The State of the Digital World

Humanity as a collective has done an excellent job at putting ourselves into a situation that our biology and consciousness were woefully prepared for. This came in the form of the internet, pocket-sized computers and social media platforms that grant access to near real-time information exchange between minds no matter what part of the globe you live in. Got an internet connection? Get posting!

Within the span of less than a century, humans went from slow bandwidth communication, often only a 1-way transmission requiring conscious effort and action to partake in (e.g. telephone, telegram, radio and newspaper) to having near-instant access to a globally-scoped 2-way stream of information.

This is a species that to this day, is still trying to understand how to express empathy and understand the perspective of another. Do we sound prepared for the exponential level of technological innovation that can be expected based off what we’ve seen in the last few years?

Objectively, global access to information exchange is an impressive feat for a species to pull out of their back pocket, however there are a vast number of flaws hard-coded into the system. Nobody said content on the internet had to be truthful; nobody said that representations of human life and the “connections” we build within the internet had to be authentic; yet the majority of users online treat it as such.

The problem here lies in how the systems we use every day (namely social media) were designed, and the consequences these design decisions have on us at a cognitive level.

Inside the Machine

Are you familiar with slot-machines? Pokies, as they are known in my home country, are a lucrative invention (and in my personal opinion, highly predatory) built to seduce patrons into slowly feeding bill after bill into its glory hole, with the promise of exciting noises, eye-candy colors and graphics, and of course, the potential for that BIG WIN 🎉.

This malicious ruse is wildly successful in its primary goal of revenue generation. By choosing to tap into our innately human cognitive tendencies, slot-machine designers found a highly effective way to keep bums in seats and the money feeding in.

Does this sound ethical to you? Does this sound like technology that uplifts humanity? Do you think we should feel any different about these SAME techniques that product teams choose to incorporate into their social media applications? We’re not feeding them money though… no no. Instead we feed them something far more sacred, something fundamental to life, love, learning, growth, I’d argue existence itself; our Attention.

The Value of Attention in a Distracted Society

I’d argue that next to breathing, shitting and your heart pumping blood around your body; your attention is the most important thing in your life. By mastering how to wield your attention, you become capable of giving power to anything; and adversely removing power from anything.

There is a well known phrase and thought experiment: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”. I think the core idea of this phrase can be abstracted out from just falling trees and applied to any circumstance through the frame of selective attention.

If you choose to give that spider on your arm no attention, its power to incite fear is removed; if you choose to give your toxic colleague no attention, their power to inflict turmoil within your mind is removed; if you choose to give your partner no attention, the power of that relationship is taken away, and it will fall apart. Hell, if you choose to click away from this ramble, any power that this article had to inspire thoughts or ideas is null and void.

I don’t want what I’m saying to come across as preaching “ignorance is bliss”, as that is very contrary to the point here. Instead I want to convey the inherent power within control of your attention. I want to reveal what you are really giving to these tech companies in exchange for using the platforms, something far more priceless than any monthly subscription fee.

Attention is one of the few aspects of our life that we have direct control over; and yet day in and day out, we haphazardly dish it out in unlimited quantities to any app developer promising us likes and an infinitely scrollable spew of information curated to incite controversy, reaction and engagement; or “stickiness and retention” as the teams behind these platforms would say.

To these tech companies: If you had a truly valuable product to offer, you wouldn’t need to rely on cognitive hacks to drive people to use it. If it served any real purpose other than boosting a profit margin, you wouldn’t need to hypnotise your users into sticking around. The collective decision of the tech industry to leverage cheap tricks to make their application “the best” is sad, uninspiring and a poor display of “innovation”.

Short-form Content (AKA Brain-musher 5000)

Vine, Shorts, Reels, Stories, whatever other silly name a product team can think of to overload the conecpt; all of them refer to roughly sub-30 second videos/content. For some reason, all of these tech companies doubled down on the idea that humans, apparently, can’t enjoy focussing on something longer than a minute. I’ve no clue where this thought came from and I’m sure some naive boffin at a big-tech company will try to justify the choice with “bUt ThE DaTa SaYs ThAt UsErs LiKe iT moAr!” - sure, they engage with your app longer, but I’m sure they could be easily weaned away with something more effective and more addictive. Does that make a little Golden Brown a better option just because users would likely engage with it over other things in life? Of course not.

As “fun” as short-form content is, it comes with a cost unknown to many, although thankfully it is becoming more popularised; it obliterates your ability to focus (or pay attention) for long periods of time, also known as “deep thought”. This is really fucking dangerous, as virtually anything in life that can provide real value to you or society as a whole requires a whole lot of deep thought. If we raise a generation of humans incapable of getting through an article like this, what hope do we have for solving some of the major burning issues we face as a species?

