Technology: Addiction or Autonomu

Kevin George Carey

Sep 4

A study on medium, message, and the attention economy.

Books referenced in this study:

Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman

The Shallows by Nicholas Carr

Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport

"I Used to Be a Human Being" by Andrew Sullivan, from New York Magazine (September 19, 2016)

Six months ago I posted here @kgcwrites about "A New Rule" I was instituting for my habits surrounding social media, internet usage, content consumption and creation, and iPhone addiction. I wrote about the subsequent effects this "rule" had on my interaction with those closest to me, as well as its effects on my anxiety and stress, my professional and personal performance, and my general mental health. It was an experiment with the way I interacted with the attention economy, and this experiment has continued for the last six months - to some noticeable benefit.

But, this past month, I wanted to study up on technology's affect on human society, starting with Neil Postman's classic Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), then moving on to Nicholas Carr's The Shallows (2010), and finally Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism (2019) + Andrew Sullivan's seminal long-form article "I Used to Be a Human Being" from New York Magazine (2016).

Each work had its technological focus:

Postman - TV

Carr - the Internet

Newport + Sullivan - the Mobile Attention Economy

Standing waist-deep in these varied intellectual waters for a month now, I found myself highlighting several passages and trying to wrap my head around not just decades, but hundreds or even thousands of years of technology's impact on human civilization: from innovations like writing, the printing press, and the telegraph, and all the way to radio, TV, the internet, mobile phones, and the rise of the attention economy.

I won't attempt here to revisit every point written about in these four sources. I would, however, highly recommend all four works if you want to do a deep dive on these topics.

But I will get down a couple of thoughts here as talking points, and will look forward to the discussions that will follow over beers or coffee, during church courtyard interactions, and via FaceTimes, DMs, and texts.

"The medium is the message" is the famous quote from Marshall McLuhan, but Postman further explains: "Each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility." All said, society's messages are always changed by the medium they are distributed by.

For our present cultural moment, where the "medium" is social media, text messages, and short emails mixed with a societal addiction to smart phones, our collective "messages" are outrage, insecurity, anxiety, performance, and digital unreality. All of this takes the place of genuine, nuanced, complex, slow, in person, human interaction.

I would add that our brains, according to anthropologist Robin Dunbar, are built to navigate a community of no more than 150 people that are all in close proximity. Our interaction with these 150 people were, for thousands of years, only in person, and these connections formed the basis of our community and, therein, our social web. Today, in our mobile-led digital reality, we are connected to thousands of people virtually, across thousands of miles, interacting with short electronic bursts that don't communicate near enough of what our brains were designed to handle or need.

Here's what Cal Newport has to say on this:

"The idea that real-world interactions are more valuable than online interactions isn't surprising. Our brains evolved during a period when the only communication was offline and face-to-face… The low-bandwidth chatter supported by many digital communication tools might offer a simulacrum of this connection, but it leaves most of our high-performance social processing networks underused—reducing these tools' ability to satisfy our intense sociality. This is why the value generated by a Facebook comment or Instagram like—although real—is minor compared to the value generated by an analog conversation or shared real-world activity." (Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism)

Further adding to this discussion, Newport writes: "[These] hot new technologies that emerged in the past decade or so are particularly well suited to foster behavioral addictions, leading people to use them much more than they think is useful or healthy. Indeed, as revealed by whistleblowers and researchers like Tristan Harris, Sean Parker, Leah Pearlman, and Adam Alter, these technologies are in many cases specifically designed to trigger this addictive behavior. Compulsive use, in this context, is not the result of a character flaw, but instead the realization of a massively profitable business plan."

Yikes.

As Newport ominously says: "We didn't sign up for the digital lives we now lead. They were instead, to a large extent, crafted in boardrooms to serve the interests of a select group of technology investors."

Or, more: "We didn't […] sign up for the digital world in which we're currently entrenched; we seem to have stumbled backward into it." (Newport)

I could go on and on with quotes that are pertinent to this discussion, but in the interest of time and space, I'll just ask the following:

Is the current attention economy really what we want for our society?

Is the attention economy really what we want for our kids?

Do we really want society-wide smart phone addiction?

Do we really want to miss out on the analogue, in person, slow, nuanced communication that we were designed to engage in?

If the answers are "No" to these questions, what do we want instead?

As Newport says: "It's not about usefulness, it's about autonomy."

Look forward to your thoughts.