Hungraian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is widely famed for his theory of flow. In his work, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, he discusses his concept of flow- what we may be more familiar with as “being in the zone”, or, the intense state of focus and absorbtion that some of us experience while playing sports, for example, or perhaps spending intimate time with a romantic partner.
According to Csikszentmihalyi, flow is all about the balance of being challenged, having the skill to meet said challenge, and how these two components come together in the form of task motivation and attention. More specifically, “To be caught in the ennui of depression or the agitation of anxiety is to be barred from flow. The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task although flow is also described as a deep focus on nothing but the activity – not even oneself or one’s emotions.” In other words, the flow is the joyful sweet spot we enter when nothing else matters in the world except the activity at hand. Many, if not all of us, I would bet, have experienced one or more flow characteristics while participating in the activities we know and love.
Enumerated in lecture as intense focus, lack of self-consciousness, feeling of complete control of one’s actions, distorted sense of time, awareness only of one’s current actions and proximal goals, and a desire to engage in the the task for its own sake, these qualities, to me, sound about like what I experience while sucked into the all-too-familiar Facebook procrastination vortex. When I’m lurking around on Facebook, in what seems like mere seconds, 30 minutes can pass, dinner can burn on the stove, and I can altogether block out any number of obligations I may have.
Moving along with my Facebook example- I find that I am most in the flow in the beginning stages of my Facebooking experience, especially if I am trying to seek out information of some kind, or am particularly interested in the subject of my investigation. Why is this, you ask? As mentioned in lecture, flow flourishes when one has clear, short-term goals, a balance or match between perceived challenges and one’s skills, and immediate feedback about the accomplishment of those goals. Since, when I’m Facebooking, I tend to have all of these things in line, it’s no wonder that I usually slip into a state of flow. Examining the below diagram of the flow “channel”, it becomes easy to understand where exactly the flow is able to occur, and why, at times, it is lost.
As I mentioned before, and Csikszentmihalyi mentioned even before that, flow is all about the balance between challenge and skill. Being a superior Facebook stalker is something of a skill, sure, and also definitely a challenge. Once the mission is accomplished, however, I, at least, usually find that I grow bored and more interested in moving on to a different activity. Flow lost! The same thing happens when we find a task TOO challenging, like when I have to hunt down an old classmate who moved away and whose last name I can’t recall. Then, too, I would lose my flow, and perhaps, also, experience some feelings of anxiety.
The concept of flow seems to lend itself quite well to media, and, not surprisingly, numerous studies, especially involving video games, have been conducted around it. Sherry (2004) explored how people prefer video games and activities with that perfect skill/challenge balance, and even more interestingly, how what we once thought were gender variances in video game preference are actually better understood as skill differences. I do not avoid games like World of Warcraft and Call of Duty because I am female and, thus, don’t like them, but, according to Sherry (2004), instead, because I am simply not good at them. Makes sense to me. Keller and Bless (2008) also did some similar work, this time with Tetris, and found support for the flow, challenge, skill relationship as well.
If you ask me, Csikszentmihalyi and his flow theory are one of the more applicable and widely relatable topics we’ve been over in class. Whether it be the art of computer stalking, the sport of your choice, video games, or beyond, I would venture to guess that we’ve all been pulled into the ‘flow’ one time or another.
The Biology of Communication - Amateur Musings 