I’m very glad that the first part of my life was without the internet and all this relatively new technology. My family didn’t get our first computer – an Apple 2C – until I was a sophomore in high school. From that point on I was an eager and enthusiastic adopter of all things tech. It felt like a positive revolution, something that us young people were going to use to change the world for good. It was such an exciting time.
Well, that youthful enthusiasm certainly faded fast as the internet and surrounding services and technology matured. Now, it seems as though it is something to try and actively limit and get away from rather than embrace. I first got the ick with Facebook around 2016. Instead of a really fun place to go and casually connect with friends (often by throwing virtual midgets at them) it became a cesspool of political arguments, a huge increase of advertisements drowning out my friends posts and an endless stream of humble (or not so humble) bragging. As one old reporter put it, Facebook was “The Daily Me,” and boy was it. People were putting up picture after picture of themselves which have now created a respository of literally thousands of pictures of them doing stuff.
People began displaying their lives virtually not so much to keep connected anymore, but rather to receive the dopamine hit of seeing the ‘like’ count of your image increase. It became an addition from which many ( mostly women) are still addicted. For me, Facebook began to create negative feelings for some reason I still haven’t really identified. I’d spoken about limiting it and I think the political divisiveness caused by Trump was the tipping point. I really have no desire to use Facebook or really even keep in touch with anyone who can’t write a simple e-mail to me or even just shoot a quick text to my phone. I usually give all the effort to keep in touch but rarely have that reciprocated. It is as though technology has made many MORE INTROVERTED, feeling much more comfortable with an easy click of the ‘like’ button than a more committed e-mail, text, or God forbid, telephone call. Technology has done more to push us apart and has actually weakened formerly strong connections.
That has been my experience but I understand that I need to learn more about what the younger generation is experiencing. Yes, I’m technically savvy and have our household under digital control but I only see part of the influence technology is having on my own kids and I’m learning that for many youth, there are no guardrails at all! The internet has more influence over them than even parents and teachers!
It was with these thoughts in mind I decided to read this book. Below are my notes and thoughts
If your body was turned over to just anyone, you would doubtless take exception. Why aren’t you ashamed that you have made your mind vulnerable to anyone who happens to criticize you, so that it automatically becomes confused and upset?
Most definitely. For my own boys I describe it in video game terms. When you’re a low level character you can easily die from extremely weak hits by weak adversaries. However, when you’re a high level with large stats and powerful weapons and armor, those same attacks won’t even register. In the real world, that is confidence. And how do you get confidence? I explain it by simply taking pride in what they are good at such as art, their language abilities, their school grades AND doing something physical and knowing how to fight which we do from karate and now wrestling. It would be nice to live in a world where the fighting/self defense confidence wouldn’t be needed but that isn’t reality, especially in guy world. We’re still a primitive species and so being confident physically is still very important.
Don’t waste the rest of your time here worrying about other people—unless it affects the common good. It will keep you from doing anything useful. You’ll be too preoccupied with what so-and-so is doing, and why, and what they’re saying, and what they’re thinking, and what they’re up to, and all the other things that throw you off and keep you from focusing on your own mind.
I was happily surprised the author brings up zen meditation about this! He even brings up very Buddhist concepts like the “monkey mind” and how to calm it. Social media creates the opposite of a calm mind. I introduced my son to meditation a year or two ago but he never took to it. I need to try again as well as get back into practice myself.
People don’t get depressed when they face threats collectively; they get depressed when they feel isolated, lonely, or useless.
Imagine that you fell into a deep sleep on June 28, 2007—the day before the iPhone was released. Like Rip Van Winkle, the protagonist in an 1819 story by Washington Irving, you wake up 10 years later and look around. The physical world looks largely the same to you, but people are behaving strangely. Nearly all of them are clutching a small glass and metal rectangle, and anytime they stop moving, they assume a hunched position and stare at it. They do this the moment they sit down on a train, or enter an elevator, or stand in line. There is an eerie quiet in public places—even babies are silent, mesmerized by these rectangles. When you do hear people talking, they usually seem to be talking to themselves while wearing white earplugs.
The internet used to be a destination. It was an actual ‘hutch’ style desk where I’d sit down, turn on the computer, and then listen to high pitched computer sounds as we connected to the internet. I’d ‘surf’ for an hour or two, then turn it all off and live in the real world again. Now, that digital world is invading the real world with all its ceaseless notifications, dings, beeps, vibrations and so on, 95% of which do not need my immediate attention.
Sean Parker, one of the early leaders of Facebook, admitted in a 2017 interview that the goal of Facebook’s and Instagram’s founders was to create “a social-validation feedback loop . . . exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”
I believe that is why so many of my friends on Facebook continue to post almost daily (mostly women). It is no longer about connection, but they have an addiction to the social validation. Their mind requires the dopamine from those ‘likes’ just as strongly as their caffeine addiction requires coffee.
