Delving into our Addiction to our Phones
According to ScreenTime, a recent addition to the iPhone’s operating system that was conceived to help users deal with their addiction to their phones, the average time I spent staring at my phone was five hours and twenty minutes per day. My typical daily phone activity includes four hours of Youtube, three hours of scrolling through Instagram, thirty minutes of Snapchat, yet another hour of swiping through my Twitter feed, and about one hundred and forty-six “pickups,” meaning that I check my phone about eight times per hour. From these numbers, one can easily infer that I basically carry my phone around with me as if it were an oxygen tank. And the frightening part is, my results are no aberration from those of others; in fact, most people have a ScreenTime average of four to seven hours spent on their phone.
Nearly three-quarters of Americans have taken additional steps to distance themselves from their phones: block push notifications from social media, avoid watching Instagram or Snapchat stories, or installing browser plug-ins that encourage productivity or block certain sites. A crop of mobile applications and sites have popped up in recent years, specifically geared towards weaning people off of their phones. But after some time, a certain restlessness accumulates in our minds, and our fingers inch towards the temptation that sits only a few feet away. Why is it that, even after all those efforts, we are pulled back to the brightly lit, small screen?
More than twenty years ago, the writer Michael Goldhaber in Wired observed that the Internet drowns its users in information while constantly increasing information production. As a result, our attention becomes a scarce and desirable resource — as he describes it, “the natural economy of cyberspace.” Goldhaber speculated that, when the “attention economy” matures, nearly everyone would have his or her own Website, and he warned readers that “increasing demand for our limited attention will keep us from reflecting, or thinking deeply (let alone enjoying leisure).” In other words, he roughly outlined the current social-media age.
Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook, has called the platform a “social-validation feedback loop” built around exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. Tristan Harris, who worked as a “design ethicist” at Google, claimed that smartphones are engineered to be addictive. Today, social-media companies capitalize on our everyday activities: our personal data and preferences are tracked and sold to advertisers. We continually capture attention by presenting a version of who we want others to see. Over time, people have absorbed these terms and conditions: we might retain very little of the value we create, but we have allowed social media to make us feel valuable. Social media platforms encourage compulsive use by offering various forms of social approval — such as likes on Facebook and Instagram, retweets on Twitter — that is intermittent and unpredictable, as though you’re playing a slot machine that tells you whether or not people love you. Eventually, we develop an odd dependency on these forms of validation. Without these triggers, people would undoubtedly feel less invested and thus stop wasting less time on their phones. However, taking those likes away would also dispose of the regular doses of dopamine, or deprive the social media companies of their revenues.
This is not to say that the recent developments of our smartphones are completely detrimental. To be able to message friends whenever I think about them; to go on FaceTime to talk to my grandmother half a globe away; or to sit on the bus and distract myself from traffic by looking up conspiracy threads on Reddit are all daily activities that I do not regret investing time in. All these activities were the stuff of science fiction years ago, and to be able to partake in them is mind-boggling. In addition, as the years pass, an online presence has become more of a requirement, not just for a social life, but also for jobs in the economy. More and more of us cannot afford to step away.
Yet it is necessary for us to become more conscious of why we use technology, and how it meets our specific needs. The first step of cutting back on our addiction is to realize how serious our dependency on our phones is. Once we are able to identify what activities are absolutely necessary (essentially Marie-Kondoing what we do on our phones), we can slowly take our eyes off of our brightly lit screens and on to what is in front of us.
Written By: Emily Jang | IQ Magazine Associate
