PassW0rd – 12th July 2017

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Speaker D: Hello and welcome to Password. I’m Pete Warren, and like most of us, I look at my mobile phone every 16 minutes to check for updates. This edition of Password is an hour long, so I’ll be doing that 3 or 4 times. And in the meantime, you might also hear some of the little noises it makes. I hope you won’t think I’m being rude, but I’m not going to switch it off. I’m not one of the 59% of respondents who recently told the communications watchdog Ofcom that they’re addicted to social media and spend the equivalent of 1 day a week on it. But some of the people I’ve been talking to, from a professor in Los Angeles to a teenage girl in Chichester, are trying to sound the alarm. They say many of us need to go back to the analog world. We need a digital detox. Carl Smith is an expert in virtual and augmented reality at Ravensbourne, the digital arts college in Greenwich, just down the road from us, and he’s working with a chest implant called North Sense that allows the wearer to literally become technology. —with an enhanced sense of place and direction. But Carl Smith fears the human-tech relationship has got out of balance.

Speaker F: For me, the big killer app— and I’m working on a big European project where we’re trying to create a new form of media called wearable experience. So imagine a situation where we’ve got a surgeon doing surgery. We can now map the surgery in real time, make a 3D model on the fly. We can also map the surgeon. We can map his head movement, his eye movement, his hand movement, his finger movement. And then a novice surgeon wearing AR headset like the HoloLens from Microsoft and smart gloves can actually wear the experience of the surgeon. They can be in the surgeon’s body, they can see ghost hands where he’s moved, they can actually see where he’s looked, they can hear what he’s done. So that’s this, this whole, you know, area of apprentice-master, you know, getting, getting point of view, um, situated embodied experience which will transform, you know, the world of, the world of training with augmented reality. And that’s what we’re doing. We’re working with astronauts and working with surgeons, and our solution will be on the International Space Station because they’ve already got HoloLenses there. So I think that once the technology— and, you know, HoloLens is still, it’s still in its early phase, it’s still that, you know, it’s still not commercially available, it’s only in beta, but it’s you can see where it’s going. So I’m really interested in, you know, making people aware of what’s going to be coming so that they can start to think about how they want to use it in a DIY fashion, as opposed to having these things forced upon you. Isn’t—

Speaker D: I mean, that’s the key, isn’t it? Because we are beginning to lose quite a lot of ourselves, aren’t we? We’re beginning— because this uncontrolled use of technology has meant that we’re in a situation now where people are actually giving their children mobile phones as distraction toys rather than actually taking the— well, making the effort to actually talk to their children. Technology is disembodying us.

Speaker F: Yeah, yeah, it’s, it’s a good— I mean, it’s Yeah, I mean, this is exactly the point, isn’t it? That you can see why people have to go away and go on a camp just to, just to stop the dissociation, because it is so— it is just so immersive. And, you know, I’ve actually removed Facebook from my phone because now I’m in that— now I’m back in the world. You know, it’s only been a month and But just not— I mean, and actually it’s quite nice to go back and actually see, you know, a few messages rather than have them, you know, constantly coming at you. It’s nice to actually have a break from it. I mean, I try and subvert Facebook because I know what they’re trying to do, and I consciously try and subvert it. So I think it’s, again, it’s a massive literacy problem. And actually, I was at an amazing conference this weekend called Breaking Convention at Greenwich, and University, a massive conference about psychedelics and, and the uses of those, of those medicines to actually cure the problems created by the legal drugs. What was interesting is sitting out on the lawn with all these people, 1,000 people attended, and everyone’s on the lawn. And this guy stood up at one point and he said, look around you, look around you. Nobody’s on their mobile phones. Everyone’s communicating with each other. And he just said, I love you all, you’re my community. And he just sat back down. And I could not believe it. I actually looked around. I started taking photos of all these people actually just talking without being on their phones. It was, it was absolutely shocking.

Speaker D: I mean, that’s— there is something of a backlash, whether, whether it is a full backlash that’s taking place. The last issue of the women’s magazine Grazia was entirely dedicated to having a detox, to saying to people, go and read a book, go and listen to a record. You, you’ve become a victim of all of this technology to such an extent that there’s this one converged device that’s sucking you in because all of these devices have been united— the phone, the camera, the, the, the, the, um, TV— sorry, the TV, the record player. Exactly.

Speaker F: And, uh, I think that I think that’s exactly right. And I’m really— I mean, I’ve got myself, I’ve got 10,000 vinyl records, and, and I have people say to me, well, why, why do you want to like have to put up— put on a record? And you know, each side’s only 20 minutes if it’s an album. What, isn’t that annoying having to get up? And I have to explain to them that not only is it my gym because I’m physically moving around, it’s also my memory palace because I have to know where all those records are. And I’m not one of these people that’s OCD and like labeling things and putting things in alphabetical order. I just, I quite like having it quite chaotic, but using it as a memory palace. And just to explain to people that don’t know what memory palaces are, you know, the Greek orators never wrote anything down. They had these 7-hour speeches that they mapped into their, into virtual architectures in their heads. And then they would literally map different parts of their 7-hour speeches into different architectural features. And then they just needed to remember a certain path through that structure to trigger the whole 7-hour speech. Now, what do they have, or what did they have, that we lost through our media usage, through language, through literacy? And what does this mean for something like augmented reality? Isn’t this marking of space actually what augmented reality is? And isn’t that a massively interesting pedagogy, an ancient pedagogy that can be applied to a modern technology? No, exactly.

