It’s almost instinctual now. Without even opening my eyes each morning, I reach over and feel around my night stand until I find it. The small rectangular device that runs all of our lives. I don’t usually wake up to my phone vibrating or ringing, but it still happens. Every day, without fail. I grab my phone before I’ve even had a chance to process the new day and begin to scroll mindlessly over the few social media platforms that I have. I check Twitter, then Snapchat, then TikTok, then my email, over and over again until it’s time to start my day. It’s like an itch that needs to be scratched and I have yet to find the metaphorical ointment to make me do otherwise.
In an interview with Anderson Cooper on CBS’s 60 Minutes, former Google Product Manager Tristan Harris described having a smartphone as a perpetual slot machine because every time you look at it, you never know what you’re going to get. So we begin to form these repetitive habits day after day because the result is our generation’s version of a reward.
To Harris, coders and programmers have been working to decrease our self-control and slowly take over our brain. We are all quite literally being brain hacked. In keeping with the slot machine metaphor, they have created systems to offer us different versions of the jackpot, which we happily take as “likes,” “favorites,” and positive engagement like comments and fun emoji. Every time our phones ping with a new notification, we’re hit with a boost of dopamine that will enhance this additive response. These programmers might as well be writing the code for our addiction by continuing to find ways to lure us back in. And we do, because we always have this incessant need to check one more thread, or refresh our feed just one more time.
According to Cooper during the interview, there is research that suggests that our phones are keeping us in a continual state of anxiety in which the only anecdote is our very phone. This anxiety of always needing more; more updates, more gossip, more photos from friends, more news— the latter of which, can be cause for issue.
In an article on the nonprofit, independent news organization The Conversation from March 2020, the authors described the negative impact social media has had during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. While public health officials were working hard to carefully craft their statements and to make sure it were accurate and safe to post, people online got restless and instead began an “infodemic” by spreading misinformation and causing confusion, all because they wanted the information at that very moment, it didn’t matter if it was accurate or not.
I get it, I know everyone has been more on edge these last 11 months, we are still in a pandemic after all, but all this did was turn our phones and social media into weapons, even more so than before. In working for the public relations department of a school district for the last five years, I understand the importance of getting information out to information-hungry people online, but there’s a responsibility of ensuring accuracy.
We’re living in a time where those who have the important job of sharing information online need to take the time to analyze and assess it at their own speed without the worry of having to compete with the immediate spreading of misinformation on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. As Cal Newport shares in Deep Work, “clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.” And these last few months confirmed that what’s important is accuracy, not how many likes your mask-less photo while on vacation got.
Social media is a scary place. We have the opportunity to experience and share incredible things with our friends and family, but there’s also a price. And that price is our self-control. We have to break away from the addiction of always having to “post first” and take the time we need to just be present. I can’t lift my right hand and pledge to not continue checking my phone every morning when I wake up and every evening before falling asleep, but I do hope that if we are all going to stay online, the least we can do is promote digital literacy, and not contribute to the negative impacts that come with misinformation online.
References:
Cooper, A. (2017, April 09). What is “brain hacking”? Tech insiders on why you should care. Retrieved February 07, 2021, from https://www.cbsnews.com/news/brain-hacking-tech-insiders-60-minutes/
Ali, S. Harris, and Fuyuki Kurasawa (2020, March 22) . “#COVID19: Social Media Both a Blessing and a Curse during Coronavirus Pandemic.” The Conversation, Retrieved February 7, 2021, from theconversation.com/covid19-social-media-both-a-blessing-and-a-curse-during-coronavirus-pandemic-133596.
Newport, C. (2016). Chapter 2: Deep Work is Rare in Deep Work (pp. 49–71). New York: Grand Central Publishing.