Students are back in classrooms and parents can finally have a brief
respite from worrying about their children’s excessive screen use — or,
at least, worrying it is all their fault. This angst peaks each year in
the summer holidays, those long, sunny weeks illuminated in large part
by the blueish light from children’s smartphones, tablets and laptops.
The beep and ping of devices triggers complicated emotions. In many
homes, parents simultaneously castigate their offspring’s use of tech
and are relieved by it: like some goblin babysitter, it squats in the
corner of family life, whispering powerfully, turning children silent
and glassy-eyed.
The erratically applied adult phrases ‘That’s enough screen time!’
and ‘Give me that iPad!’ ring hopelessly around family homes,
interspersed with squeals of refusal. Cannier parents have worked out
that if they cannot contain the addiction they can manipulate it to
their advantage: the threat of sudden iPad withdrawal is a behavioral
corrective that trumps the useless ‘naughty step’ every time.
There is one group of parents, however, who restrict their children’s
use of technology ruthlessly, so keenly are they aware of its potential
for distraction and damage. They are the titans of tech, the very
people whose job it is to develop and popularize these devices in the
first place. Bill Gates, the principal founder of Microsoft, has said he
banned his three children from owning a mobile phone until they were
14, excluded ‘tech’ from meal times and restricted its use before bed.
His wife Melinda, a former Microsoft executive, said last year that if
she could rewind the clock she would have held out further against
smartphones: ‘I probably would have waited longer before putting a
computer in my children’s pockets.’
The late Steve Jobs, co-founder and former CEO of Apple Inc, was even sterner: in a
New York Times
interview in late 2010, he revealed that his children had never used
what was then Apple’s exciting new product, the iPad, saying: ‘We limit
how much technology our kids use at home.’ Tim Cook, the current Apple
CEO, doesn’t have children of his own, but said: ‘I have a nephew that I
put some boundaries on’ — including a firm instruction to stay off
social media. One might have imagined that the self-proclaimed geeks and
nerds of Silicon Valley would be tech’s greatest cheerleaders. Yet it
seems that the tech elite are instead keenly aware of just how much
effort goes into making devices addictive, and how disturbingly
successful that has been. As constant ‘connectivity’ seems to be warping
both our political systems and our mental health, some tech pioneers
are showing signs of guilt, rendered uneasy by the monstrous reach of
their inventions.
Sean Parker, the founding president of Facebook — who left the
company in 2005 — said last year that he had become ‘something of a
conscientious objector’ against social platforms. The original thought
process behind social networks such as Facebook and Instagram, he said,
was: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as
possible? And that means we need to sort of give you a little dopamine
hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo
or a post or whatever.’ The aim, Parker said, was to create ‘a social
validation feedback loop’ that ‘exploits a vulnerability in human
psychology’. He added: ‘The inventors, creators — it’s me, it’s Mark
[Zuckerberg], it’s Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it’s all of these people —
understood this consciously. We did it anyway.’ For those who recognized the enormous potential of a ‘social validation feedback loop’
early, it has brought unimaginable profits. Mark Zuckerberg, the
co-founder and CEO of Facebook, is worth roughly $67 billion. Last
summer he wrote a public letter to his new daughter, August, in which he
made no mention of tech. Instead, he talked about putting leaves in
buckets, reading Dr Seuss books and taking naps. ‘The world can be a
serious place,’ he wrote, ‘That’s why it’s important to make time to go
outside and play.’
Tristan Harris, a former Google ‘design ethicist’, is now head of
Time Well Spent, a non-profit organization that seeks to reverse the
problem of constant distractability, or the ‘digital attention crisis’.
He seems particularly concerned about emotionally fragile teens and
their yearning to be liked: ‘We’ve never had 100 million human animals
viewing hundreds of their friends having fun without them.’
In the wider world, innumerable children aren’t yet listening to Harris, or to
Zuckerberg’s
advice on the outdoors, because they’re too busy gaming, posing on
Instagram or sending each other disposable messages on Snapchat. A
recent survey on behalf of the National Trust found that UK children
play outside for an average of just over four hours a week, half the
time that their parents did when they were children. One cannot wholly
blame technology for that — a reduction in outside play spaces in cities
plays its part, as does a heightened parental anxiety about ‘stranger
danger’. Yet the tug of computer games and social media certainly
contributes to the growing phenomenon of sedentary children cooped up
indoors.
Those of us who were children in the pre-internet era might remember
similar dire warnings being made about an addiction to television: in
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,
the brash, gun-obsessed character of Mike Teavee was Roald Dahl’s
satire on a screen-mad child. Yet the limited choice of programs — and
the resulting creep of boredom — would eventually propel us beyond the
front door. I remember spending hours simply hitting a tennis ball
against a brick wall, or riding around in circles on my bicycle. To the
outside eye, this must have looked like meaninglessly repetitive
activity, which indeed it was. Yet it was also relaxing, because I used
the time to mull over all kinds of things in my head, including the
prolonged pretense that the bicycle was a horse.
