Techie Ramblings

Category: Social Media

  • Smartphone addiction or social media addiction?

    We see it all the time. People are at war with their own screen time. Or not. I’d argue some people don’t even know they have a problem. It’s very telling though when both of the major smartphone operating systems have built in methods to help limit screen time and use their devices in more productive ways. Would they actually want you to use your smartphone less though? Obviously not, but there is enough of a demand that they need to be seen trying at least.

    If you use a smartphone, take a look at your screen time in the settings of your device. If this isn’t something you’re mindful of you may be surprised at just how much time you spend staring at it every day. Secondly take a look at the breakdown by application, if you have any form of social media installed on the device I’d bet with fairly high confidence that the social media application is at the top of the list.

    The argument I’d like to make is that when we hear people talking about smartphone addictions, with people regularly hitting 10 hours or more a day on their phone (which is frankly insane!) they’re actually incorrect. I think what most people are describing is a social media addiction, the reason that the smartphone is blamed as the culprit it because it enhances the problem due to it’s convenience and portability.

    Have you ever noticed that neither Windows or Mac computers have settings to limit screen time? They simply don’t need it. When we use a computer it’s more intentional. Generally we perform the task we set out to complete and then we switch it off again. In my case I primarily use a desktop computer, to use it I have to sit at my desk and if I’m not at my desk any task I need to perform on the computer would have to wait until I’m there. The 27″ monitor I have can display information at a much larger size, I can type at 80 words per minute on it’s full sized keyboard, and I can select things and operate much more accurately with a proper mouse. Considering this and many more reasons, using my desktop computer is the most efficient and productive way for me to interface with the digital world. Yet if I wasn’t mindful of my usage I would be sat on the sofa trying to do these things on my phone. Why? Because it’s more convenient.

    Yes you can use social media on a computer, in a web browser but I doubt many people do this, especially those that aren’t mindful of their social media consumption. The majority of people will use social media on their mobile device, with a dedicated app that can send notifications to them at any time, and that’s when social media can become a problem.

    A smartphone, when used intentionally can be a very powerful productivity tool. It provides a way to interface with the digital form in a portable form factor. You can access and manage your finances. You have the entirety of human knowledge at your fingertips through its web browser. You can take photos, record videos, play them back or send them to friends and family. You can take and store an almost infinite number of notes. It can be your alarm clock, timer or stopwatch. You can read books or watch films on it. It can also replace your wallet. Obviously it’s also a phone! This is really only scratching the surface of the near endless functionality of a smartphone. Looking back only a few years having a modern smartphone in your pocket would be the equivalent of having access to a pocketable super computer. Is it the most productive form factor? Absolutely not. A relatively small touch screen as the only input and display is not a particularly ergonomic or effective way of using a computer, but considering it has to fit in our pocket the options are quite limited.

    I argue strongly that it is not the smartphone that should be demonised, for it’s merely a tool it is in fact the social media apps that have completely hijacked our smartphones that is the problem.

    Don’t believe me? Don’t take my word for it. Take part in my challenge. But before you do anything I’d like you to record some data as a baseline. For 7 days, at the end of each day, write down your total screen time for the day.

    Once you’ve done that delete every single social media app from your mobile phone, and block access to their web versions from your web browser (depending on your device the steps for that will be different but the information is easily found on popular search engines). You don’t need to delete your social media accounts, and you can still access the accounts on a desktop, laptop or even a tablet as often as you like but just not your smartphone. Do this for 14 days, and at the end of each day write down your total screen usage.

    I’ve done exactly as I described above, however I went one step further. I also completely deleted the accounts. The only account I still have is Youtube and I limit my usage of that to my tablet.

    The first couple of days you’ll find your screen time is still high, however it will be slightly lower than before. You’ll find yourself unlocking your smartphone regularly out of sheer habit, but because the allure of social media is gone from it you’ll probably swipe through the Home Screen for a minute or so before putting it back in your pocket. Try your best not to replace scrolling social media with mindless web browsing. By the end of this challenge I am almost certain that (unless you’re involved in multiple group chats that you participate heavily in) your screen time will have at least halved. You’ll find that when you do use your smartphone it will be to complete a task that you decided upon before you unlocked the screen, and once that task is completed the screen will be switched off.

    If you have taken part in this challenge, please share your results in the comments if you’re comfortable doing so. What I’d also be interested to know is that at the end of the challenge will you be reinstalling the apps or are you going to continue to keep them off your smartphone?

