A few weeks ago an 11-week old infant was killed in an automobile accident near my home when the car in which he was riding collided with a truck. At the time of the accident, the driver of the car was talking on a cellular telephone and local authorities reported that they are investigating the cell phone conversation as a contributing factor in the accident. A similar accident took the life of a relative of mine about a year ago. She was talking on a cell phone while she drove up to an intersection, failed to stop, and was killed when her car collided with another vehicle.
Both of these accidents had a powerful emotional effect on me, one because of its geographical proximity, the other because it killed a member of my extended family. They also caught my attention, however, because they bear interesting similarities to instances of a phenomenon with which I am more familiar and therefore feel more qualified to generalize from: commercial aircraft accidents and incidents that occur when certain aircraft equipment distracts pilots from the crucially important tasks necessary to control their airplanes. Both on the road and in the air technological objects like cell phones and cockpit equipment can give rise to distractions, and these technological distractions can lead to fatal accidents. The point of this article is that technological distractions can also occur in the broader context of life, where the goal is far more significant than getting safely to some earthly location. Here too technological objects - devices, systems, methods, and other products of technology that are made to help us realize the things we value - can distract us, and the consequences of these distractions can be far worse than mere bodily injury or death. In the following pages I highlight some important principles about technological distraction in the air and on the road, show how they generalize to the broader context of life, and suggest some remedies.
For the past decade, my students and I have been studying how airline pilots manage the many concurrent tasks that must be performed to fly a modern airplane. We have learned that pilots have a little maxim to help prioritize things: aviate - navigate - communicate - manage systems. Given the goal of a safe arrival at the destination, the pilots' most important tasks involve aviating or flight control: controlling the path of the airplane. Of course, other tasks are essential to the mission: the pilots must navigate to know where they are and where they should go, they must communicate with air traffic controllers to coordinate their airplane's movement with that of other aircraft, and they must monitor and control onboard devices that keep the aircraft functioning. But these other tasks must be subordinate to the primary flight control tasks, they should be performed only as time permits, after the pilots have established the aircraft on a safe and appropriate path, and they must give way to flight control tasks when flight path corrections are necessary.
Unfortunately, we have also found that pilots do not always follow the maxim. In studies of commercial transport aircraft accident and incident reports, we have identified a significant number of cases in which pilots allowed themselves to be distracted from flight control tasks by subordinate tasks. Although we have found that these distractions take a variety of forms, many are caused by relatively minor equipment malfunctions. Of particular interest, though, is our most recent study of aircraft incident reports, which revealed a significantly higher rate of distraction-induced incidents in newer generation aircraft than in older airplanes. Many of the distractions in these advanced technology aircraft incidents occurred when the pilots allowed their aircraft to deviate from a safe flight path while trying to understand or program complex automation devices (including autopilots and flight management computers), tasks not essential to the immediate, positive control of the airplane.
Why does this happen? While I can offer no definitive answer yet, our studies suggest several contributing factors. Distractions of all kinds are naturally more likely to occur when there are lots of tasks to perform, as when equipment failures occur or when unanticipated air traffic control instructions mandate flight path changes. In such situations, pilots tend to be distracted by salient stimuli, such as the bright flashing lights and loud auditory warning signals associated with equipment malfunctions or the attention-demanding prompts of computer displays. Finally, they tend to be drawn to subordinate tasks that they perceive to be more urgent than they really are, such as relatively minor equipment problems or discretionary changes to the aircraft's flight path.
In summary, there are four important points to be made about technological distractions in the air, and they probably apply to technological distractions on the road as well. First, these distractions occur in the context of a primary goal to be achieved, something of considerable value to be realized: safe arrival at a select destination. To fail to achieve the primary goal can be catastrophic.
Second, during the trip, many tasks arise to be performed: vehicle control, navigation, communication, system management, and other tasks. Some are essential to achieving the primary goal, others merely helpful, still others purely optional, and a few are extraneous and have nothing whatsoever to do with it. Many of these tasks are made possible, facilitated, or even necessitated by technological objects.