Smartphones grab our attention so powerfully that if they merely vibrate in our pockets for a tenth of a second, many of us will interrupt a face-to-face conversation, just in case the phone is bringing us an important update. We usually don’t tell the other person to stop talking; we just pull out our phone and spend some time pecking at it, leaving the other person to conclude, reasonably, that she is less important than the latest notification.
I point this out to my own family. This is rude and shows that people are primitive indeed, reacting just as strongly to these notifications from their phones as Pavlov’s dogs reacted to the sound of a bell. Indeed, one not even wait for notifications, just have a look around a restaurant and see how many couples and families are peering into their phones instead of having a conversation.
We often enjoy entertainment about dystopian futures but guess what? We’re all living in a dystopian future right now! And, it will only get worse.
As generative AI personalities improve, and as they are implanted into ever-more-lifelike sex dolls and sex robots,[44] an increasing number of heterosexual men may find that a hikikomori lifestyle with a programmable mechanical girlfriend is preferable to the thousands of left swipes they get on dating apps, to say nothing of the social risk of approaching a girl or woman in real life and asking her out on a date.
Seems reasonable to me! World and life is continually getting more difficult, especially for young people. I’m just now learning that to get in to the best schools now require 4.3+. The homes where we live are unaffordable and layoffs are occurring all over the place as the AI revolution heats up. If I were a young person facing such daunting challenges, the allure of shutting myself up in a room with this futuristic sex doll they’re speaking of might seem like a decent idea!
Of course this is atrocious, and so I do my best to teach my kids how to interact: call people by their name, make small talk, look them in the eye (culture dependent) etc. They’re still young and not very good at any of the above but continual reinforcement should eventually stick.
But after wading into one of the largest and most contentious areas of media research, I do not find clear evidence that would support a blanket warning to parents to keep their boys entirely away from video games. The situation is different from the many studies that link girls, social media, anxiety, and depression.
Great and I’m glad to hear it! I played video games on my Atari, Sega Master System and Genesis. I found the experience to be both enjoyable and beneficial personally – although it was probably somewhat detrimental in helping improve the skill of talking to girls. I would have loved to have a girlfriend late elementary / early high school but looking back, I say it was good I didn’t. Childhood could be extended just a bit longer.
However, like much on the internet games have gotten thousands of times better and more addictive. In drug terms it would be as though Atari was a little skunk weed while current PC / Playstation games are like fentanyl. I could only play Atari for an hour or two before I got bored of it. Kids today could play games nonstop.
*Note: I’m old enough to think it weird when I hear wives complaining about their husbands playing “too much X-Box.” To me, that is a teenager problem, not a 30-something with a family problem. It makes me feel old.
Unlike online pornography, researchers have found that a number of benefits accrue to adolescents who play video games. Some research has demonstrated that video game use is associated with increased cognitive and intellectual functioning, such as improved working memory, response inhibition, and even school competence. One experiment found significant decreases in depression symptoms when an experimental group was assigned to play 30 minutes of video games three times a week for a month. Other studies have found playing games cooperatively can induce players to cooperate outside the game.
Agree – video games are, on the overall, beneficial so long as they do not become an addiction.
But now I’d like to write less as a social scientist than as a fellow human being who has felt overwhelmed, personally and perpetually, since around 2014. It feels as if something very deep changed in the 2010s. On college campuses, there seemed to be a shift from discover mode to defend mode. In American politics, things got even stranger. I’ve been struggling to figure out: What is happening to us? How is technology changing us?
I like his idea of ‘discover vs defend mode,’ and will keep this in mind as I see my own kids develop.
But there’s another vertical dimension, shown as the z axis coming out of the page. I called it the divinity axis because so many cultures wrote explicitly that virtuous actions bring one upward, closer to God, while base, selfish, or disgusting actions bring one downward, away from God and sometimes toward an anti-divinity such as the Devil.
Interesting that he brings spirituality into the discussion. But yes, I’d agree that technology is spiritually harmful.
Meditation helps to calm the monkey mind. Over time, the nature of conscious experience changes, even when one is not meditating. Studies on Buddhist monks suggest that their intense meditation practices alter their brains in lasting ways, decreasing activation in brain areas related to fear and negative emotionality. That’s a sign that they have come to live in the openness of discover mode, rather than in the guardedness of defend mode.
I learned of this long ago and had a good meditation practice going there for a while. It is time to get back into it.
