Students were instructed to have their phones on their desks and turned on. For extra amusement, they were invited (but not required) to turn on audible indicators. They were asked to tally each notification received and log it by app.
Just checking, were they counting pull notifications as well as push?
Push notifications: All notifications that appeared on your lock screen / buzz your phone / make a noise.
Pull notifications: Any in-app notifications that don’t have the above effects, but that you see if you choose to open the app.
For instance my FB app has like 5-10 ‘notifications’ for me when I check it once a day, but I only find out when I check it, there are no badges and nothing appears on my lock screen.
I have hundreds of pull notifications per day in my slack app, but I get close to zero push notifications (e.g. yesterday I got ~20).
They should not have been counting pull notifications, as they were instructed to not engage with their phones during the experiment except to maybe see what caused a vibration or ding. I don’t think students think of pull notifications as real notifications the way we were using the word. They were logging the notifications they could notice while their phone flat was flat on their desk not being touched.
Thanks for clarifying, that’s what I was expecting.
I just needed to check, because if I’m getting 20/day, and the peak student is getting 450/hour, then that’s like 300x difference in terms of notifications, and that really is an extremely different experience of life. Even the mean kid is having a ~30x different experience. I wonder whether I would be able to have time to think if that was my life.
From chatting with those peak students during the experiment, I think their experience is more like being in a cafeteria abuzz with the voices of friends and acquaintances. At some point, you’re not even trying to follow every conversation, but are just maintaining some vague awareness of the conversations that are taking place and jumping in when you feel like it. People can and do think about other things in a noisy cafeteria. Some even read books! The brain can filter out a constant buzz. It’s just wind blowing through the trees.
The upper middle zone where it’s still possible to try to follow everything (and maybe even reply) looked like more of an attention trap, and was where I was more likely to find that handful of students I already knew had a problem. The FOMO is probably more distracting than the notifications themselves.
Just checking, were they counting pull notifications as well as push?
Push notifications: All notifications that appeared on your lock screen / buzz your phone / make a noise.
Pull notifications: Any in-app notifications that don’t have the above effects, but that you see if you choose to open the app.
For instance my FB app has like 5-10 ‘notifications’ for me when I check it once a day, but I only find out when I check it, there are no badges and nothing appears on my lock screen.
I have hundreds of pull notifications per day in my slack app, but I get close to zero push notifications (e.g. yesterday I got ~20).
They should not have been counting pull notifications, as they were instructed to not engage with their phones during the experiment except to maybe see what caused a vibration or ding. I don’t think students think of pull notifications as real notifications the way we were using the word. They were logging the notifications they could notice while their phone flat was flat on their desk not being touched.
Thanks for clarifying, that’s what I was expecting.
I just needed to check, because if I’m getting 20/day, and the peak student is getting 450/hour, then that’s like 300x difference in terms of notifications, and that really is an extremely different experience of life. Even the mean kid is having a ~30x different experience. I wonder whether I would be able to have time to think if that was my life.
From chatting with those peak students during the experiment, I think their experience is more like being in a cafeteria abuzz with the voices of friends and acquaintances. At some point, you’re not even trying to follow every conversation, but are just maintaining some vague awareness of the conversations that are taking place and jumping in when you feel like it. People can and do think about other things in a noisy cafeteria. Some even read books! The brain can filter out a constant buzz. It’s just wind blowing through the trees.
The upper middle zone where it’s still possible to try to follow everything (and maybe even reply) looked like more of an attention trap, and was where I was more likely to find that handful of students I already knew had a problem. The FOMO is probably more distracting than the notifications themselves.