meeting to actually brainstorm. Unless it’s specifically labeled a brainstorming meeting, all of that work should have been done ahead of time. Very often a meeting is convened to make decisions, and so next steps can be taken by the relevant parties. All of this is really just a matter of self-discipline. If you have a strategy meeting set for Thursday, then you need to make sure you have the time to get all your ducks in a row by no later than Thursday morning.
Sometimes new avenues or topics will come up in a meeting, obviously, and the whole thing gets derailed. This can often result in the main purpose of the meeting not actually being achieved, which wastes the time of people who are there who have nothing to do with this side topic. It is incumbent upon someone, preferably whoever is chairing the meeting, to make a note that another meeting is needed on this side issue that’s cropped up, maybe with some of the current participants, maybe with some people who aren’t present right now, and moving on. This saves all your meeting participants from just staring at a screen while other people talk much longer than they actually need to. Help them cut down how much time they spend on screens.
Some organizations encourage what are known as deep work throughout the week or even during the day. These are predetermined time periods when interruptions are unwelcome unless they’re of vital importance, sort of a widening of the old when the boss’s door is closed, don’t even knock unless the building’s on fire, but when it’s ajar, feel free to knock and enter. One way to accomplish this is to have certain times classified as one-work times instead of multitasking times. For example, Geetha has a one-hour long meeting starting at three o’clock this afternoon that she needs to be up to speed on, so she sets aside one o’clock to two o’clock so that she can focus on that and only that.
You can also get a bit of a technological assist for things like this with a room or desk sign. It’s on the wall outside the office or it’s on the desk, but the availability light is red during this deep work session, signaling to everybody just bugger off and come back later, unless the building’s on fire.
Because yes, and I’m sure you guessed this earlier, I’m gonna say that one of the better solutions to all of this that is available to every kind of organization is, in fact, a screen – digital signage, and this includes things like room and desk signs.
Your digital signs really can be a one-stop shop for the majority of your communications. In the spirit of reducing overload, however, don’t repeat information displayed publicly like that. There’s no need to put up a well-crafted, well-designed motivating message about participating in the Fun Run in two weeks, and then also send out a company-wide IM, and then later an email about the same thing. If you’re not getting the signups you want, then tweak the digital sign’s message to encourage more participation or show that message more frequently in the playlist.
If you repeat everything that’s on your digital signs through other means, then no one will pay attention to your digital signs. Why would they? Instead use emails for message type A, IMs for message type B and digital signage for all the rest.
Boston’s McClean Hospital, part of the Massachusetts General system and experts in mental health, emphasizes self-assessment as a coping strategy for the feeling of burnout. Encourage employees or students to ask themselves questions like, do you feel connected part of a community, or are you having feelings of anxiety and despair?
People experiencing negative emotions will sometimes use TV or social media as a panacea, a distraction from what’s troubling them. The obvious solution there is to foster feelings of community and inclusiveness. Now, this is far beyond the sort of messaging that’s just informative and time-bound, like sign up for the 401(k) program by the 15th, or stuff about fundraisers or contest deadlines, student enrollment, events; these are the sorts of messages that most people use digital signage for (and they should). But it’s also effective for other sorts of messaging. Post wellness tips, motivational and inspirational content, even throw up a reminder to look away from their screens once in a while for 30 seconds. And yes, I understand the irony of a screen telling you to look away from your screens.
Now, if you’re at a desk using a laptop or, heaven forbid, a tower PC still, there’s still always your phone sitting by silently waiting for you to pick it up and use it. Sticking screen time limiters on there might also be helpful.
The fact is we probably don’t even know how often we just take a quick look at our devices. The website Digital Detox says that a person checks their phone an average of 950 times a day. Let me say that again: 950 times a day. Assuming eight hours for sleep, that basically works out to once every minute. In fact, over half the people out there also say they wake up in the night at some point and check their phones, and 20% of people say they even check their phones while having sex, which is astonishing. This is starting to seem less like a useful tool and more like a serious problem. Some of us at least are becoming literally addicted to our devices.