Smartphones and social media smash the levee, flood consciousness with alerts and triviality, fill the ears with sounds, fragment attention, and scatter consciousness.[15] The phone-based life makes it difficult for people to be fully present with others when they are with others, and to sit silently with themselves when they are alone. If we want to experience stillness and silence, and if we want to develop focus and a sense of unified consciousness, we must reduce the flow of stimulation into our eyes and ears. We must find ample opportunities to sit quietly, whether that is in meditation,[16] or by spending more time in nature, or just by looking out a car window and thinking on a long drive, rather than always listening to something, or (for children in the back seat) watching videos the whole way.
I wonder what the ever present screens have done to imagination. Kids always want to be entertained with their phones and I often let them. But over the past couple of years I’ve been telling them to put the phones away and look out the window. When I do this however, they just fall asleep.
For my own imagination I believe there has been an effect as well due to all this technology. I used to be able to imagine certain scenarios very vividly but that ability has been diminished. I’m not sure if it is due to simply age, constant screen/distraction or perhaps even COVID. It is something I’ll have to make a conscious effort to try and get back.
Social media is a fountain of bedevilments. It trains people to think in ways that are exactly contrary to the world’s wisdom traditions: Think about yourself first; be materialistic, judgmental, boastful, and petty; seek glory as quantified by likes and followers.
In this world, hate never yet dispelled hate. Only love dispels hate. This is the law, Ancient and inexhaustible. You too shall pass away. Knowing this, how can you quarrel?
In the woods . . . these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign. . . . Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God. – From Walden
It matters what we expose ourselves to. On this the ancients universally agree. Here is Buddha: “We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts.”[37] And here is Marcus Aurelius: “The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts.”
I’ve read many books on meditation and Buddhism, I’ve read Marcus Aurelius and many other books that discuss how important it is to train the mind. I understand and agree with it, but the problem is persistence. I always fall out of practice. I wrote the post about Marcus Aurelius ‘Meditations’ ten years ago. It would be nice to say I’ve been practicing meditation consistently for 10 years which is certainly not the case.
In an attention economy, there’s only so much attention and the advertising business model always wants more. So, it becomes a race to the bottom of the brainstem. . . . It starts small. First to get your attention, I add slot machine “pull to refresh” rewards which create little addictions. I remove stopping cues for “infinite scroll” so your mind forgets when to do something else. But then that’s not enough. As attention gets more competitive, we have to crawl deeper down the brainstem to your identity and get you addicted to getting attention from other people. By adding the number of followers and likes, technology hacks our social validation and now people are obsessed with the constant feedback they get from others. This helped fuel a mental health crisis for teenagers.
Governments are literally criminalizing the play-based childhoods that were the norm before the 1990s.
Further proof that we’re already living in a dystopian future.
The “digital divide” is no longer that poor kids and racial minorities have less access to the internet, as was feared in the early 2000s; it is now that they have less protection from it.
In The Gardener and the Carpenter, the developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik notes that the word “parenting” was essentially never used until the 1950s, and only became popular in the 1970s. For nearly all of human history, people grew up in environments where they observed many people caring for many children. There was plenty of local wisdom and no need for parenting experts.
One modern-day program to consider is the American Exchange Project. It sends high school seniors from all over the United States to spend a week with a family in another state, in the hopes of weaving a polarized country back together. And it’s free! Meanwhile, the American Field Service has been sending high school students all over the globe for decades. Teens live with a family and attend the local school. Alternatively, you can host a student from abroad. CISV International, pioneered by the child psychologist Dr. Doris Allen, fosters intercultural friendship through exchanges and other youth programming beginning at age 11. There are CISV chapters in more than 60 countries around the world.
There are so many programs and opportunities out there. It is difficult to even know programs like these exist and just as difficult to find the gems, one whose purpose isn’t only driven by profits.
In summary, I feel as though I’ve done a pretty good job regulating the technology with my kids. Here is what it looks like in our household.
- Yes, they have a great PC, iPhone, iPad and even an Apple Watch.
- All of these devices are under the family setting by router meaning most of the things they should not be looking at on the internet are filtered out.
- They are allowed to game plentifully so long as they maintain straight As, do their homework and do something physical which for most of their lives has been karate.
- Social media is forbidden.
- I can see what they’re watching and doing on the internet from the comfort of my own computer. I’ve looked at their activities probably only 3 times in the past seven years. They are good kids so I don’t feel it is necessary. My method is to just talk to them normally about the internet, teach them how it works and explain the good, bad and ugly. I want them to understand companies are preying on them, ensure they have a basic technological skill and to express my own fears with tech.
And I’d like to say that it isn’t just the kids that have a problem with technology, but the adults as well! I make sure my boys see this. Given that profit is really the only concern of most technology companies, I expect this to continually get worse and I’m pretty sure our future is going to look even more bizarre as it would be for someone suddenly appearing from the 1980s and having a look around.
