The Evolutionary Psychology of Digital Clutter

The dream of tech companies is to knit together a seamless, integrated system for our gadgets, phones and TVs that works for humans and one data pool that assists marketers. This is why Amazon, Apple and Google keep attempting to build a single interface to rule the digital screens spread throughout your home. The only problem: Humans don’t want that.

In the 1960s, anthropologist Edward T. Hall and psychologist Robert Sommer discovered three distance fields in which humans take in the communications…