Apr. 19 Seminar by CHCI Distinguished Speaker Gloria Mark
April 15, 2024
CHCI Distinguished Speaker Gloria Mark will present her research on the social impact of digital media on Friday, April 19 at Gilbert Place, Room 2124 (11 am - 12 noon).
Our Attention in the Digital Age: The Past, Present and Future
Gloria Mark is Chancellor’s Professor Emerita of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. She received her PhD from Columbia University in psychology. She has been a visiting senior researcher at Microsoft Research since 2012. She was inducted into the ACM SIGCHI Academy in 2017 in recognition of her contribution to Human-Computer Interaction. She was also a Fulbright scholar and an NSF CAREER grant recipient.
Mark’s research interest is in understanding the impact of digital media on people's lives. She is best known for her work on people's multitasking, mood, behavior, and stress in real-world environments. Her goal is to create a holistic picture of people’s technology use based on objective measurements combined with other data. She is also interested in the future of work and how teams adapt to remote work environments.
She has published over 200 papers in top journals and conferences in the fields of human-computer interactions (HCI) and Computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW). She is the author of the books Attention Span and Multitasking in the Digital Age. Her work has been recognized outside of academia: she has been invited to present her work at SXSW and the Aspen Ideas Festival and her work on multitasking has appeared in the popular media, e.g. New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, CNN, The Guardian, the Dax Shepard show, the Dave Asprey show, The Atlantic, the BBC, and many others. She was General Co-Chair of the ACM CHI 2017 conference, and Papers Chair of ACM CSCW 2012 and ACM CSCW 2006. She currently serves as Associate Editor of the ACM TOCHI and Human-Computer Interaction journals.
We are experiencing a fundamental shift in how we think, work, focus, and find fulfillment in this digital age. Our personal technologies have been designed to extend our capabilities, yet in my research we found many people experience stress and multitasking, leading to lower performance when using their devices. I argue that we need to reframe the singular goal of using our devices to maximize our productivity to instead achieve a broader goal of maintaining a healthy psychological balance. In this talk, I will first show how our attention spans on screens have measurably diminished over the last twenty years. The reasons for our shortening attention spans are far broader than just dealing with external distractions—I will discuss how reasons for it can be tied to the broader sociotechnical world we live in. I will also describe popular myths about our attention and technology use and how research doesn’t support these. I will then outline a path forward with solutions at the individual and collective levels. I will show how people have individual rhythms of attention that they can leverage, and how we can learn to gain agency over our behaviors to achieve greater wellbeing when we use our devices.
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