Mulling is largely out, as a pastime for children. Reaction is in,
provoked by endless electronic diversion. The great and terrifying feat
of the internet, delivered through its portable devices, is that it has
virtually eliminated boredom. Through it you can access a taste of
almost everything, from all over the world — music, history, news,
politics, pornography, films, facts, lies and arguments. Many things
flow from this digital cornucopia, including fascination, education,
self-affirmation, delusion, competitiveness, insecurity, anxiety,
outrage, vitriol, insomnia and depression, but rarely boredom. Yet for
children it is boredom, not necessity, which has so often been the
mother of invention.
In the early days of the internet, the advance of tech was seen as
almost wholly positive, an infinite library opening to the grateful
masses. Tony Blair, while admitting in the mid-1990s that technology
baffled him, was nonetheless a zealous proselytizer for getting the
‘information superhighway’ into schools. If used wisely, the internet
remains a powerful educational tool, opening up resources far beyond the
sum of those editions of the
Encyclopedia Britannica that once
gleamed on family bookcases. But excessive use also seems to have
negative effects on mental health, particularly among teenagers.
In the US, Dr Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego
State University, has dubbed the post-millennial generation (those born
between 1995 and 2012) ‘iGen’ because they will be the first to have
spent their entire adolescence with smartphones. In about 2010 or 2011,
Twenge says, she first started to notice striking changes in teenage behavior: they were going out and getting together with friends less
often, while more reported feeling ‘left out’ and claiming that they
didn’t enjoy life.
Among US teens, the prevalence of depression has risen steadily in
line with smartphone ownership and time spent online. Since 2007, the
suicide rate of US 12- to 14-year-olds has doubled. Twenge’s critics say
that the rise in depression could have other causes and there is an
element of moral panic to tech-blaming, but the notion of damage has
stuck.
As suspicions about technology’s dark side increase, the ‘digital
detox’ has grown in social status. Some people are making decisive
efforts to tune out: sales of ‘dumb phones,’ which deny internet access,
rose by 5 per cent globally last year. In a bid to modify the power of
the very beast they created, Facebook and Instagram executives are
rolling out features such as an ‘activity dashboard’ that tells mesmerized users how long they have spent on sites, and reminds them of
when they have hit their quota for the day.
In France, a nation admirably protective of its quality of life,
companies with more than 50 employees were formally required last year
to set out hours when workers should not be expected to send or answer
emails. Otherwise, as the legislator Benoît Hamon told the BBC, one
would have the pitiful situation whereby employees ‘leave the office,
but they do not leave their work. They remain attached by a kind of
electronic leash — like a dog’.
This perfectly describes a substantial number of working lives in the
UK. What once looked like freedom — the ability to communicate from
anywhere, anytime — has hardened into the prison of constant
accessibility. The nine-to-five slog, formerly mocked as the daily
drudge, now looks deliciously fenced-off, as employees can only dream of
evenings free from work hassles.
Children, up to a certain age, can indeed be kept off devices at
home. For adults, however, a digital detox is not always an easy or
voluntary choice. For many of us, the internet is inextricably tied up
not only with our rolling workload, but also the business of shopping,
paying bills and other chores. I’m not on Facebook or Instagram, but
since my husband and I are both journalists, the constant political
bickering and culture wars on Twitter are appallingly and necessarily
interesting. At the end of an absorbing evening spent online, however, I
often feel unusually gloomy and fretful, as if a moth has eaten bits of
my soul. To paraphrase Neil Postman, I think I might be interesting
myself to death.
By Silicon Valley measures we’re doing pretty well so far on
containing tech in our house… until you get to the adults. My
12-year-old doesn’t have a smartphone, but a brutally basic Nokia that
is so dull he frequently neglects to charge it. The extent of my
nine-year-old daughter’s tech ownership is a Kindle. They both have
access to a large, ancient Apple Mac in the living room, which they
mainly use to watch old comedy or bakery shows. This summer, in between
squabbling and complaining of boredom, the children were often painting,
reading and baking experimental varieties of cakes like 19th-century
gentlefolk while I read anxiety-provoking things on a small screen. It’s
me I’m worried about, not them.
For adults, tech use may indeed be a combination of choice and
compulsion, but we can certainly make a pitch for sanity by cutting down
on the part of it that’s a choice. This autumn I’ve resolved to check
the habit, just like Bill Gates and all those other billionaire tech
bosses do at home, and start showing tech that it’s not the boss of me.
This article was originally published in The Spectator magazine.
