Here’s why I’m grateful.
Here’s why I’m grateful.
I remember the days of typing out text messages using T9, deleting texts after reading the previews so that they wouldn’t diminish my allotted 400 per month, and calling my best friend on the home phone because it was too early in the evening to access free minutes on the family cell plan.
These experiences would be unimaginable to most kids ten years younger than me, members of a generation that grew up awash in digital technology, screen time, social media, and smartphones. I was in middle school when Apple introduced the iPhone, and as I progressed through high school, few of my peers had one. In fact, few of my peers’ parents had one. By the time I got to college, I was one of very few students without one.
I won’t claim that the iPhone era has been all bad, and I don’t need to rehearse the list of conveniences and communications that it enables. We all know what they are. But having experienced the negative effects of omnipresent technology as an adult, I’m grateful to have grown up before the rise of the Pocket Computer. I’m watching, just a bit removed, as the youngest Americans grow up in uncharted territory, reaping the benefits of unprecedented technological change while also having their minds exposed to its more pernicious effects, with little societal concern about the possible long-term harms.
According to the annual Common Sense Census (CSC) for 2021, media use by teens (13- to 18-year-olds) and tweens (eight- to twelve-year-olds) grew faster in 2020 and 2021 than it did in the four years before the Covid-19 pandemic.
“On average, [tweens] use about five and a half hours of screen media per day, while [teens] use about eight and a half hours of screen media,” according to the CSC. “Since 2019, the biggest increases were in time spent watching online videos, using social media, and browsing websites.”
As of 2019, more than half of U.S. children owned a smartphone by the age of eleven, and 84 percent of teenagers had their own phones, numbers that likely have only increased since. Surely there are careful parents out there, those with the time and energy and foresight to supervise and limit their children’s use of screens. But are there enough of them, and are they careful enough?
Far too few of us, parents or not, appreciate that the architects of these technologies intentionally design them to maximize our time online or plugged in. In his book Digital Minimalism, Cal Newport describes a concept he calls “eyeball minutes,” which he identifies as “the key resource for companies like Google and Facebook.” Effectively collecting these minutes, he writes, is “more lucrative than extracting oil.”
Plenty of Newport’s concepts stuck with me, but this one pops into my head far more often than the rest. It’s a powerful visual and a frightening notion. What captures my “eyeball minutes”? Do I have full control over it? Who profits from how I choose — freely or under subconscious duress — to direct my gaze? And how do our individual choices about how we spend our “eyeball minutes” shape our society?
Because these minutes are so valuable in our advertising economy, social-media companies, search engines, and app developers have placed a premium on learning how to attract and keep them. The iPhone in particular has made it far easier to capture “eyeball minutes” and far more profitable to do so. We’re all addicted, and that’s by design.
One Silicon Valley engineer, Tristan Harris, became so concerned about the effect of the technologies he was helping to develop that he became something of a whistleblower. He left his job as a Google engineer and alleged in a 60 Minutes interview that the architects at technology companies are well aware that they’re “programming people.”
“There’s always this narrative that technology is neutral, and it’s up to us how we choose to use it,” Harris says. “It’s not neutral. They want you to use it in particular ways and for long periods of time, because that’s how they make their money.” Putting a fine point on it, he described his smartphone as a “slot machine.”
Responding to the interview, Bill Maher put it this way:
The tycoons of social media have to stop pretending that they’re friendly nerd gods building a better world and admit they’re just tobacco farmers in T-shirts selling an addictive product to children. Because, let’s face it, checking your “likes” is the new smoking. . . . Philip Morris just wanted your lungs. The App Store wants your soul.
And they’ve become so good at stealing it that they’re frightened of themselves. Plenty of parents working in Silicon Valley, for instance, report banning their children from the very technology they’re peddling to other people’s kids.
Clearly, the social-media project is working. Whether or not we’re troubled by it, none of us can deny that it’s happening. Once people on public transportation might have read a book or the newspaper or stared off into space merely thinking; now we stare into the tiny box we carry around, ever available, in our pockets. Standing in line? Bury your face in the box. Stuck in an elevator? Bury your face in the box. Passing someone on the sidewalk whom you’d rather not greet? Bury your face in the box. Trying to go to sleep but your mind is racing? Bury your face in the box. Waking up a little groggy? Bury your face in the box.
Refusing to do so even once feels like an act of powerful resistance. Unless we consciously reject these temptations and addictions, we slip into them unthinkingly. And even if we don’t succumb, each of us experiences the pull. We feel the conspicuous emptiness in our hand when we forget our phone at home. We feel its presence on the table beside us, sucking us in like a magnet while we’re trying to read or write or watch TV. We feel it burning a hole in our bag or pocket while we eat lunch with a friend.
In a 2016 essay on this topic, strikingly titled “I Used to Be a Human Being,” Andrew Sullivan chronicles his own experience of trying to detox from tech addiction. In the process, he discovered how he had come to use technology, and his phone in particular, as a distraction from emotional pain and emptiness. Surely he isn’t the only one.
Curious about the effects of digital technology on the generation behind mine — I graduated from high school in 2012, which puts me at the very tail end of the Millennial generation — I assigned the Sullivan essay to my students in a journalism course at Hillsdale this past semester.
Admittedly, Hillsdale students don’t make for the most representative sample, but in this case, that made our discussion even more disturbing. My students were more passionately engaged in this conversation than any other we had in the entire course. To a one, they reported using digital technology — particularly their phones and social media — more than they’d like, for no real reason other than a sense of compulsion.
At least a couple mentioned that they have trouble “just watching TV” and feel a strong need to scroll around on their phones while watching a movie in order to sit still. Several said they dislike how often they indulge the temptation to use their phones to escape awkward or unwanted encounters with those around them. Each of them felt at least some effects of minor digital addiction, and they reported not enjoying it.
Newport argues in Digital Minimalism that resisting the addictive design of digital technology is impossible — unless, that is, we develop a personal philosophy to govern its use. We have to know our values, and we have to identify what concrete benefits we’re seeking in each discrete use of technology. And then we need to establish an operating system, so that we are forced to engage these technologies only insofar as they’re serving our values.
Any adult who has made such an effort knows how hard it can be — just ask Sullivan. How much more difficult must it be for a child? Yet we’re tossing young people into the deep end of digital addiction without so much as a road map for escape.
Conservatives complain a lot about “Big Tech,” the malign influence of the algorithm on our politics, and the bias of tech companies that prevents users from accessing or sharing certain types of information. Big Tech is indeed a formidable foe in the political and cultural arena. But I’m far more concerned that most of us have unthinkingly granted it permission to reshape our brains — and the malleable minds of our youngest generation.