Speaker D: I mean, one of the points, and it has been made again within the last two months, that the use of satnavs robs us of a large part of our brain. People do very stupid things because they just inherently trust in what the satnav is telling them. So they go along streets that are unfeasibly large for large lorries, or they drive into rivers. And the result of this is that because you’re not actually looking around for signposts, because you’re not trying to map things in your mind, you actually are— your brain becomes less active because it should, you know, the point has to be made that your brain is a muscle too. Exactly.

Speaker F: One of my mates actually doesn’t use the internet. I mean, I’m just talking just general search engine. Usage because he says that’s the big brain. And he says, I want to use my, my local brain before I resort to using the big brain. And exactly that, he will try everything he can in order to, to not go to the easy— not to go to the easy option. And it’s a bit like me, I’ve lost my smartphone recently, or I smashed it up, and it’s meaning that I don’t have a GPS, I don’t have Citymapper on my phone. Again, I’m having to be going back to that purely self-reliant analog version of just asking people. It’s almost as if we have to either just drop our phones down the drains temporarily to remember that these things are actually— we’re becoming dependent and actually very, very— it’s a bit like Wally World where everything’s at your fingertips. You just get fat and stupid.

Speaker D: Carl Smith has been to Japan to research the Hokutomori, Japanese teenagers who enter a virtual world at puberty and never leave their room. Full-time gamers hooked to the joystick. New gadgets and games that allow us to enter virtual worlds can now mix fantasy and reality. Pornhub, for example, lets you feel what the characters on the screen are feeling through a Wi-Fi-enabled sex toy. Toy. And North Sense, Carl Smith’s wearable compass project, gives the wearer a sort of superpower.

Speaker G: It’s important to understand here the difference between a comp— between a, a tool and the sense. So people say, okay, but I have a compass on my phone, why do I need the North Sense on my body? I can just use my phone. And it’s true, you do have a compass on your phone, but the compass is a tool, is something that you need to make a deliberate decision to take it out of your pocket, open it, look inside, get the information that you need, and then you put it back in the pocket. A sense is something that is always part of you. I do not ask the north sense to tell me where the north is, and it doesn’t ask me if I’m interested to do that, to know that.

Speaker D: This is Liviu Babitz, a Romanian digital entrepreneur with a compass fixed on his chest. Why?

Speaker G: So it’s always hard to explain. It’s like it’s as hard as explaining someone that can’t see how it is to see something, but I’ll try to give examples from existing senses. So first of all, our memories are created by what our senses capture. So I will remember this interview by the lights of the room where I am, by the sounds, by the smells, the colors. And now there is another factor that is being added to this memory, which is how I am located on the planet and oriented. Memories start being created, then basically the next step is that emotions start to be created along those memories. So if today I am traveling a lot, so moments that I miss my son, because I know where London would be compared to where I am at that moment. I can always look in that direction and knowing that this is exactly where my boy is, that creates a completely emotional connection to, to basically to the new sense that I have. These are basic kind of things that are happening to people. It’s a bit like looking at our eyes and saying, okay, we all use our eyes not to bump into walls and not to get run by cars, but beyond that there is your whole personality. And if you’re a painter, so then colors and things that you see with your eyes are a major part of your life. So I’m really interested to see what will happen to people that, for example, are architects and they use the North Sense and they have it for 2-3 years, and how will that change the way that they design stuff that they see or understand spaces. I’m interested to see how other creators or just normal people, how their personality and the NordSense or other new sensors will start communicating in the long term.

Speaker D: So Babitz knows where he is in relation to the magnetic north, and he at least believes that this is a personal enhancement. Yet the digital footprint that we leave, showing exactly where we are at any moment, can also lead to a loss of human rights such as privacy and identity. It can even put us at risk. On Facebook and YouTube, TV presenter Nadia Sawalaha and her teenage daughter Maddy are taking a stand against the new app Snapchat Maps that has some unwelcome consequences.

Speaker H: Okay guys, if any of your children have Snapchat, it’s really important you listen to what Maddy here, my 14-year-old daughter, has to say. So explain it to me again, Maddy, because I can’t quite believe it. Okay, so Snapchat is a social media where you can share with your friends or anyone that you let have you on Snapchat see what you’re doing in the day. They’ve just updated it and it’s called Snap Maps, and it’s also called stalk your friends. So what it does is, see, I’m on camera on Snapchat. If I zoom out, it goes to the map of the world. So this is, this is Kaius’s phone. Uh, we’re in Christ church. We’re on the edge. Luckily we’re on ghost mode, so other people can’t see us, only we can see ourselves. But we can still stalk everyone else. So if I zoom really far out, I can see all of the friends that he has on Snapchat. Some— once someone’s in a car, and, and you can see exactly what they can see what they’re doing.

