In fact, a long-haul flight can be an ideal, library-like setting for what computer scientist Cal Newport calls “deep work”. This distraction-free focus on a cognitively demanding task pushes a person’s cognitive capabilities to their limit and actually creates value.
Some known trouble spots according to a warning on a Singapore Airlines plane.Credit: The Age
But with Wi-Fi, the digital fog of communication – the spam, the updates, the marketing messages, and the constant barrage of posts and email – has no barrier, not even on a flight.
Its effect on the mind is the opposite of clarity and perspective that flying can and used to offer; a time to pause from routines, to view a life in its totality.
The availability of in-flight Wi-Fi is not new. It has been around for a while, but it’s becoming more commonplace.
A recent Singapore Airlines flight to New York from Singapore used an efficient Panasonic Avionics Corporation satellite system to provide Wi-Fi.
Other technologies like Elon Musk’s Starlink – based on thousands of small satellites – makes connectivity faster and more widespread than ever before. Airlines ranging from Qatar Airways, to United and Air New Zealand are adopting Starlink.
Whatever the internet system, it seems to be an iron law of human behaviour: if a connection is available, you will use it. If the connection only works half the time, you will spend time trying to use it.
Another vista of on-board distraction. This isn’t technology as liberation rather, it’s tech as an itch to scratch.
Combined with mobile phones, on-board Wi-Fi converts flight from feeling unique and consequential to feeling a bit like how things are in the airport: congested and confused.
Author William Davies writes: “The addictive quality of smartphones derives from how they engage us physically … as much as mentally, via our eyes and minds. We study our screens more because they are under our control, than for whatever information they might impart.”
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In practice, our attention isn’t directed to a sustained event (like even a movie), instead, our attention is broken up, fragmented, and absorbed by trivialities.
Even as I write the first draft of this piece at 38,000 feet, I find myself fighting the urge to check my phone, feeling the pull of the digital world below.
I can only hope that, as some airline videos explain, there are still areas with poor Wi-Fi coverage.
The Bering Strait, Alaska, India, the Pacific, and the Black Sea.
These are known areas of “blackout zones” where Wi-Fi frequently doesn’t work on many on-board systems.
Cut off from internet access, in a state of in-flight solitude, my thoughts can roam, and I can appreciate the mental effect of travel and the adventures in imagination it can spark.
It’s a break not just with routine, but with the tyranny of constant communication.
Chris Zappone travelled as a guest of Singapore Airlines.