Third, not all the tasks that arise at a given time can be performed simultaneously, nor need they be. The subordinate tasks (e.g., navigation and communication tasks) can almost always be delayed or interrupted, and sometimes they can be completely ignored. Even the most important tasks (i.e., vehicle control tasks) can be interrupted briefly when the vehicle is on a safe, stable, and predictable path, to permit the performance of subordinate tasks. If this condition is not satisfied, however, pilots and drivers interrupt the most important tasks only at great risk to vehicles and occupants.
But, fourth, pilots and drivers do let themselves be distracted by subordinate tasks at critical times, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Often these distractions are related to technological objects in the operator's environment: they succumb to the salient stimuli produced by technological objects or the sense of urgency these objects impart to the tasks.
I am not a commercial pilot and I do not use a cell phone when I drive, yet as I reflect on these points, I realize that I am subject to technological distraction in the broader context of my life as I, by God's grace, move toward its primary goal. Moreover, from observation I infer that the same is true of many of my friends and colleagues. To bring the dangers of technological distractions to the attention of others, in the following paragraphs I draw on my own experience to generalize the four points described above.
First, just as a flight has a destination, so my life has a destination: the kingdom of God. To enter the kingdom of God is to experience eternal life (Mark 10:17-23), which is to know God by participating in an intimate, mutually indwelling relationship with Him mediated by Jesus Christ (John 17). To fail to arrive at this destination is to fail utterly, to be eternally separated from God - a far worse fate than mere bodily injury or death in an aircraft or automobile accident. So my primary goal in life must be to enter the kingdom of God and to help others do the same.
Second, as the pilot can be faced with many tasks to perform, so I am often confronted with a multitude of activities. Some are essential to achieving my primary goal, others instrumental, still others purely optional, and some, I must confess, have nothing whatsoever to do with it. Most of these activities are made possible, facilitated, or even necessitated by technological objects.
For example, agricultural technology is the source of new varieties of crops to feed me or the animals I eat, as well as equipment and methods to raise and process them. As a result, I help my wife in the activities of grocery shopping, meal planning, preparation, consumption, and cleanup. Textile technology provides fabrics for my clothing, which require washing, ironing, and mending activities. Construction technology provides me a house in which to live and a university building in which to work. Though my employer takes care of the latter, I am responsible for the cleaning, repair, and modification of the former. Medical technology produces drugs, medical equipment, and methods to grant me a longer healthier life, but to realize it I must visit the doctor, undergo laboratory tests, purchase and take medicines, and sometimes enter the hospital for treatment.
Communication technology provides many technological objects that keep me active. I read books and other documents, listen to the radio, and talk on the telephone with relatives, friends, colleagues, strangers who mis-dial my number, and telephone solicitors. Transportation technology gives me my car, which I drive to work, church, community gatherings, cultural events, and my children's swimming lessons. Besides the activities of driving and riding in it, I also fill it with gas, wash it, repair it, and insure it. Transportation technology also provides the airplanes I use to travel to distant meetings; besides the travel and meeting activities these trips entail, they each also require several hours of planning and preparation.
Computer technology enables and facilitates many of my activities. I use computers to write papers, articles, letters, reports, and other documents. I use them to communicate with colleagues by electronic mail and explore the vast wasteland of the Internet. My students and I also use our computers to create and evaluate experimental software to aid airline pilots and build and use databases of aviation safety information. Any spare time I have after all of these activities can be filled, thanks to technological objects supplied by electronics technology. For example, I can listen to my stereo or watch old movies using my VCR and television.
Notice that many of the activities I pursue are not merely enabled or facilitated by technological objects, they are mandated by them. Besides the activities in which I actually use them, I must also engage in activities to learn about them, acquire them, learn to use them, pay for them, insure them against damage or loss, deal with their undesirable consequences, clean and maintain them, and ultimately dispose of them. Taken together, all these activities make me quite busy.
