Comedian Des Bishop had his audience laughing out loud earlier this year when he said that when he was a teenager, no one talked about mindfulness (mindfulness). “We were conscious of it half the time because we had no choice. If you were waiting for someone, you waited. If you were on the bus, you were on the bus and watched the condensation fall on the windows. If you wanted to play a VHS tape back, you had to rewind it. Mindfulness. Have you rewound anything in your life?
The advent of smartphones has changed, perhaps forever, our daily behavior. It is estimated that there are nearly 7 billion smartphones on the planet, or nearly one for every human being, and this number is growing faster than the population.
The brain is an adaptable organ and changes its configuration to better perform the task it performs most frequently. For example, different studies have proven that London taxi drivers, who have to pass a very difficult test to obtain their license, for which they must memorize all the streets of the city, have a hippocampus (the part of the brain where memory is located). ) more developed than the rest of the population.
Likewise, our brains, especially those of younger people, are adapting to develop a different skill: constantly switching from one task to another, and that comes at a cost.
According to the latest data from the National Institute of Statistics (INE), 40% of 11-year-olds in Spain own a mobile phone. This figure rises to 75% at 12 years old and 90% at 14 years old. But it is not just about access, which is omnipresent, but also about the use that is made of these devices, especially social networks.
In Spain, 30 million users access social networks daily, spending an average of 46 minutes a day on them, but this time they spend up to 70 minutes in the generation born after 2000, who have not known a world without the Internet, according to the GfK. DAM report. The same report reveals that the network most used by people born after 1990 is Instagram, which occupies half of the time they dedicate to social networks, around nine hours a week in total, followed by TikTok.
Social Media: Designed to Cause Addiction
Psychologist B.F. Skinner is known for developing the theory of operant conditioning, which explains the repetition of certain behaviors. In his “Skinner box,” the researcher placed rats and a lever that gave them food when they pressed it. Thus, the rat learned to press the lever when it was hungry and rest the rest of the time. Conversely, if the lever was disconnected and the food was stopped, the rat would soon give up and stop pressing it.
However, Skinner introduced a perverse variation: sometimes the lever provided food to the rat, and sometimes not, randomly. This is called intermittent reinforcement. The result was that the rat pressed the lever constantly, in a state of increasing agitation.
Skinner’s theories have an immediate practical application in humans: slot machines. A behavior, that of putting money into the machine, can result in either a prize or nothing. The goal is for the subject to continue putting money into the slot machine, without stopping, and this is one of the behaviors that leads to problem gambling.
The parallel with social media is easy to see. A gesture, a swipe, produces an endless chain of content, some interesting and some not. In the case of dating apps, the content is people, in a game that looks even more like a slot machine, trying to create matches.
You don’t have to use the phone. A study published in Nature found that simply having it in front of you, such as on the table while you’re talking to another person, takes up your brain’s processing power and reduces your attention.
In addition, the use of these applications fragments attention. The human brain is not multitasking. Instead, we learn to switch from one task to another very quickly, but with each change, an adaptation to the new task is necessary, and this has a cost in time and efficiency. With the use of social networks as a source of information and entertainment, and the avalanche of information to which we are subjected, we lose the ability to concentrate.
You don’t have to use the phone. A study published in Nature found that simply having it in front of you, such as on the table while you’re talking to another person, takes up your brain’s processing power and reduces your attention.
Stolen Attention
Johann Hari is a British journalist and writer known for his work on addiction, mental health and social criticism, and has written books on addiction and depression. One of his latest works is titled The Value of Attention: Why It Was Stolen and How to Get It Back (published in Spain by Peninsula).
In his book, Hari looks back at the evolution of social networks since the appearance of Facebook in 2005. At first, access was via the web, and to capture the attention of users, rewards such as “likes” were used, which publications accumulated. When reaching the end of a web page, there were buttons to go to the next page.
But in 2006 engineer Aza Raskin developed the technique of roll or infinite scrolling, which eliminated pagination from websites. Instead, once the end of the screen was reached, new content was loaded as the user scrolled endlessly down the page.
According to their estimates, infinite scrolling increases the time spent on an application by 50%. Today, Raskin denies his invention. He is one of the founders of the Center for Human Technology and is very critical of the effects of technology on humans. The center is responsible for the documentary The social media dilemma, available on Netflix, where these tactics of big tech companies are exposed.
The business model of social platforms is based on a single metric: the amount of time a person spends on the app. More time, more exposure to ads, more ad revenue. More time, more ability for the app to analyze individual behavior and display content that increases usage time, such as politically polarizing content and conspiracy theories, as well as personalized ads that are more likely to result in a sale.
The business model of social platforms is based on a single metric: the time a person spends consulting the application. More time, more exposure to ads, more ad revenue
Facebook conducted an internal survey to see how political polarization was affecting its platform. The report Common ground He was blunt: “Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to division.” The working group was disbanded.
Social networks do not exist to improve people’s lives, but to extract what is most precious to us: our time. Various specialists, both in psychology and technology, do not hesitate to call this concept “addictive” and to propose a solution. Social networks could start offering their services in exchange for a monthly subscription, like social media platforms. streaming. This would eliminate advertising and open the door to apps that would instead serve to receive information from friends and family, or useful acquaintances – but this formula would lead to a significant bias based on purchasing power.
How to regain attention
Experts are beginning to consider compulsive mobile phone use as a form of addiction, which can affect social relationships, reduce cognitive abilities and the ability to process negative emotions, leading to a deterioration in mental and physical health. There are a number of small changes to get rid of mobile phone addiction and regain our attention:
- Make it aware: we use the phone automatically, a first step is to use the “Screen Time” option, which measures the time we spend in each application. It can be much more than you think.
- Disable notifications: Notification technology is called “push” (push) are calls for attention that make us lose focus on what we are doing. Instead, turning them off makes us regain control and use the strategy “to pull”that is, we decide when we want to see new messages.
- Control apps: On today’s phones, you can set limits on the use of certain apps (although it’s easy to ignore them). Others applications like Freedom or Antisocial limit the duration of use and block access until the next day.
- Keep the phone out of sight: Having the phone in front of you is an encouragement to use it, instead leave it outside the bedroom so it doesn’t interrupt your sleep, in your pocket to avoid it interrupting a conversation with another person, and in a drawer or closet when you need to concentrate on a task.
- Seek out other stimuli: Social media captivates us because of our need for connection and our curiosity to discover new things. Instead, bring back in-person socializing, group activities, especially outdoors, and learning new skills, like a language or an instrument, that require you to focus.
Johann Hari recounts in his book how he tried to kick his cell phone addiction by retreating for a month to a coastal town with no internet. During that time, he was able to read books, write, reconnect with friends, and feel fulfilled and satisfied. But when he returned, within days, everything was back to normal and he was constantly on his phone. Digital disconnection can be beneficial, but Hari recommends something we can do every day to regain our focus: setting aside time to do nothing, letting our thoughts wander freely, new connections being made, and new ideas emerging.
Darío Pescador is editor and director of the Quo Magazine and author of the book the best of yourself Published by Oberon.