Speaker E: So that’s the bit that I find most—

Speaker H: this is really like when I, I didn’t know about it, Snapchat automatically updated me and and I wasn’t aware that it was on, meaning that people in that moment could see what I was doing, until my friend Alex said, have you got Snapmaps? And I said, what’s that? And he said, oh, it’s a new thing where you can stalk your friends and see what they’re doing. So I went onto it and I could see that my friend Leah was listening to music, someone else was sleeping. So what would be the advice to any parents then, Natalie? The advice would be to check that you make sure that your children are on Go Smoke because it’s really dangerous. And because me and Kiki are quite safe anyway, because we only really have friends on Snapchat.

Speaker D: So what’s most creepy for me about the whole thing is that they’re saying it’s a way of just your friends staying in touch with you. Friends, friends who are a bit paranoid about friends, you can see if kids are doing things or saying they’re doing things.

Speaker H: It’s because they said it could be used for boyfriends and girlfriends to see if their partner’s cheating on them. I mean, could control issues or what? Also, what if you don’t get invited to the party and you see all your friends are at another party? I mean, I just think it’s— And then there’s these— and then in different parts of the country with their events going on, so like yesterday was— there was Pride. Oh yeah. And you could see people’s stories that they’d forgotten to— they obviously didn’t know that their phone was updated and all of their stories were going local to the entire world so they can see all their stories. Anyone can see where they are. I have this friend that I talk to that’s lives in Florida, um, and she’s my age. And I was— when I first got Snapmaps, I was just looking around to see what it was like, and I could see that she was sitting down in Florida in high school. It can also see what school people are at, like when your friends are at Brit school. This is so dangerous. I don’t know what you guys think, but I think this is so dangerous. This is a step too far. So I’m completely horrified by this, but what do you think? Am I being like a really overprotective protective mother. What do you think? Are your kids using it? Did you even know it existed? Because I didn’t 24 hours ago. I didn’t either.

Speaker D: That’s Nadia Sawalaha and Maddie warning Snapchat users to switch to ghost mode if they don’t want everyone to watch what they are doing through a smartphone camera. Just a minute, I’ve got an email. It might be from someone I want to interview for this show. I’ll just check. Nope, nope, nope. It’s spam offering me breast augmentation surgery. So that’s gone in the bin. Where was I? Right, this is Password with Peter Wyren on Resonance FM, and after this you can hear DJ Ritu with A World in London. Now I was talking about the potential risks of linking social media with real-world locations. New research from Anglia Ruskin University shows that many humans have changed the way they walk in order to avoid tripping over things while looking at a mobile device. So you could say that the Monty Python Ministry of Silly Walks could be caused by the mobile phone operator’s silly squawks. But mixing virtual and actual can be a good thing too. Who hasn’t reached for their mobile device to get directions when visiting somewhere new, a place or an event? And exactly a year ago at this time, we were all rushing around chasing animated characters as the Pokémon Go game took us out into the real world. At the University of East Anglia, just a little further north than Ruskin, Dr. Tom Phillips has been studying the benefits.

Speaker A: I think you’re absolutely right about kind of people’s gait and the way in which people are moving through cities is changing. And that’s— yeah, you can very much kind of tell the way in which somebody is walking, the way in which they’re holding their phone, you know, if they’re playing a game or or if they’re kind of looking at maps or something like that. I think it’s difficult to kind of say that, yes, there definitely should be some disengagement, because I think actually kind of the realities of the world that we have now are that technology can bring people together. And actually, you know, the people who are concerned about over-engagement with technology will naturally take a break from it, whereas I think you’re going to get a possibly younger generation of people who are more happy for it to be integrated in their lives. And I think that will then see— we will then see that’s the direction in which society is going. So I think everything in moderation. I think if you are kind of checking it every, every few minutes, possibly that’s a bit too much. That’s my own kind of personal opinion. But I don’t necessarily think we’ve got a problem because I think the the positivities of technology and what it can do do outweigh the negatives. Right.

Speaker D: I’m interviewing a psychologist in America, a professor at the University of Southern California a bit later today, who’s saying mobile phone technology is as addictive as cocaine.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think it’s interesting actually that you mention games there, because you’re absolutely right. I mean, Pokémon Go is a free-to-play game. So there’s often a debate at the moment within gaming spheres and within academic spheres as well about the morality of free-to-play or freemium games. So a freemium game is something that is free to download and it offers paid incentives where you have to pay to perhaps unlock the next stage or unlock a mechanism where the alternative would be to wait 24 hours or wait an unseemly amount of time. So it’s— it kind of almost forces the user’s hand to continue putting money in. It’s the same thing with some games, is that they don’t ask you to purchase real money, as it were. They ask you to purchase in-game currency, so it doesn’t seem like you’re actually spending actual currency. It seems like you’re spending Pokécoins or something like that. But I think you’re right in terms of of intervention because the people— I’ve spoken to game developers about this. Game developers feel that people who make freemium games are just looking out for their economic baseline. They’re just looking out to make as much money as possible, and that is to the detriment of user experience. It’s to the detriment of gameplay, and it’s also to the detriment, as you say, of people glued to their screens. What a large section of developers and more vocal developers want to do is make games that are engaging, that bring people together, that get people talking, and that act as a social start point, that we’re not just rats hitting a button for a pellet. It’s actually about making it part of a social experience. And so, yeah, I think at the moment the games industry is pretty good at self-regulating. About saying, hey, these guys over here are just making a game for profit, but actually, if you’d like a game that is a good experience, why not go for this one over here? Whether that will drip feed down to another point of intervention to stopping people being on their screens as much, I don’t know, but there are people that certainly share that view and do take steps to try and highlight the better things that technology can do. What Dr.