In fact, as a generalization of my third point, there is simply not enough time in the day to do all of the things these technological objects make possible or necessary, much less do them well. So naturally I must make choices about which activities I actually pursue. Fortunately, just as flight instructors teach new pilots how to prioritize tasks, Jesus provided some instructions about which activities are most important: "... seek first His [i.e., God's] kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well." (Matthew 6:33).
It is pretty clear to me from this and other passages that if I want to reach the kingdom of God and to help others do so, the most important activities I can pursue are kingdom activities, including prayer, meditation, study, worship, teaching, and evangelism. That does not mean that my every waking moment must be directly devoted to these and other kingdom activities - after all, I have to eat to pray and I have to work to eat, and there are many other activities essential to support kingdom activities.
But here I can take a lesson from good pilots (and good drivers do something like this). They attend to flight control tasks sufficiently to keep their aircraft on a safe, stable, and predictable path consistent with their primary goal. Then and only then do they intersperse navigation, communication, system management, and other tasks, but always checking the flight control tasks periodically to see that all is well. So too should I intersperse subordinate activities to support kingdom activities, and then only when I am pretty confident that I and the others that I can reasonably influence are on a path to the kingdom.
Of course, there are many complexities and subtleties associated with distinguishing subordinate activities from kingdom activities and in knowing when progress towards the kingdom is satisfactory, and I have not worked them all out (and probably never will). But through the witness of the Holy Spirit I can usually tell when what I am doing is directed toward the kingdom and when it is not - and far too often it is not.
That is because, fourth, just as the pilot is often distracted from flight control tasks, I am often distracted from kingdom activities, and frequently these distractions are technological distractions. Like the technological distractions of pilots and drivers, mine are often due to the salience of stimuli produced by technological objects and the sense of urgency technological objects impart to subordinate activities.
The salience of a sensory stimulus (e.g., a sight or a sound) is its conspicuity, its capacity to trigger a persistent mental response. It is the ability of a stimulus to catch my attention and draw it away from the activity in which I am currently engaged to some other activity related to the stimulus. Now the kingdom of God is not the source of salient stimuli (at least not yet). In parables of the kingdom Jesus likened it to a mustard seed and yeast (Matthew 13:31, 33) - not particularly salient objects - and he even declared it not to be visible at all (Luke 17:20). Also, many kingdom activities - especially the core ones like prayer and meditation - are not facilitated by technological objects, which are often the sources of salient stimuli. But most of the subordinate activities I could potentially engage in involve technological objects and their salient stimuli can distract me from kingdom activities.
When I am engaged in or have the opportunity to engage in some kingdom activity, the mere presence of certain technological objects can result in salient stimuli that divert me to something else. In some cases, these distractions take the form of temptations to engage in some subordinate activity for which the distracting technological object exists. For example, I see books and magazines to read, computers to program or use, shovels with which to move dirt, musical instruments to play, bicycles to ride, tackle with which to fish, boots to wear hiking, and audio equipment to which to listen. In other cases, stimuli from the mere presence of technological objects distract me to engage in activities directed to the objects themselves. There are dirty things to clean, worn or broken things to repair, worn out things to replace, used things to recycle or discard, disorderly things to organize, orderly things to re-organize, unneeded things to store, and "needed" things to retrieve from storage.
Even more salient than the stimuli that arise from just the presence of technological objects are the stimuli that are specifically designed to distract me. The sound of a ringing telephone can interrupt almost anything I am doing and draw me to a conversation. Although I do not use a cell phone or pager, plenty of my friends and colleagues are promptly responsive to their signals. Salient images and sounds from televisions and radios almost irresistibly draw me to attend to programs and commercials. Striking images and words in printed advertisements can induce me to contemplate products, services, and social and environmental causes. Of course, some of the activities these stimuli would draw me to are kingdom activities, but most are not.
