“The first step of change is to become aware of your own bullshit.” — Unknown
Springing up out of bed has never been my forte. I like to wake slowly, stretch and flex my pointer finger up and down my slippery Samsung screen as I scroll social feeds of nothingness until I feel like I’ve seen it all.
About an hour later, I’m sitting in traffic and find myself going to Facebook again. Swiping, liking, commenting, not paying attention to the traffic light turning green. I get to work, boot up my computer and I’m on Facebook again, tapping, hearting, sharing.
In a 2017 episode of 60 Minutes, “What is ‘Brain Hacking?’ Tech Insiders on Why You Should Care,” Anderson Cooper said that the average person checks his or her phone at least every 15 minutes. Looking at my morning route, I know that I am one of the people he was talking about. But if you asked me if I am the mom who is always on her phone in front of her daughter, the employee checking her phone constantly at work, the wife who peeps her Newsfeed in the middle of dinner with her husband, I would tell you — adamantly — “absolutely not, I can put my phone down any time.”
Addiction to social media is as real as any chemical addiction and with it comes the same feelings of guilt and shame. Only with that shame comes an added layer of disappointment. Not in ourselves for tempting fate and tasting the drug which has left us handcuffed, but in placing our trust in our human peers that the technology they have created will lead to us living better lives … only to be let down. Humanity has failed us as these brilliant minds have taken away that which makes us human: free thinking. A drug user may use to get a temporary high but ultimately they don’t count on the opiate to actually improve their his or her life with more meaningful connections and long-term social status gratification.
“The machine is my brain and it’s maker is the internet.”
We watch “fantasy” movies and TV shows about this all the time and rarely stop to think the fiction we are consuming is a hair away from becoming non-fiction, or in some cases already has. Netflix’s “Black Mirror” plotlines about AI invading our lives appeal to us because they terrifyingly teeter on reality. But in pausing to reflect on how influenced I have personally become by the technology that consumes virtually all of my waking hours and most of my decision-making, I realize I am “Ex Machina’s” Ava or “Westworld’s” Dolores. The machine is my brain and it’s maker is the internet.
Who Holds the Strings?
OK, maybe I’m being dramatic. After all, I got a paper cut last week and bled blood and not sparking wires. As Franklin Foer said of Facebook, Microsoft and Apple in The Washington Post’s “How Silicon Valley is Erasing Your Individuality,” “They intend for us to turn unthinkingly to them for information and entertainment while they catalog our intentions and aversions.”
This is most evident in the way ads are served to us through programmatic systems on the sites and social media platforms we frequent. Based on our browsing history and the actions we take (or don’t take) on specific pages, the products and services we already thought about and showed interest in online haunt us as we navigate the internet. Images follow us, calls to action yell to us until we complete the conversion as the advertiser wants.
Still, as computer programmer Ramsay Brown said to Cooper in the 60 Minutes piece, we, the users, are not the ones paying for Facebook and thus the price we pay to use the service is our pair of eyeballs that view what advertisers pay to show us.
“You’re not the customer. You don’t sign a check to Facebook. But Coca-Cola does,” he said.
Digital Media and Decision Manipulation
Our choices in products purchased are not all that digital media control, but our ability to think independently has been warped over time by what we see on the internet. No example has been more glaring over the past several years than the 2016 presidential election and the addition of terms to our vocabulary like “fake news.”
In Cal Newport’s book, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, Newport quoted social critic Evgeny Morozov’s comments in To Save Everything, Click Here about the way web-based platforms lure us in and gain our trust.
“It’s this propensity to view ‘the internet’ as a source of wisdom and policy advice that transforms it from a fairly uninteresting set of cables and network routers into a seductive and exciting ideology—perhaps today’s uber-ideology,” he said.
“But coming back isn’t the only problem. Putting our full faith that what we come back to is always honest is.”
The Guardian writer Paul Lewis explored this further in “‘Our Minds Can Be Hijacked’: The Tech Insiders Who Fear a Smartphone Dystopia.” The article examined how deeply designers delve into human psychology when developing features for social media platforms. Among other tech pioneers, Lewis interviewed Justin Rosenstein and Leah Pearlman. Both worked on the team that created the “Like” feature on Facebook and now, years later, both shy away from many features like the one they created on the social media platform in their personal lives in a “look at the monster I’ve created” sort of way. He also interviewed Tristan Harris, a former Google employee who wrote a 41-page presentation on Silicon Valley’s responsibility not to keep people wasting time on tech platforms but to make efficient use of time through the platforms so that they could get on with their real lives. Harris saw the way these platforms were shaping our minds away from independent thought as a serious problem.