Speaker D: Phillips says about the ethics of gameplay is a real concern now. The Royal Society and British Academy have just published a hard-hitting and very detailed research study involving more than 20 experts demanding that a national independent watchdog body be set up to oversee the ethics of the digital world and report directly to Parliament. They say that “human flourishing must be at the centre of all new and existing technologies.” That’s the Royal Society’s rather ungrammatical version of Humans first. We at Future Intelligence are rather chuffed because we were there first, warning that there was a need to do this in our 2014 report for Netopia, Can We Make the Digital World Ethical? You can find details of both reports on the Future Intelligence website. And there’s no doubt that the internet is contributing hugely to human flourishing, physical as well as mental. Like the Wii Fit indoor games consoles before it, Pokémon Go was a great answer to the accusation that computer games lead to inactivity and obesity. They don’t if the whole point of the game is to physically move around. Apps and armbands also help thousands of people to get fit and stay fit by measuring how many steps they do in a day. For an average person to stay in good health, they should stump up about 10,000 steps. Whoops. But that can lead to frantic over-exercising and a measuring addiction. Martin Torx of the Digital Detoxing Company explains.

Speaker C: That’s part of the quantifiable self movement where with wearables and particularly you can track a lot of things about yourself, whether it’s a number of steps or movements, your sleep patterns, your heart rate. So there’s a lot of data coming out for people and people get quite, quite involved with that. You know, I think to some degree that’s a positive in the sense that people are trying to take control of their lives and try and improve themselves. Obviously, if it’s tipping over to something that causes one to neglect other aspects of one’s life, which I suppose is one of the definitions of addiction, then again one needs to try and get a bit of a balance back, which isn’t always easy. But again, taking breaks can be one of the ways to do that.

Speaker D: There’s something about many aspects of our digital lives that get us hooked, and because our participation generates data about what we do where we are and what we like. It can be monetized. To find out what it is that companies build into their social media offerings to attract and keep us, I asked Dr. Joan Harvey of Newcastle University. She’s an industrial psychologist, and she’s afraid that there are too many unknowns when it comes to the effect on humans of constant mobile phone use.

Speaker B: It’s quite interesting. A few years ago, we got hauled in, and we were one of the final 2 or 3 trying to put a bid in for looking at mobile phones. This was the Department of Health mobile telephone something research, and we didn’t win the bid, which annoyed me more than somewhat. But at that time, they were actually— they discovered that some of the vibes of mobile phones would fry nematodes. And so— and they also— a mobile phone spent too long next to your ear warms your brain up. They don’t have any idea what the long-term consequences of that would be, so they The government, a good few years ago now, issued what they call the precautionary principle, which basically said, don’t use the phone too much and use it remotely. In other words, have the headphones things on and all the rest of it, so you’ve not got the phone clamped to your ear the whole time. But by the time they did that, the genie was well and truly out of the bottle. It was just too little, too late. So there was an attempt to try and restrict this. And it’s just not happened. There’s some things that’ll pull it to pieces. For example, if people start hacking into big systems. We’ve already seen a lot of this. If I was gonna be a terrorist, I wouldn’t be a terrorist blowing people up. I’d bugger up everybody’s cyber networks. That’s infinitely more effective. You could knacker half the world in no time flat. But that would put a stop to a lot of that crime. Quite quickly and we’d learn to live without it. Now the question then is, are people too dependent on mobiles? Well, I don’t use my mobile very much, but this is just me as an example. When I do use it, I bloody well need it. My mother’s been very ill, and in fact she died just a few days ago. We’re still in the— I’m not grieving at the moment, don’t worry, but I was on the phone constantly to my brother, texting him and my husband, saying, I’ll be here, you, where are you? You begin to realize these these things are infinitely useful, but you’ve got to keep a sort of control on how much you use them. Now, if people don’t choose to keep that control, where do we take this argument? What do we do? What do we do with Val sitting there with— can’t move a muscle without taking a phone? She can’t go to the toilet without taking a phone with her in case it rings. What are we going to do about the Vals of this world?

Speaker D: Well, that’s the issue, isn’t it? Because basically people have got to get things into proportion and perspective. However, at the same time, you cannot— you cannot patronize people in that almost BBC way about, you know, put down your phone and go and do something useful instead.

Speaker B: What I’m saying is that dissonance theory says that if you do patronize them, they will disregard your patronage because it’s not consistent with the sort of hedonistic pleasures that have in the device gives them. So we’re in a peculiar place with all of this.

Speaker D: Do you, do you just think it’s a maturity thing? Do you think that since 1996 and the advent of the internet, we’ve had it around for 21 years now, do you think we’ll fall out of love with it, or that it will fall out of the forefront of our lives?

