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I have been finding my daughter in that position far too often as
she constantly checks for social media updates, watches YouTube
videos, tries out new apps and selfie filters and texts with friends.
Something tells me I’m not alone. Trying to get her—or the vast
hordes of technoholic teens around the globe—to come up for air
has become a struggle. And any suggestion of taking her phone
away, even temporarily, transforms this normally smart, sweet,
responsible and reasonable kid into an anxious, arguing, begging,
panicking, and finally, wailing creature who will quickly snatch
up her phone and run out of the room.
In my view, she’s demonstrating a pretty unhealthy preoccupation
with her phone, but is there a larger concern at stake? I fear
there is: She may be coming biochemically addicted to it.
For a growing group of tech-savvy observers, smartphone obsession
now involves more than repetitive behavior: It taps directly
into neural networking. According to Tristan Harris, a former
Google ethicist, product manager and entrepreneur, many of
today’s devices are specifically designed to tap into the same brain
neurology that leads to gambling or drug addiction. Harris has
shared his views in a variety of media and forums, including ‘60
Minutes,’ ‘PBS NewsHour’ and TED Talks. Atlantic magazine has
called him “the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience.”
THE SLOT MACHINE EFFECT
In one section of his report, “How Technology Hijacks People’s
Minds,” Harris compares our phones to slot machines. His
premise: Just as those who make slot machines know they need
to link a user’s action (pulling a lever) with a reward (a match,
or a prize), those who design phones, devices, and other new
technology are, in essence, rewiring our brains to respond to the
same conditioning.
“When we pull our phone out of our pocket, we’re playing a
slot machine to see what notifications we got,” he writes. “When
we pull to refresh our email, we’re playing a slot machine to see
what new email we got. When we swipe down our finger to scroll
the Instagram feed, we’re playing a slot machine to see what photo
comes next. When we swipe faces left/right on dating apps like
Tinder, we’re playing a slot machine to see if we got a match.”
Harris largely blames the tech industry for creating these addictive
apps, and has been advocating for a different approach.
To follow that path he ultimately left Google to found Time Well
Spent, described on its website as a “nonprofit movement to transform
how technology companies steer billions of human minds.”
The Time Well Spent site describes the way apps are designed
to keep people using them. For example, before we shut it down,
YouTube will auto-load the next video. Instagram shows new
“likes” one at a time to keep people checking in, and “Facebook
shows whatever keeps us on the screen, whether it’s true or not.”
Harris’s site also challenges mobile phone and app developers
to create better design that takes quality of life into account. For
example, it proposes questions like, “What if we designed devices
to help us disconnect without missing something important?”
and “What if we designed devices for quick in-and-out interactions
not bottomless bowls?”
Or, in other words, if smartphones and their cohorts are so
intelligent, why don’t they see to it that we don’t become addicted
to them.
LIKE OTHER ADDIC TIONS
Dr. Michael Genovese, chief medical officer at Sierra Tucson
treatment center in Arizona and chief recovery adviser for Acadia
Healthcare’s recovery division in San Francisco, picks up Harris’s
addiction argument. The brain processes are very similar, he insists.
“It’s getting that dopamine surge that we find pleasurable,”
Genovese explains, adding that the process also taps into the
brain’s reward circuitry. “When you look at functional MRI and
Teenagers, as any
parent knows only too
well, spend significant
time communicating
with their social circles
through texting, social
media and games.