    For me personally I enjoy being intentional with my consumption of media, and I like to be present when I’m spending time with friends or family. A face to face conversation is much richer and more fulfilling than anything I could ever see on my smartphone so I prioritise that. I spend less than an hour a day on my smartphone now, and yet I still listen to music, I still use my GPS, I keep in touch with people, I do mobile banking and I keep on top of email. My device can go almost a week between charges because unless I need the phone for something, it’s not being used.

    To conclude and summarise: When you next hear the term “smartphone addiction”, consider correcting it to “social media addiction”. It’s nigh on impossible to be addicted to a tool. To put it crudely; a drug user is not addicted to a syringe, but the drugs they administer through it. Used correctly a syringe is a powerful tool that can be used to saved lives, but it can also be misused to devastating effect.

  • Staying sane in the digital era

    We are living in the biggest mental health crisis in modern history. People are more anxious and depressed than ever before. Doctors are throwing medication at the issue, with record numbers of people on prescribed medication, many others are self medicating the issue with illicit substances.

    We can cure more conditions than ever before, with diseases and illnesses that would’ve been a death sentence in years gone by now trivial. Yet mental health is still murky territory, and the knowledge we have on the subject lags years behind our advancements in physical conditions.

    Irrespective of this, it could easily be argued that the mental health of the developed world’s population is worse than ever, particularly in younger generations.

    Excessive smartphone and internet use have been cited as causes for a decline in mental health, and I’d argue it’s the main factor.

    Smartphones and internet, when used in a positive manner are two of the biggest technological advancements of man kind. We have the entirety of human knowledge and history at our fingertips, accessible to everyone and we can store the whole thing in our pocket. No longer does a question have to go unanswered, and everyone regardless of their education can find guides and a wealth of information on any task they are presented with.

    However, something that started with pure intentions of the advancement of humans has quickly been corrupted by greed and as of today there’s very little left of the internet that isn’t trying to make someone richer. At first the internet became littered with adverts, generic at first, then targeted through algorithmic analysis. Then came the influencers; advertisements in the disguise of content. Most recently came “AI”, human content is now at war with computer generated content, and the use of AI doesn’t come cheap for corporations so it’s used to either advertise products, harvest data or sway opinions in the favour of it’s overlord.

    People flock to social media as a last huddle to escape computer generated content, but this is not much better. Deep fakes, bots and generated content flood this too, often posing as a human poster.

    So what are we left with in 2025? Mass data collection, targeted advertising, political propoganda, AI generated content, fake news, malicious scamming and a mass of bots. Does this sound a healthy place to be? If you described that to me I wouldn’t want to spend one minute there, let alone upwards of 10 hours a day that an alarming number of people do today.

    There’s a lot to examine here so I’ll break this down into the different ways that this hurts our mental health:

    • Isolation – Human’s are social creatures, and interacting with each other and forming positive relationship improves our mental state. It’s an innate behaviour that we seek out interaction and approval of our peers. Social media preys on that. It exchanges genuine human interaction for cheap, low effort interaction. A like, a comment, an upvote, a retweet, a share all take next to no effort. The sender feels like they’ve got behind the poster, and the recipient feels accepted, like or admired. Both get a quick rush of dopamine, reinforcing the behaviour, encouraging the cycle to repeat. In actuality, these people haven’t interacted at all, but they feel like they have for a brief moment. People are using this as a substitute for staying in contact with their friends, family or acquaintances because it’s low effort. However for something to be genuinely fulfilling it needs to be given effort. Think of it as receiving a thoughtful, relevant gift opposed to a gift card. This whole cycle leaves people feeling more isolated and lonely than ever, which in turn leads them to spend more time on social media trying to fulfil a longing for human contact, obviously this just compounds the issue, but benefits the social media company massively as the user spends more time on their platform, consuming their content, sharing more of their personal information and feeding the advertisers.
    • Anxiety – You’ll have most likely heard of the term “clickbait” and maybe even “ragebait” by now. Even so, I’m sure you still fall for it, we all do. It’s a well known fact that negative content gets more engagement than positive. Someone who is outraged, scared or full of dread is much likely to click on an article, share or engage in discussion than something nice. It’s the same concept as you only see bad reviews online, people are generally more likely to go out of their way if they’ve had a negative experience. Marketers and news outlets know this, and as their income comes from your engagement they’ll produce what makes them more of it. For someone who gets the majority of their news from social media or less credible publications it would be very easy for them to form a view that everything in the world is terrible, on the brink of all out war, and that everyone is out to get them. In reality it’s not, but if that’s all you see you’ll start to believe it.
    • Too much exposure to news – Previously there were two ways to get your news. Either a newspaper or the televised news, usually once a day. To cram all this into one paper, or a small period of time on a TV channel news was concise and relevant to it’s readers/viewers. Do we really need to know of every conflict or problem occurring in the world? Does knowing about this enable you to do anything about it? Not every problem is ours to bare, and the increased mental stress of knowing all this information can weigh us down. Not too long ago we had town criers, who would deliver local news to the population. Being naturally inquisitive leads us into trying to be up to speed on worldwide events, even when there is really no benefit to us knowing about them.
    • Less time spent in the real world – Every minute spent online is a minute that could be spent doing something else. Buying something online substitutes an actual shopping trip, that would generally include some exercise and social interaction. Watching short form videos could substitute someone going for a walk in nature, playing with their children or learning a new hobby. I could go on but I’m sure you get the point. Granted that not every moment spent on the internet or a smartphone is productive time, but generally the time spend online does our mental health more harm than if we just stared at a wall.
    • Lack of boredom – This sounds counterintuitive but boredom is actually pretty important. I’m old enough to remember being a child or teenager, bored out of my mind in my bedroom, with only my thoughts. When we have no distractions the voice in our heads wake up, we start to think about and process our experiences, we start to be creative and eventually we seek out something interesting to do. When I hear that people are spending 10 hours a day on their phones it baffles me, what does that really leave any other time free for? Assuming the average person spends 7 hours a day asleep, and 8 hours a day working there literally is not enough hours in the day. Sleep problems are on the rise, and is it any surprise? That voice in our head that gets subdued with mindless content consumption wakes up when we close our eyes to try and sleep, we haven’t given our imagination and subconscious any time to be active.

    So what can we do?

    The most important thing you can do by far is remove yourself from social media. There is nothing beneficial there anymore, it’s mass data harvesting, propaganda and advertising thrown together in an addictive pot. Consider deleting your accounts, your apps and keep yourself as far away from it as possible. Reddit and Youtube count too, however these can be beneficial sources of information so I would suggest using these without an account and avoid the comments sections. Staying signed out keeps the algorithm from sucking you in. Personally I deleted all of my accounts years ago and the benefits have been huge. The funny thing is I’ve never felt like I was missing out. Nothing on those sites was of any real value.

    Secondly, limit your news consumption both in volume and geography. Consider setting aside 10 minutes a day to catch up on the news, and do it conscientiously. Either buy a local newspaper or stick to your towns local news outlet. You don’t need the whole worlds problems bearing down on your shoulders. And if it’s something you really need to know, you’ll find out.

    Thirdly, spend more time outside of your bubble. Step out into the world, go for a walk, explore a new place, even just go to the shops in person. Your outlook will begin to brighten quickly when you see life isn’t what the internet portrays it to be.

    Finally, embrace boredom! Achieving moments of boredom will look different for everyone. For me that meant keeping my smartphone very minimalist. I don’t have a web browser and I don’t have any apps outside of functional ones. My phone becomes a tool. For times where I need the internet, or apps I have my tablet and a PC. They’re less convenient and generally not on my person, so I can moderate their use more easily. To this day when I’m feeling bored I sometimes instinctively pull out my phone, only to realise there’s nothing to do on there and put it away. I’ll either find something else to do or just allow myself to be bored for a while. Eventually it stops being so uncomfortable and feels peaceful.

    The resolution looks slightly different for everyone, because we all have different circumstances and needs. For you, it might be a less extreme solution, even just reducing screen time but the key point is removing yourself from what has become a toxic environment.

  • The attention economy

    In my constant battle of trying to find balance in today’s world I’ve been going on a trip filled with nostalgia back in time a decade or two.

    I’m 31 now so some of my fondest memories are 15–20 years ago which takes us back to the time period of 2005–2010. Now I imagine everyone of different ages has a period of time in their heads they consider to be the “golden times” but I truly do believe these were great times, for technology and the internet at the very least which is something I enjoy focusing on.

    Myspace was in it’s final days, the most addictive part of Facebook was Farmville, Tumblr was where we pretended we were very deep and complex individuals and I never really got my head around what the point of Twitter was. We accessed these sites with intention, because it involved sitting down at a PC, more often than not the family PC in a shared space in the house. We still used MSN messenger, and Facebook chat was just getting started. Messages would only be replied to when we were on the PC.