This is because when we check our phones, our brains release a tiny amount of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that plays a role in reward learning in all animal groups, including us humans, by giving feelings of pleasure and satisfaction. A little squirt of this stuff rewards us for doing something which then prompts us to do it again, and then maybe the next squirt is a little bit bigger, and so the organism is literally being trained to repeat that action again and again and again.
There’s also a motivation factor here since dopamine also encourages us to take action. Heck, in some animals, it literally modifies their motor behavior. Dopamine is also a factor in learning and attention, mood, heart rate, kidney function and lots of other things. It’s super important.
This reward feedback system creates a compulsion which can easily turn into a dependency. Studies in the past few years seem to indicate that as much as a quarter of the human population suffers from what we might want to call smartphone addiction, with younger people suffering from this way more than any other cohort. Perhaps as many as half of all people under the age of 20 can be classified as addicted, according to some metrics.
Or so many reports and thought piece articles say. However, the DSM says that that’s a little bit of an overstatement. A true addiction actually impairs people’s daily functioning, and the lack of the addicting stimulus creates psychological distress, which is not something we actually see very often when it comes to smartphones and the online world. So maybe we aren’t addicted yet, we’re more like pre-addicted. In the timeline of addiction, we would be considered to be at the dependence stage.
And the single long-term study out there of social media and its effects on brain development says that excessive social media use does not change our brain structure per se, but rather how our brains function. High social media usage might result in the thinning of parts of the brain that regulate decision making and social awareness in the real world, as well as affecting the way we handle certain emotions, like boredom, and increase our Pavlovian responses to external cues, like seeing someone taking out their phone creates a desire for us to do the same thing. But the fact is, we really don’t know what the long-term effects of all this are or are likely to be because we just don’t have enough data.
So maybe that’s the good news. We aren’t actually addicted in a clinical sense to our phones or not yet anyway, but that itch is certainly there, and an itch needs to be scratched.
This is where recognition messaging can come in. If people are sitting there jonesing for a little hit of dopamine, and so they’re thinking about their phones or wondering how their latest TikTok is performing, why not give them a little hit of dopamine from another source?
Because literally anything that makes people feel happy or relaxed causes the brain to release some dopamine. Examples often cited include shopping, the smell of cookies, baking, listening to music and even sexual activity. But recognition is another dopamine trigger. One study found that 92% of employees are likely to repeat behaviors that they receive positive recognition for, and that regular and consistent recognition boosts overall productivity and morale.
I think many organizations have something like recognition and kudos pretty far down the priority list when coming up with their quarterly or yearly communications plans, but honestly, it should be moved up way up that list because there are just so many benefits. People become more confident when they’re being recognized. They feel more secure in expressing their ideas because they know that they’re being heard. They work harder so that they can also get some of that sweet recognition, and since they’re also getting a dopamine squirt, they feel happier. There are actually whole companies out there who specialize in employee recognition platforms, like the Canadian company Bucketlist Rewards based in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Recognition of all kinds should always be specific and sincere. You can certainly tie what type of recognition you give back into things like core organizational values. Like, if you say sustainability is important to your organization, then maybe give a shout out to departments that are doing the most recycling, for example. But generic general praise just falls flat because it seems insincere.
It could be something as simple as a happy birthday message or spotlighting an anniversary or a milestone. And including a good photo of the person also tends to give them a bigger dopamine hit. We like to see ourselves on screens. Oh, yeah, sure, everybody gets one, but that doesn’t make it feel less special.
A word of warning, however: if you do put up a happy birthday message for everyone, then make sure it is for everyone. Forgetting one person can make the whole effort backfire, since that person feels singled out and probably has hurt feelings. And I have literally witnessed this myself when somebody’s birthday was forgotten at a company I worked for. That person talked about it for weeks, becoming a kind of nexus of negativity that spread throughout the entire department, just because of a simple oversight.