Speaker B: Hey, listen, I mean, I would love to have these squillions of pounds for getting this right with the predictions, which I’m not going to get. And some of my colleagues are researching this, But, the problem with doing the research is, the fastest you do the research and then take a year to get it published, everything’s moved on. So, the whole thing’s moving. One of my colleagues at university has actually been, he runs a big computer lab, it’s called the Auburn Lab, and he’s been looking at things like digital jewellery and stuff like that. Where this is going is not going to be like it is now. Quite where it’s going and how we’ll adapt to that. And more importantly, the moral and legal and ethical issues about data and where those are going and what we’re going to be doing with all these data that everybody’s going to be accessing and how much you want your data to be accessed. There’s a mountain of those issues and they are We’re miles behind the development, but looking at what this chap’s doing in this open lab, things are moving apace, a faster pace than you can possibly imagine, and it’s sort of uncontrolled. We’ve never been in this position before, so quite where it’s going, I don’t know. Dr.

Speaker D: Joan Harvey, an expert with a refreshingly frank admission that science doesn’t have the answers here. What she said about frying nematodes, by the way, is an experiment from 2002 that proved that nematodes, or roundworms, exposed to the signals from a mobile phone started to become much more fertile and multiply more rapidly. And the heat generated from a mobile phone can raise the temperature of your head by 0.11 of a degree Celsius. Scientists led by Gerard van Looyen conclude The temperature rises are far too small to have lasting effects. Hang on a minute. I just need to check my messages. I think something’s just come through on my family WhatsApp group chat. Mmm, I’m a bit worried about my mother and there could be an update. Hold on. Nope. It’s one of my sons sharing a funny video about Jeremy Corbyn. So, moving on now. Social media has proved to be a very profitable business for HTK Loyalty Solutions. Managing Director and trained psychologist Justin Bowser explains how HTK turns likes into profits. And like many of those we interviewed, he says social media is like a drug.

Speaker E: You get some of the same symptoms. You get mood alteration, people becoming depressed or anxious if they haven’t been on social. You get more tolerance to it, so you need bigger and bigger hits on the likes or the followers to get the same little measure of dopamine going through your brain and you get withdrawal. So in some ways, yes, social addiction. I mean, there’s still arguments about whether social addiction exists. I think it does. But in some ways it has very similar characteristics to other neurochemical addictions because fundamentally it is about dopamine, about brain chemicals. And you’re getting the same feedback loops, the same things occurring.

Speaker D: Now technology companies are very, very aware of all of this, aren’t they? They’re very aware of all of these chemicals going around in our brains, and they actually do use psychologists to actually set some of those mechanisms in train. In computer games, for example, they deliberately use psychologists to create anxiety, say, in a shoot-’em-up game. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker E: There’s a kind of an area of study called gamification, which is looking at using those same kind of mechanics that you see in games, but also in non-game environments. So using these things in whether it be business software or other social media software, or again loyalty programs with simple things like points or giving people badges badges or leaderboards where they can see how they’re comparing against their peers. And all these things which increase competitive spirit or make you want to do that next one thing because then you’ll get the badge and so on. And they’re now being used beyond games in all manner of, say, other contexts. And sometimes to good effect. There are some trends where this is— people are trying to gamify everything these days, and some things just don’t work like that. But yes, I don’t think Facebook would have offered to buy Snapchat for $3 billion or whatever they, they offered if they didn’t see that these psychological levers were really powerful.

Speaker D: Now, there is legislation to prevent subliminal messaging, for example, in films. This seems to be much, much more sophisticated and subliminal messaging. Is there any way that we can control it?

Speaker E: I don’t think so. I think companies like Facebook and Google— but you look particularly at Facebook, I think with what, 2 billion users, whatever now— I think they’re too, too big to control other than where there is a commercial impact. So we’ve seen Google getting hit now with massive fines where you can argue a commercial or antitrust argument, and that will hold true of companies like Facebook too in terms of how they serve ads and monetize people. But in terms of how their social network works, how things like their EdgeRank algorithm, which determines what content you see what you don’t see, and so on, how that works. I don’t think you can legislate that. I don’t think there’d be any vehicle for legislating it. I don’t think legislators would understand enough about it to do so. What I think will happen here is that as more people think about what’s happening, as more people start to lose that initial excitement of social, which by now we are, we’re going over that initial peak of thinking, hey, this is wonderful, getting likes to now thinking, well, actually, what are these businesses doing? Why, why are they giving me this free stuff? They are monetizing me, they are commercializing me. And people, I guess, will start introspecting. Is this good for my life, for my relationships, for my well-being? And people will start making those decisions. And one thing that Facebook, Google, and the others are really good at doing is looking at data and looking at people’s behaviors on a large scale by analyzing the data and what it’s telling them. And if they see that people are starting to change their attitudes or perceptions, then they will adapt accordingly, and they will do that much faster than we could legislate anyway. So I think really it’s up to people to wake up to what’s happening and to seek inspiration and guidance from elsewhere. I think again, we have become quite a— how can I say this— a religiously illiterate culture, or more so over the last few years, because we’re getting, you know, people are looking to social more than to spirituality. I don’t want to preach on this, but I think again, that’s something where people are just struggling to keep up with what’s going on in tech. And it won’t take people long to start taking back that balance of their own lives. And working out on a deeper level what gives them satisfaction and what doesn’t. So I still have faith in humanity and the fact that people work this stuff out for themselves.

