Why are we in a digital disarray?

It’s about time all of us seriously reflect on how we break this addiction

- Rehan Khan

I started working in the telecoms sector back in 1993, when electronic distractions in the office were controlled by turning off the antiquated greenscreen computer connected to a squeaky dial-up modem. Today, my working time feels like it is incessantly shattered into a thousand shards of digital distractions, pulling me from one thought to the next, never allowing me to settle, reflect and find deeper meaning. Instead, I find myself programming my mind to think in a browsing mode, jumping from one thing to the next. I didn’t sign up to this kind of digital future. Did you? Probably not, but this present-day distraction crisis is upon us and here is why.

When the late Steve Jobs launched the first Apple iPhone in 2007, like millions of others I purchased it with great awe. We were on our way to a general-purpose mobile computer, the likes of which we had seen the crew of Star Trek using. Paid wifi was being actively rolled out in many public places, enabling emails to be accessed from any location, but back then there was no app store and no social media notifications.