This millennial generation of ‘instant gratification’ has surrendered its autonomy to a single brick of steel and silicon. This is a concern as serious as global warming. Technology should improve our life, not distract from it. To achieve a life where we are not displacing our time to internet, we have to declutter our online life. For A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else. The previous blog concluded with a philosophy suggested by Cal Newport in his book Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. A philosophy that gives us the control back in our lives which is known as digital minimalism. Digital minimalism, he explains, is a “philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.”

It’s not about usefulness, it’s about autonomy

Cal Newport, Author, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a focused life in a noisy world

It is close to impossible to give up the technologies right now in this world. Fewer and fewer modern jobs allow you to avoid using computers and smartphones. But those who have a choice and want to realise the cliché ‘YOLO’ can adopt the minimalist attitude. According to Newport, to re-establish control, we need to rebuild our relationship with technology from scratch, using our deeply held values as a foundation. He suggests the first step is “the digital declutter process”. “Much like decluttering your house,” he explains, “this lifestyle experiment provides a reset for your digital life by clearing away distracting tools and compulsive habits that may have accumulated haphazardly over time and replacing them with a much more intentional set of behaviours, optimized, in proper minimalist fashion, to support your values instead of subverting them.”

What Tristian Harris warned us about – how handful of tech companies control billions of minds everyday – is what the elephant in the room is. However, in late 2019 Google launched a set of ‘experimental apps’ designed to help users to become better aware of their device use and therefore reduce their screen time. Google described its “Digital Wellbeing Experiments as a platform to encourage designers and developers to build digital wellbeing into their products. Anyone can use the platform to share their ideas and experimental tools to help people find a better balance with technology.” 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rt5LY5TeTVQ

The various wellbeing experiments involve:

• Unlock Clock, that shows you how often you unlock your phone.
• We Flip, lets a group of friends or a family disconnect from technology altogether by flipping a big switch. And if anyone unlocks their phone, the session ends for everyone — almost like making screen time a competitive family sport.
• Desert Island and Morph, meanwhile, take an app-centric approach to screen-time reduction. The former requires you to go a day with only your most essential apps, while the latter helps you stay focused by giving you the right apps at the right time of day.

This problem of behavioural addiction is the biggest problem in the contemporary world, which is the foundation of most of the problems in this world right now. This attention economy of tech companies has drastically changed how humans live, how they talk and their relationship with their families, friends and with themselves. We need technology for morally good reasons, it should give us the extraordinary power to bind ourselves together to tackle threatening problems like global warming, rather than manipulating kids to ‘socialise’ by maintaining their ‘snapchat streaks’.

Why do we then keep on scrolling to that bottomless feed of Instagram? Is this some neurological disorder in humans that is making them spend their considerable amount of time in front of their screens and has made them a smartphone addict. An average modern user spends around two hours per day on social media and related messaging services and compulsively checks his device about eighty-five times a day. However, according to Tristian Harris, a former ‘design ethicist’ at Google, the problem isn’t that people lack willpower; it’s that “there are a thousand people on the other side of the screen whose job is to break down the self-regulation you have.” This is a big giveaway – this means a handful of tech companies have invested billions of dollars to engineer these ‘features’ of smartphone to their best just to grab our attention. This big tech world is not a shrine that is serving us for good. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings in 2017 said that ‘he isn’t concerned about Amazon or HBO but his biggest competitor is SLEEP.’ Tristian Harris describes this as ‘The Arms Race for Attention.’