The urgency that I perceive in an activity is my estimate of the time needed to complete it relative to the time available for it. Often I wrongly manage my activities based on perceived urgency more than importance, and technological objects play a significant role in that mismanagement. Calendars and clocks are technological objects that have been around for a long time, but they are the basis for the urgency so characteristic of modern life. They require my timely action for bus and airplane trips, medical appointments, classes and lessons, research project tasks, meetings, cultural events, and practices and rehearsals. In fact, many of the activities made possible or necessitated by technological objects have more or less rigid start and end times or deadlines to which I feel that I must conform.
Some technological objects are designed to save time, thereby reducing urgency. These include FAX machines, electronic mail, and overnight delivery services. But knowing that these devices, systems, and methods are available to me encourages me to both procrastinate and to use the time I "save" to schedule more activities, resulting in a net increase in urgency. Still other technological objects are available to help me manage my schedule. These devices, ranging from simple "to-do" lists to weekly planners give me a false sense of temporal security and encourage me to schedule still more activities.
Of course, kingdom activities can be urgent too. Church services start at specified times, opportunities I have to tell others about the kingdom of God may be fleeting, and I must acknowledge that my days are numbered. But the vast majority of urgent activities in my life have very little to do with the kingdom of God. Also, while the good to be realized through the subordinate activities is transient, by contrast, I generally perceive little urgency associated with seeking God or His kingdom. Questioned about his second coming, Jesus responded "'No one knows about that day or hour ...'" (Mat. 24:36). In spite of his subsequent admonition to be ready for the reckoning associated with his return, the fact that no date or time was given seems to have led some of us to be complacent about the kingdom of God. Often kingdom activities simply cannot compete with the technology-induced urgency of subordinate activities.
In summary, the technological distractions that occur in my life parallel those that occur in the air and on the road. My primary goal is the kingdom of God - for others as well as for myself. My life is incredibly busy with activities, most of them enabled, facilitated, or necessitated by technological objects. To reach my goal I should seek first the kingdom of God. But I am frequently distracted from the more important kingdom activities by subordinate activities, and these distractions are often attributable to the salient stimuli of technological objects and the urgency technological objects impart to subordinate activities.
There is hope, though, based on one other point that can be made concerning technological distractions in the air. In our study of aircraft incidents, although we found a higher rate of distractions (often technological distractions) in advanced technology aircraft, that rate appears to be decreasing. We do not know for sure why this is so, but there are two factors that may contribute to it. First, we know from surveys that pilots are becoming aware that the new automation devices in advanced technology airplanes have great potential to distract them from flight control tasks. This awareness has presumably led to personal strategies that have proven effective in reducing those distractions. Second, some airlines that once required pilots to use automation devices to their fullest potential have recently adopted "turn it off" policies: whenever their pilots do not understand what the automation is doing or when they feel that it is requiring too much of their attention to use it, they are encouraged to turn it off and revert to manual control.
With the help of my family I have extended these two measures to my life with some success. First, we have tried to make ourselves aware of the presence and nature of technological distractions, and that awareness has become a first line of defense against them. Second, we try to limit the number of technological objects we own and use, or at least to limit how we use the ones we have. For example, we refuse to use pagers or cell phones, we own just one car, we do not watch broadcast television, and although we have a computer in our home, it is not connected to the Internet. These steps have been moderately effective in reducing technological distractions: we are not as insanely busy as the families of many of our friends and colleagues. But we have made no real sacrifices and we can claim no significant victories - more extreme measures may be necessary.
The Amish model comes to mind. Their Anabaptist heritage of literal obedience to the teachings of Christ, the church as a covenant community, the family as the fundamental social unit, submission to proper authority, and separation from the world provides an effective framework for the cautious acquisition and use of technological objects. I recognize that there are flaws in the Amish model, and anyway there would be significant practical difficulties in adopting all their ways. Nevertheless, some of the time-tested methods the Amish use to control the influence of technology would be valuable additions to the simple measures to reduce technological distraction mentioned above. Also, I hope that others who recognize the challenge will use these pages and other means to share their insights and recommendations. Aware of the obstacles, perhaps, by God's grace, we can together partially clear a path to His kingdom - if we don't get distracted.