In 2000, Microsoft Canada found that our average attention span was 12 seconds long. Though the age of mobile tech has only just begun, Alter believes that signs point to a crisis. I downloaded Moment (the research I mentioned earlier) and uninstalled it after it informed me that, by noon, I had already fiddled away an hour of my time on the phone. Moment, an app designed to track how often you pick up and look at your phone, estimates that the average smartphone user spends two to three hours on his or her mobile daily. You don’t need to be locked in an airless room or unemployed in order to spend hours online.
You can carry your addiction around with you. Thirdly, it’s immersive – and even worse, it’s mobile. Want to send someone a message and see when it reaches their phone, when they read it and whether they like it? Even BlackBerry could do that.
Want to borrow a stranger’s dog to play with for an hour, with no long-term responsibility for the animal? Sure, there’s an app for that. Everything is possible in the ideology of the internet – need a car in the middle of the night? Here you go. And the internet, Alter writes, with its unpredictable but continuous loop of positive feedback, simulation of connectivity and culture of comparison, is “ripe for abuse”.įor one thing, it’s impossible to avoid a recovering alcoholic can re-enter the slipstream of his life with more ease than someone addicted to online gaming – the alcoholic can avoid bars while the gaming addict still has to use a computer at work, to stay in touch with family, to be included in his micro-society. Everyone is vulnerable we’re all just a product or substance away from an uncomfortable attachment of some kind. Rather, it is largely a function of environment and circumstance. We’re the only ones late to the party.Īddiction isn’t inherent or genetic incertain people, as was previously thought. The tech innovators behind our favourite products and apps understood that they were offering us endless portals to addiction. Brain patterns of heroin users just after a hit and World of Warcraft addicts starting up a new game are nearly identical. After all, Steve Jobs gave the world the iPad, but made very sure his kids never got near one. Tristan Harris, a “design ethicist” (whatever that is) tells the author that it’s not a question of willpower when “there are a thousand people on the other side of the screen whose job it is to break down the self-regulation you have”. Technology is designed to hook us, and to keep us locked in a refresh/reload cycle so that we don’t miss any news, cat memes or status updates from our friends. This tech zombie epidemic is not entirely our fault. Facebook was fun three years ago, Alter warns.
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