Speaker D: Well, Twitter might be in decline, but it’s still got 328 million users worldwide according to Statistista. And Facebook just topped 2 billion. The reason that everybody likes them is because they get good sensations from taking part. And businesses make more profits by getting us, the users, to do their marketing for them for free. So it’s worrying to look at the research that shows addiction to social media, smartphone use, and computer games is on the rise. For example, Dr. Olatz López Fernández’s team at the University of Barcelona has been studying British adolescents and found that 10% of 11- to 14-year-olds have what could be classed as a clinical addiction to their smartphones. And at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, researchers have found that addiction to social media is as powerful as cocaine addiction.

Speaker I: Professor Julie Albright: Well, that’s the thing about these smartphones, is that they are both physically and behaviorally, you could say, addicting, but certainly reinforcing for people to continue using them. They activate every time when you get a message or a text or some sort of announcement from Instagram or feedback from Facebook that someone’s liked your post. It activates the pleasure center in the brain and actually gives you a hit of dopamine, which causes people to just keep on on checking those phones. People are checking phones now up to 150 times or more a day.

Speaker D: Somebody I spoke to earlier quoted me 3,000 times a day.

Speaker I: Well, that’s probably the excessive compulsive user, but it’s—

Speaker D: and a recent survey came out in the UK which said that people are touching an internet-enabled device once every 16 minutes, which sounds to me to be a little more feasible.

Speaker I: Yeah, I think that’s probably true. In the United States and in the UK, they say adults are using screens about 10 hours plus a day, and kids now are using it 6 or 8 or more hours a day. So it’s definitely a central part of our lives now.

Speaker D: And the technology industry accentuates this, doesn’t it? Because those little beeps that that we hear when we get a message. They are designed to actually please us, aren’t they?

Speaker I: Well, that’s true. It’s kind of classic behavioral reinforcement, and that’s the other side of it. You have a little ding. Remember the Pavlov dog study where every time there was a ding, the dog got a piece of meat, and eventually it would salivate hearing that ding knowing that the meat was coming, and eventually you could ding the bell and the dog would salivate whether there was meat or not. So, I mean, all these kind of behavioral reinforcers, like a ding when you get a message, are just very classic psychological, you know, reinforcers of behavior. So it’s, it’s like a reward system, you know. You know, the reward is that text message has arrived, or that comment is has been made on your Facebook post.

Speaker D: So what is the impact of that on us? If our behavior has changed and become similar to that of a drug user, what, what, what does that mean?

Speaker I: Well, I think that’s the thing. Uh, some people are more prone toward addictive behaviors. I don’t really like to use the word addiction so much. I do have two counseling degrees, by the way, a master’s and a PhD in counseling, so I’m very aware of addiction and those kinds of things. But I don’t like to use it because that word is overused. But I will say that using these technologies, it’s definitely a strong reinforcer of behavior. There’s another term that psychologists use, which is random reinforcement. It’s the kind of thing when you go to slot machines in Las Vegas, and you used to pull the arm on the one-arm bandit, or now you push a button oftentimes. But you win, but you don’t win every time. Sometimes you win, many times you lose, so you just keep hitting that button or pulling that lever hoping to win, and that’s called random reinforcement. And that’s the most powerful behavioral reinforcer there is, and that’s That’s what’s going on with smartphones. Sometimes you get a text and sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you get feedback on that photo that you posted, sometimes you don’t. That’s random reinforcement, and that’s the most powerful reinforcer to keep behaviors going. So people are now checking their phones now when there isn’t even a ding or isn’t even a vibration or any kind of announcement. They’re compulsively checking them. Because of this random reinforcement going on.

Speaker D: And does that mean that we’re not getting satisfaction? Does that mean that we get the message but we just want another one? So it doesn’t, it doesn’t actually satisfy anything at all?

Speaker I: Right, it’s like eating potato chips, you just can’t eat one. Have you ever had people that you, you think you’re going to eat one, then you eat half the bag? You know, you want another one, another one. And what people are doing now is they’ll post something on Instagram like a photo, and if they don’t get enough likes, they’ll post another one trying to get more likes. And, you know, the thing is, particularly younger people are doing this because they are even more digitally immersed and are more likely to go online wirelessly or via mobile devices than older adults are.

Speaker D: But apparently this can also mean that those young people actually are becoming more lonely, and in the actual act of being on social media, that they feel more lonely because they know that they’re not really meeting people. Is that correct?

Speaker I: Well, I think there’s an aspect of that. There’s really two aspects of that. If you think about meeting people, something interesting has happened in recent years, and that is that for teenagers, young adults, for example, online dating has really taken off. And the impact of these mobile smartphone devices is that now you do it on apps. And what that’s caused is the swiping society. So it’s this idea that it’s all about the look, it’s all about superficiality, and people are just swiping, swiping, swiping and trying to to form a match with people, and it really sort of enhances this hookup culture and transitory relationships where everything is ephemeral.

Speaker D: Professor Julie Albright. Her research focuses on the pathways and reward systems in the brain that make social media and computer games so compelling. Hi, I’m Blue. Call me back in an hour. Sorry about that. I’ve been looking at the research into mobile phone use And there are studies from all over the world: Turkey, Taiwan, Nigeria, Slovenia, and especially China, Japan, and the USA. They show that addiction or compulsive use of computer games and smartphones leads to a long list of problems: child neglect, bad parenting, unwanted pregnancies, and sexually transmitted diseases caused by sex provoked by sexting. Alexithymia— that’s the inability to feel or express emotion in the real world. Depression leading to suicide. Post-traumatic stress disorder. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Cardiorespiratory diseases. Cyberbullying. Cyberstalking, narcissism, cognitive failure— that’s, that’s when you forget what you were doing or saying— road accidents causing injury or death, sleep deprivation, low self-esteem, and loneliness. Loneliness. Loneliness. How on earth can you be lonely with thousands of friends and followers? Surely that’s the whole point of all of this. Martin talks once again of the digital detoxing company. He knows only too well how you can be lonely.

