"digital autism"

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I was looking through the notices on the wall at work and saw a paper about being distracted by personal electronic devices while at work. Then I saw a section title with the words "digital autism" in it.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. I agree that there is a bit of a similarity in that people with ASD can block things out when focused on something, but this makes it sound like we're totally oblivious of our surroundings. Thought it'd be an interesting topic here.
What do you all think?

Last edited by jetbuilder on 27 Sep 2012, 11:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.

At best it's an insensitive turn of phrase. At worst, it's prejudicial.

I get what they mean by digital autism. its like when you do something and you hyper-focus on it ignoring your surroundings.

great. not only can i be "cured with an over-the-counter pill from Tesco", it's probably caused by the fact that I own a cell phone...

Here's the key word.

Intense preoccupation with an interest = autism.

Brief absorption of a task, usually distracting you from the real task at hand, or hyper focus = ADHD.

In this beautiful busy digital culture where an answer to a question can be at your fingertips in a matter of seconds, where most of what you need to remember is on the world wide web, so there's hardly a need to memorise anything for yourself anymore.
A world that is so jam-packed full of information lasting no longer than 30 seconds - 20 seconds - 10?

It's actually mimicking ADHD symptoms as the human brain adapts to this fast moving, quick information absorbing, working longer, talking shorter, society.

It's not digital autism. If it was it would be impossible to get those phone's away from people. They still socialise with them. And their memories aren't so good these days. They miss the finer details.

And all this technology makes ADHD symptoms worse while at the same time making it much harder to diagnose real cases.

OK, rant over.

'Digital autism' is offensive. Autism is far more complex than 'zoning out.' Autism is pervasive, it is impossible to overcome just by putting the damn phone down.

Now rant is over.

This reminds me of my boss calling some of the IT staff "autistic" because they only discussed IT matters with the rest of the organisation - they didn't mix and discuss other aspects of the organisation's work.

As I am the only one here on the spectrum, and as I do have an understanding of the wider organisation and do discuss it with non-tech staff, I was a bit miffed in two ways: the people called "autistic" were entirely average NTs**, and the one person who is (mildly) autistic doesn't do what the boss was describing as "autistic".

** I have seen their AQ scores - they all score below 20 - often well below. They are more NT than the average computer science student in Baron-Cohen's study of the AQ test.

I don't care about this at all.
Nor do I understand why feel offended. It's just an expression to me.

Anyways, I'll keep an eye on this thread to try to understand why is it a problem for some.

I have no feelings about it. It sounds like my type of humor. I joke about people going autistic and saying me and NTs switched places.

It's got nothing to do with autism. Ignoring one person to interact with another person is pretty typical for NTs. While they might be better at multitasking than we are, even their capacity isn't limitless. They aren't even hyperfocusing.

Stop using my diagnosis to mean something it doesn't mean! It makes about as much sense as calling my cat a chimpanzee and wondering why he doesn't like bananas.

It's like calling someone n*gger if you're not black.
We can have our own personal jokes but it trivialises autism when other people use it. Some people might actually start thinking of autism in that way.

But for now this term seems centralised to that office.

I remember when social networking was said to turn people autistic but it didn't catch on.


I'm just passionate about being against digital technology. It's useful but just don't spend too long on it. It can't cause anything as severe as ADHD but it can mimic it, and I just find it funny that these people born with a typically developing brain are starting to deal with issues that I was born with. But all they have to do is not spend that long on it and their problems will be over. Unlike me who has to impose bans on internet/phone/ipad usage at certain times of day, have to write lists and constantly have to pull my attention away from things I'm (proper) hyperfocusing on.

Also if you're offended when autism is called a 'disease' or even 'disorder' then that's how I feel about it being used in this context. And I'm not offended when it's called a disease, no matter how inaccurate it is.

This is a confusing misuse of the word autism. "Digitally distracted" would be better, although suggestive.

It's like telling someone who likes to keep a clean house that they have "OCD". I've seen OCD. OCD is someone scrubbing an immaculate floor 2-3 times a day. Someone who picks up after themselves is not obsessive compulsive. Someone losing focus on their job because their attention is sucked into their phone is not autistic, because those things are designed in such a way as to get and keep a person's attention.

Last edited by Rorberyllium on 28 Sep 2012, 7:08 am, edited 1 time in total.

The word autism is older than it being used to refer to the disorder. I think it is wrong to assume any use of the word autism refers to saidvdisorder (ex. Post-Autistic Economics). The word could be being used literally here, not referring to the disorder, though I doubt it.

Last edited by Ganondox on 28 Sep 2012, 9:34 am, edited 1 time in total.

What Callista said.

Actually people have used OCD in that context. Some will say they are OCD about this or that or about keeping their house clean.

I find that kind of annoying, like when people say that they are "addicted to" or "obsessed with" anything they like. I also don't understand the people that act like doing things like drinking a single mountain dew gives them feelings that I wouldn't get unless I smoked crack.