Sometimes even just putting up your company’s social media feed or feeds that are relevant to your industry can be enough to trigger that brief dopamine hit. If simply seeing one person take their phone out of their pocket makes somebody want to do the same thing, then seeing that familiar social media interface might also be enough to make someone pay just a little extra moment’s attention to your digital signs, which means they’ll also be exposed to some of your other messaging. But also, just for a moment, they have that X-shaped hole they were walking around with filled.
Peer-to-peer recognition is not only great because it gets more people involved in the positive reinforcement recognition cycle, but it builds stronger relationships, sometimes knitting whole departments into a more cohesive whole. It also means that there’s less work for the communications team to have to do. All they have to do is set up a kudos reporting system, approve suggestions and then schedule them to the digital signage.
By using recognition in a smart way, you include people’s personal stories in the overall organizational one, and that’s really I think what’s at the heart of all this and the best overall approach towards reducing digital overload in your organization.
On the website for the University of Texas Permian Basin, I came across this quote from filmmaker Steven Spielberg in an article titled The Psychology of Smartphone Addiction, “(Technology) interrupts our own story, interrupts our ability to have a thought or a daydream, to imagine something wonderful because we’re too busy bridging the walk from the cafeteria back to the office on the cellphone.”
Something to always keep in mind is that even though your audience is there, they are fully rounded human beings with rich inner lives and a whole range of interests and priorities that have nothing to do with what you do at all. We spend every day refining the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, the world around us and our place in it. That is the essence of being a conscious human being. So, instead of your communications being an interruption, make them somehow integrate into those individual stories.
Since transparency has become an employee priority, simply putting up progress towards goals or other metrics on how the overall organization is doing goes a long way to helping people feel included. Have that data feed to your screens in real time, displayed using an easy-to-understand graph or image, and a decent part of your audience is sure to appreciate it and feel like they’re being included in the bigger picture. But you can go even further than that.
An obvious model is a university or a school where there are many student groups and clubs. A large business might also have such social groupings or if not that, then certain working groups that focus on certain tasks and priorities. Someone’s in charge of the company’s community outreach program, and they probably have some nice stats about how the company is affecting local change. Share those on your digital signs. This is something that everybody can get behind and participate in, regardless of what their job is. “We are all in this together” is a powerful, inclusive message that speaks to a deep need humans have to belong to a group.
Another example is maybe you have a bunch of people working for you who are also foodies. Well, you know what foodies like? Food! Specials at the onsite cafeteria, guest chefs from local hot restaurants, a food truck every other Thursday, or even recipes. Even better if they’re from local hotspots or beloved eateries, maybe with a QR code so people can take the recipes home and try them out. In Atlanta, for example, food fans often follow the food and drink section of Atlanta Magazine or the website Eater Atlanta. Maybe put up a feed from these websites or social media channels on your digital signs and make some messages to be included in your rotation.
Now, I chose food there because I love food, but this applies to anything. Maybe you have an oddly large number of lacrosse fans or people with kids who play it. It could be literally anything. I once heard of a textile manufacturer that discovered that almost a quarter of their employees were huge fans of Formula One racing, so they started sharing information about that. Now, how did they know that so many of their workers loved F1? They asked. Your people aren’t just doing tasks to make your company successful; they can also be your greatest resource and your main inspiration.
Dealing with digital overload requires action on several fronts. As individuals, we can try and manage our digital consumption and use tools to help us focus. However, for those involved in digital communications, there’s a key role to play in making the digital environment less overwhelming and more effective. By being intentional in our communication, consolidating our messaging, using automation where appropriate and possible, and focusing on genuine connection and recognition, we can move towards a less cluttered information space.
Ultimately, by understanding that our audience members are individuals with their own lives and stories, we can aim to create communications that fit into their experiences rather than constantly interrupt them, leading to better engagement and less overload for everyone.