“It’s changing our democracy and it’s changing our ability to have the conversations and relationships that we want with each other,” he said.
Harris explored the effects of what he called “variable rewards,” or the actions that a user would take to get an actionable outcome on social media, things like the pull-to-refresh feature on Twitter. He likened these movements to pulling the lever on a slot machine. It’s not necessary, and the same outcome can be achieved with the push of a button, but there’s still a gratifying feeling that comes with the physical pull. It’s actions like this that release chemicals in our bodies and keep us coming back.
But coming back isn’t the only problem. Putting our full faith that what we come back to is always honest is.
As false accounts and deceitful publishers have gotten smarter about presenting fake content as truth, social media giants have come under fire for not more clearly differentiating what’s real from what’s not on their platforms. Foreign influence on our elections has the power to crumble our democracy and the speed at which our own government is able to regulate this may not be quick enough. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey gave testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee this week and Florida Senator Marco Rubio referenced both companies’ core values which discourage “bad actors” and false impersonations. Rubio asked how much the companies care about serving truthful, accurate information to its users.
“Are your companies really built on these core values or are they global companies…who see their No. 1 obligation to make money?” he asked.
Both answered that their companies’ values were what was most important and that, essentially, without credibility there is nothing.
Digital Addiction and Our Physical Health
To draw a line between liking a Tweet and completely changing course on the candidate we would have chosen for president seems strong, but every day we are strengthening our connection to these platforms in the smallest of ways. When put together, these features can have a profound impact on our moods.
Lewis spoke with Nir Eyal, author of “Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products,” who said our compulsion to do a quick social media action often leads to a time suck and affects our mental state.
“It’s the impulse to check a message notification. It’s the pull to visit YouTube, Facebook or Twitter for just a few minutes, only to find yourself still tapping and scrolling an hour later.”
“Actions like this are addictive in themselves. Add to them the very real Fear of Missing Out (or FOMO) and we end up spending hours on social media.”
When your post has more “Loves” you feel happy and popular. The more your content is shared, the more you feel reassured in your ability to entertain your friends. But a post that goes “Like-less” can make you feel isolated and depressed, and those kinds of feelings can lead to mental distress.
“Feelings of boredom, loneliness, frustration, confusion and indecisiveness often instigate a slight pain or irritation and prompt an almost instantaneous and often mindless action to quell the negative sensation,” Eyal wrote in his book.
Actions like this are addictive in themselves. Add to them the very real Fear of Missing Out (or FOMO) and we end up spending hours on social media. But is the mental impact of focusing so much energy on social media actually harmful to our health?
Linda Stone, author of “Our Powerful & Fragile Attention” via Huffington Post said it can be.
“The way we use our attention shapes and controls our reality,” she said.
Stone studied what she calls “email apnea.” In monitoring her own breathing patterns against anxiety, she came to find that she stopped or slowed her breathing when reading/considering how to respond to unexpected emails and text messages. Further, she studied a sample group and found the behavior consistent amongst 80% of her subjects.
While the breath loss is not dramatic enough to be considered a dangerous health concern, Stone attributes email apnea to being part of a larger problem that we allow receiving emailing and texting to distract us from our regular mental state.
“If we don’t consciously choose where we want to direct our attention, there will always be something in our path to misdirect it,” Stone said.
Reclaiming Our Control
When Eyal spoke at the 2017 Habit Summit, he remarked that while we are all-consumed by technology, hope is not lost.
“The idea is to remember that we are not powerless,” he said. “We are in control.”
In quoting Eyal’s summit remarks, Lewis was not so sure that we could overcome the consumption of digital technology on our minds.
“If the people who built these technologies are taking such radical steps to wean themselves free, can the rest of us reasonably be expected to exercise our free will?” he asked.
Like any addiction, the first step is admitting there is a problem. But solving this problem is a bit more complicated. Social and digital media has become ingrained in so many parts of our lives: the way we work, the way we socialize, the way we find love, the way we make money. This technology is tied into the core tenets of humanity.
For myself, I can’t envision a world where I shut off all my devices and not start and end my day facing the glare of my phone screen. But if I can at commit to cutting out that middle-of-traffic Facebook peek, I’ll at least improve my own safety once per day.
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