A short attention span isn’t the only prize you win consuming social media regularly, it also comes with a side of social anxiety, depression, lack of meaning, lack of enthusiasm for life and what it has to offer. Why is it that a technology designed to “connect humanity” instead leaves society fractured and upset? Because that’s what is most effective at keeping users ON THE APP.

We attach so much value to what we see online as if its comparable to our own lives, when the truth is that a majority of things online are manufactured for engagement and hold no real basis in reality.

Understanding Addiction

Just like booze, blow or benzos; social media has hooked its talons into humanity and we are ADDICTED.

There’s no denying it. I see it in my friends, I see it in my family, I too find myself instinctively reaching for my phone and unlocking it at any dull moment. At any void of conscious action, my unconscious yearns for that sweet false trickle of dopamine provided by an endless timeline of bull-shit posts. On the shitter? Whip out the phone. At the bus stop? Whip out the phone. Uncomfortable silence at a party? Comfort is only a swipe away.

What the fuck?

Thankfully I am one of the lucky individuals for whom the true nature of social media has clicked. Even though it still happens, when I do find myself habitually reaching for an app, I start to ask myself “why?”. More often than not, I will have no good answer. There’s no true value in whatever I was about to mindlessly scroll through, all I would have achieved is a swift burn of my finite supply of time, for nothing.

I’m addicted, you’re addicted, humanity living in the digital age is addicted, and just like any addiction, recovery is a process of information, understanding, acceptance and action to control it within your life.

Recovery: How to escape the Matrix

People have different approaches to this, all across the spectrum: revert to a dumb phone, install an app (ironic) to limit what apps you can use or how long you can use them, remove yourself from social media platforms by deleting your accounts. The truth is, I don’t see a silver bullet, as everyone’s requirements and needs in life and from their technology are different.

As someone who truly loves technology and the potential it has, the most pragmatic advice I could give is to take aside the time to audit what you really need from your mobile device and cull as much as you’re physically able to stomach, until you are left with boring utility apps that only provide solutions to real problems in your life.

For example: I have family abroad, I don’t need to know what they had for breakfast, or where they walked their dog last weekend, I need to be able to talk to them. If they want to tell me about breakfast and their dog walk, great! I’ll be happy to hear that from them. I don’t need a timeline to solve this problem, I don’t need stories, I need messages, so I chose to delete parts of the social media apps that didn’t solve this need. Goodbye Facebook app, goodbye Instagram, just the sole Messenger app is more than suitable to talk with the majority of my loved ones. If I could go a step further and convince friends and family to exclusively talk with me through a more purpose-built and less socially-integrated chat app, that’s a huge win, but logistically a bit of a challenge.

Ask yourself: Is this providing me with value that isn’t just another way to burn time? Is this solving a real need in my life? If not, fuck it off because it’s likely poison. Personally, I didn’t see deleting all my accounts as a viable solution, as a lot of social events are planned through some of these platforms. As long as they aren’t within easy reach of my thumb, I find “out of side, out of mind” works well enough to deter my own habitual scrolling. From there, any engagement with social media has to be a conscious effort to go to my computer, log in and see whatever event notifications I need to see.

Dealing with Boredom

One effect I witnessed early after my decision to actively avoid spending time on social media was how much extra time I had on my hands. Look at your phone settings for screen time data (if you have it). Take the time, aggregate it for days, weeks or months, and suddenly it’s as if you have claimed back a lifetime. This is time that can be spent nurturing yourself, those around you and your environment.

Read, write, play, develop skills, use your fantastic brain for what it was designed for, learning and creating! We don’t have to learn things that are boring either, there’s an enormous amount of interesting and engaging ideas that can help us build a better understanding of our world and our place in it.

Practice prolonged focus, expend effort into something, read books or informative articles, create something that takes time; see how you can wield your attention to manifest joy in your life. I promise you will be surprised with how your lens of the world changes after you unplug from the trough of “social media content”.

Closing Words

All in all I think technology has immense potential to improve our world and society as a whole. It’s unfortunate that the most “effective” uses of it have been at the cost of our well-being, but it’s not too late to change that.

With each shared thought and with every discussion, we get closer to understanding how to use tech to help us, instead of how it can take advantage of us, and I’m optimistic that there exist enough bright minds in the world to see the errors of the past and adjust course for a brighter and less profit-centered model of technological advancement.

If you haven’t already, I recommend checking out Jaron Laniers “10 Arguments for Deleting your Social Media Accounts Right Now”. He does an excellent job of breaking down the root cause of why social media sucks so hard and how it could be better.

If you made it this far, thank you for paying your attention to the musings of a silly fool. I really hope you found something helpful in these writings and if you would like to talk about anything I mentioned in the article, I’m always open to a chat.

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