Speaker C: It came to me as a realization that perhaps I hadn’t personally got my right— my balance right with 3 kids. Perhaps I was spending a bit too much time myself on my smartphone, etc., and I needed to get a better balance. So what I did was I took a group of people away on a bit of a an experimental adventure. We went away to a little remote place in Norfolk and took away people’s technology, did a series of activities designed to reconnect us a bit with the world around us and each other and indeed ourselves. And yeah, the overall effect was much more powerful than any of us expected. I think it was described by a couple of the people on it as a deep breath of fresh air. So it just struck me there was something important there, and perhaps those who come from a time perhaps before we were always on and always connected have a bit of perspective on that, and I think it’s useful sometimes to disconnect to understand what our relationship is with technology.

Speaker D: Why, you know, you said that it was an empowering experience. Why? I mean, what do you think is wrong with technology?

Speaker C: The obvious case study of this, of course, is a smartphone, which we’ve become more and more attached to. It’s like an extra part of our bodies. Like, you know, when I remove people’s smartphone from them, it’s like I’d taken off a limb or something. People find it quite difficult to let go. And the problem with that is several. The smartphone, apart from anything else, is something that demands attention. So people are always staring at their screen rather than the world around us. It interrupts us when we’re trying to concentrate, and if you want to do anything creatively meaningful. You need long periods of time without being interrupted. And through it, of course, we get access to lots of people, which is great, but some people find it quite hard to manage that sort of relationship issue because there’s an awful lot of people one doesn’t know one’s connected to as much as who one does know. I mean, there is this phenomenon called phubbing you may have heard of, which is snubbing someone with your phone. And I’m sure we’ve all experienced it, you’re talking to someone and they suddenly start looking at their phone because someone’s messaged them. Probably completely unnecessary interruption and not relevant, but people will interrupt mid-conversation to look at their phones. So yeah, I think part of the issue is that phones are designed to demand our attention. You know, there’s the buzz, the beeps, the lights, they play to our hormonal reactions as people and they demand our attention. And that, I think, does make them slightly addictive. I think where it’s possibly most troubling is the use of such devices with very young children. It’s become quite common practice for people to keep their children quiet by giving them a screen, and, you know, it is the equivalent of drugging your kids. I’m concerned about that. You know, you can even get a potty with an iPhone attachment to it. Prams have iPad attachments to them. You know, you’re thinking, We don’t really know what we are doing here. This is a mass experiment on children with no real idea about what the consequences are going to be. But of course, there isn’t a huge amount of appetite within the industry to investigate that much further.

Speaker D: But there wouldn’t be, would there? Because the industry has deliberately designed the technology so that it actually appeals to you. Those beeps, those little noises are actually designed by psychologists Absolutely.

Speaker C: So how do we begin to get control back, if you like? Well, you know, we have to exercise a certain amount of self-discipline, which is where digital detoxing comes in. Obviously, one can wait for regulations and stuff to come in, but these things have had some debate within the UK Parliament, but, you know, there’s no real appetite to address it. So I think it does boil down to people and their own choices, and fortunately at the moment we do have choice about whether we give a smartphone or screen to our children. We do have the choice of whether we turn our device on or off. These things may become trickier in the future, but at the moment, you know, we have those options.

Speaker D: But again, if you don’t give the, the smart devices to the children, or the, the, then you, you, that they will become essentially excluded, socially excluded from their peer group.

Speaker C: Well, it depends what age we’re talking about. You know, the very young kids, you know, we’re talking the ages of 1, 1, 2, 3, that sort of age. They’re not gonna be socially excluded. Excluded if they don’t have Facebook. So it does depend, and they’re different age groups. There’s no question about it that a lot of young people will organise their social life via social media applications, and it’s important that kids do get included with that. But it’s also important that children are taught the right habits and the right etiquettes with their devices. Which again, I think—

Speaker D: I mean, that’s an important point, isn’t it? Because one of the psychologists that I spoke to said that she’d invited an old friend around to dinner that she hadn’t seen for a long time, and her friend came around to dinner, put her smartphone on the table, and was consulting it about once every 2 minutes, and that she had become quite, you know, very dependent on this as a device, and she said that it actually completely and utterly ruined the meal.

Speaker C: Mm, yeah, and you see that all too often, I think, in the way people interact with each other. I mean, what I advocate in such situations is the idea of phone stack, which you may have heard of, which is this idea that if you’re out for some drinks with some friends or having a meal at home, you get everyone to stack their phones in the middle of a table. The first person to reach for their phone for whatever reason buys the next round or does the washing up or something.

Speaker D: So gamify it. If I want to digitally detox, what should I do? And also, what other mechanisms should I use to get my technology use into perspective if I’m one of these people who picks up a gadget every 16 minutes or more than that?