    Our phones were what I consider to be the ideal scenario, they were complex enough that we could play basic offline games, they had rudimentary web browsers so we could obtain information in a pinch but the lack of memory and slow data meant that it was not an enjoyable experience. Other than that they made calls, sent texts and took very pixelated photos and videos.

    Most people gamed on an Xbox 360 or PS3 and most households had a Wii to play as a family. Online gaming was experiencing it’s first generation for most people who never owned a gaming PC. You bought the game and a year subscription to online services (or not in the case of the PS3, it was free!) and could play to your hearts content with your friends. Nobody was competing on who had the most expensive cosmetic items, and there was very little in the way of DLC.

    At some point in time, which I struggle to pinpoint, around 2012–2015 there was a major shift. Mobile devices became more advanced, mobile internet speeds improved and prices decreased, and WiFi became commonplace everywhere. The internet became a thing that followed us everywhere we went, rather than something we sit down to pay a visit to. Social media began to boom, and multiple different platforms began popping up. As time went on a cultural shift happened, most people no longer used or even owned a desktop PC or a laptop. Everything could be done on the ever expanding smartphone in our pockets.

    A war began across the internet, and the target was our attention.

    Very quickly marketers discovered that someone’s decision making process could be altered by what they saw on their social media feeds. Be that making a decision to buy a product based on advertisements that were displayed to the user, political opinions based on videos and material the user was fed, even lifestyle choices could all be altered.

    Social media platforms began monetising their platforms, but not to us the users. We were the product. Our attention was and is still sold to the highest bidder, they can pay money to target very specific demographics with their material. Think what you may but it’s very effective, these social media companies are now some of the wealthiest in the world, and their only product is a platform and its users.

    Any successful company will ensure it’s product is available and in plentiful supply, and this is where the addictive nature of these platforms come into play. Huge teams of people engineer their platform to be as addictive as possible, to keep you coming back and for as long as possible to ensure you are there and ready to view their customers advertisements. A notable example of this is when Facebook introduced notifications. At first the notification dot was blue, and users generally left it unread. When the colour was changed to red however it got much more attention, the colour red is well known to provoke a response in humans (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4413730/). These companies openly utilise our human nature and instinct to assure our attention.

    Humans have developed very rapidly over the last century. In evolution terms it’s been the blink of an eye since we were simple tribal or nomadic hunter gatherers. Our brains are not equipped to deal the cheap thrill that is social media. We are social creatures too, so when we receive a “like” it simulates social acceptance from our peers. Our brain rewards us for this good action with a little rush of dopamine. We crave this dopamine and repeat the behaviour. In more primitive times this would’ve been beneficial in that humans would act in ways that other members of their group liked, and this in turn would strengthen their bond which in survival terms is a good thing. In terms of social media a like costs nothing, and often means very little however the primitive circuitry in our brain cannot differentiate that from genuine interaction. Very easily people become addicted to this instant gratification, and in turn spend more time on social media which leads them to spend less time on genuine interaction.

    As you probably already know, or are finding out now social media isn’t beneficial for average people. There are genuine use cases for it, such as long distance relationships or friendships where face to face or a higher quality interaction is impossible but in general it is a lower quality social interaction. People are lonelier than ever but more connected than ever, why is this? I’d argue it’s because we’re replacing face to face interaction, or even a phone call with a like or a comment on a post, and somehow that feels like we’ve touched base with that person and removed the need to contact them in another manner.

    Social media then, is only really beneficial for the social media company itself, who make money from exploiting their users and keeping them active, and the companies that pay the social media company to advertise to it’s users.

    This is where we are today, and it only takes an altered perspective and you’ll find it impossible to avoid. AI generated sites litter search results. Social media can make you lose hours without realising just by choosing to open the app. We feel disconnected, dissatisfied and lonely through poor quality interaction online. Teenage boys are using steroids so they can look like their idols on Instagram, teenage girls are struggling with eating disorders for the same reason. Buying a genuine product online has become a minefield of ads and inferior products. There are so many bots online now it’s hard to tell if we’re talking to a real person, and in some cases bots end up talking to themselves.

    It feels like somewhere along the lines we went wrong with the internet, and I suppose where money is involved this was bound to happen. But I wish we could go back, and enjoy the internet for what it was again when it was fresh, exciting but not yet addictive and completely capitalised.