There are different psychological tricks that companies are using to grab our attention and getting us sucked into our devices. Adam Alter, a business professor with a PhD from Princeton in social psychology, in his book Irresistible points out,” The people who create and refine tech, games, and interactive experiences are very good at what they do. They run thousands of tests with millions of users to learn which tweaks work and which ones don’t—which background colors, fonts, and audio tones maximize engagement and minimize frustration. As an experience evolves, it becomes an irresistible, weaponized version of the experience it once was. In 2004, Facebook was fun; in 2016, it’s addictive.” Instagram is addictive, for example, because some photos attract many likes, while others fall short. Users chase the next big hit of likes by posting one photo after another, and return to the site regularly to support their friends. Gamers play certain games for days on end because they’re driven to complete missions, and because they’ve formed strong social ties that bind them to other gamers. https://www.businessinsider.com/how-app-developers-keep-us-addicted-to-our-smartphones-2018-1

People really haven’t realized that technology is holding the pen of history right now. We’re not in control.

Tristan Harris, director and co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology

Alter in his book further says, substance addiction and behavioural addictions are very similar; “They activate the same brain regions, and they’re fueled by some of the same basic human needs: social engagement and social support, mental stimulation, and a sense of effectiveness.”

https://youtu.be/NUMa0QkPzns

When you combine the sociology and the psychology of the whole experience it just becomes very difficult to live a mainstream life today where you completely disengage or even spend less than a few hours a day on your screens. “We require a philosophy that puts our aspirations and values once again in charge of our daily experience, all the while dethroning primal whims and the business models of Silicon Valley from their current dominance of this role.”, says Cal Newport in his book, Digital Minimalism. We cannot passively allow the wild tangle of tools, entertainments, and distractions provided by the internet age to dictate how we spend our time or how we feel.

What is that one thing that you would not like to lose in your life? If you asked this question to the teenagers five years ago then the answer would have been friends, family or some of their ‘productive’ habit; but if you ask the same question to the millennial generation today, then the answer would be Snapchat streaks. Today in this ‘virtual world’ when you hear phrases like – ‘Hey, I completed my 300 streak today’, ‘Did you see the wedding photos I posted on my Instagram story?’ or when you see ( if you’re also not doing the same activity) a common scene when you travel ‘heads bowed down, ears plucked with earphones, eyes on the screen watching religiously either some movie or western series’ – you might not find these phrases or scenes peculiar as you have got accustomed to hear or watch people doing that. But what many researchers have found or ‘a human being with common sense’ can find is that this is not a normal behaviour instead its behavioural addiction. Tristian Harris, director and co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, aptly describes this human state as “Technology in its own force is pushing our culture in a very specific direction.”

https://youtu.be/C74amJRp730

Over the past decade smartphones have revolutionised our lives in ways that go well beyond on how we communicate, navigate or educate ourselves, however these benefits seem to have come at a high cost to our mental and social lives. Smartphones have made humans an ‘uncapable thing’ that now finds nirvana in his device, a normal routine of a millennial starts off by turning off alarm on his phone, then after an all day of scrolling switching it off at midnight after some hours of binging. An attitude ‘I have just co-opted to this mainstream culture of using my phone wherever and whenever I can’ has been adopted.

“If you see someone in a café sipping coffee and staring out the window, it’s less likely that they’re enjoying a quiet moment and more likely that their device has simply run out of charge.”

Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, Smartphones revolutionise our lives – but at what cost?

The ‘innocent victims’ of this ‘distracted world’ have been the infants. A baby who doesn’t yet know how to speak, but now easily knows how to use an iPad. A 2015 study by Hilda Kabali shows that 30% of the children under the age of 2 know easily how to use an iPad but haven’t learnt how to speak. The concern is early brain development is dependent on which environment and surroundings children are in. Age between 0-2, the brain doubles in size and continues to grow until they become 25 years old. Studies show that 3 to 4 years old children who know how to use smartphones have motor difficulty in grasping objects like pen, blocks and paper. Kids are never going to be fully adapted and become evolved social creatures because if they spend all their time behind the screen they will never learn what “feedback” is. For example – Kids have to learn what it feels like and what are the emotions involved when other kids snatch toys from them. What’s worrying is that how will this generation of kids who have spent their development stage in front of the screens look like?

The question is why and when did we give up control of our lives to a single brick of steel and silicon and lost our ability to enjoy a moment without having an urge to document it for a virtual audience?