Speaker C: I think there’s a number of things you can do. I mean, obviously you can go away on a digital detoxing adventure run by ourselves or other people. You can do that. That’s no more than a kickstarter really about investigating and getting perspective on one’s behaviors. But I think, you know, what we hope to do is try and get people to weave the habits into their daily lives, really, because that’s when real change is made. So, you know, there are probably 3 things I always strongly advocate people do in order to get a better balance in their life. One is keep technology out of the bedroom. People tend to take their phones into their bedroom, use them as alarm clocks, never turn them off, find themselves looking at emails or messages in the middle of the night. Getting sleep deprivation because of the backlit nature of screens that mess with the melatonin production that causes us to sleep. So keep technology out of the bedroom. Buy an alarm clock. That’s my first bit of advice. So buy an alarm clock. The second thing is buy a watch, not a smartwatch either, because people constantly look at their phones to find the time out as well as anything else, and then they see ‘Ah, there’s been that alert or that,’ and they disappear down the wormhole of social media for the next half hour or so and wonder where the time’s gone. So that’s the second thing I’d do. And the third thing is, you know, do take those little breaks during your day. And if it’s lunchtime, you know, do the phone stack idea or going out for drinks, stack your phones in the middle of a table and everyone take a break from it. And I think people will find that there are good well-being benefits from doing that. Digital detoxing.

Speaker D: It looks like it’s becoming flavor of the month. A whole edition of Grazia, the glossy women’s magazine, is devoted to it. Now, I wonder why a magazine would want people to put down their smartphones and read something real instead. Like a magazine that’s full of adverts for products to help you switch off and de-stress. Celebrities like Ed Sheeran are quitting Twitter, while others have an on-off love affair with the thought association software. Kate Bush and Florence Welch have banned fans from using smartphones at their festival appearances and concerts. They want to be watched and listened to, not selfie’d 20,000 times. They want you to have a relationship with them, not a relationship with them at arm’s length through your phone, appealing to your own social media audience. Everyone’s after your attention. Even the digital detoxers use the internet to promote themselves. It’s all so confusing. People are signing off for their summer holidays in ways that make themselves sound just too important to be interrupted in their quality time. A sort of reverse narcissism, if you will. Dr. James Anslow, a media psychologist, says on Facebook, “Dear fans and loved ones—often not the same thing—I am turning off all my notifications except WhatsApp because they’re driving me mad. So if you want my attention ASAP, you know what to do.” do. Just two examples amongst millions of people who are switching off, or trying to, for a summer break. It’s worth noting that in France it’s against the law for an employer to make you look at work emails at weekend, or on holidays, or outside normal office hours. Under the French right to disconnect, workers are meant to be given a contract setting out when they are supposed to send and answer emails. The law says that workers are not being paid fairly for that overtime and that the practice, oh, once again carries a risk of stress, burnout, sleep problems, and relationship difficulty. But is it enough to just switch off notifications? Peter Harrison thinks not, unsurprisingly since he runs a holiday lettings business that is offering a new line that specializes in digital detox mini breaks.

Speaker G: It’s a small but growing area of the community. A lot of people want to get away from the city breaks, you know, to go out walking, enjoy time with the family, play the snakes and ladders. And we’ve got very remote properties, you know, the wildcard property which I always talk about is the Isles in, in the Inner Hebrides. It’s the smallest permeable inhabited island and there are no cars on this island, and you actually have to get a boat from the mainland, and then the owner will come and pick up your luggage. People love the lack of interaction with technology, and it will be a growing trend as we move forward.

Speaker D: Why do you think that? Why do you think it will be a growing trend?

Speaker G: I think that people are reliant on their phones. You know, on average, a consumer touches their mobile phone 3,000 times per day. So in some cases it’s all about digital detox. Some will be able to do it, some won’t. Some will have that mobile phone paranoia after a couple of hours of being away from being contactable or using it as an information service.

Speaker D: But if you don’t want to take yourself off to a shepherd’s hut or a yurt in a remote bit of the countryside where there’s no mobile phone mast for miles and no Wi-Fi node, you might want to study the findings of some of the research that you can easily find on the subject. This is from a study called ‘Discipline Yourself Before Life Disciplines You,’ presented by Amisora in 2012 at an international conference of electronics engineers in Hawaii. Excessive mobile phone use has gained attention in the media recently, where it has been associated with driving fatalities and productivity declines, as well as social embarrassment. To provide successful interventions, there is a need to understand why some mobile phone owners can’t resist the urge to use their devices. Surveys were used for data collection. A partial least squares analysis of anxiety, boredom, deficient self-regulation, habit, and mobile phone use combined to explain negative consequences with a 52.8% variance explained. The findings provide evidence on the role of deficient self-regulation in excessive mobile phone use and provide useful insights about appropriate interventions. In other words, you’re probably not addicted. You’re bored, maybe anxious, definitely lacking in self-discipline. Maybe you’d be better off with some worry beads. Do you really need a detox, or do you just need to get a life? I know what I’m going to do. I am going to put my laptop and the mobile devices in the freezer like Edward Snowden did in Hong Kong, so no one knows where I am. So now I’m going to take my dog and my family for a long walk without any of our 7 mobile phones or my 2 tablets or my old pager that’s been lurking in the drawer since 1998. That’s all from Password with Peter Warren, a Future Intelligence production for Resonance FM.

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