Eric’s Blog

I was scrolling through Facebook this morning and I noticed that ever second or third post in my news feed was an ad or a promotion of some kind.

I thought back to when I first got on social media and it wasn’t like that at all. There were very few ads in the beginning. Now, it’s more likely that you’ll look at ads all day long instead of seeing what you originally signed up for. To see what friends and family are posting, doing, or discussing.

It reminded me of the scene in Ready Player One where the head of IOI is talking about filling up to 70% of a users field of vision with ads before inducing seizures.

Since New Years’ I’ve limited myself to one hour of screen time on social media per day and I’ve found that I’m rarely using that one hour. That’s one hour for ALL my social media apps, not one hour for each of them.

It’s amazing how these devices have selectively evolved over the last decade to become indispensable. How many times per day do you find yourself thinking or asking, “what did we do before smart phones?”

I believe that they’ve evolved to become more addictive than caffeine, nicotine, sugar, alcohol, or any illicit drug. They feel good in our hands, they have a nice soft feel when you’re tapping out a message yet they’re heavy and the weight in your hand feels comforting. The haptic feedback they provide is appealing. The sounds they make are cute and delightful and are probably engineered to light up the reward centers of the human brain. If you don’t like the sounds they make, you can change them to be something you do like. Then, when you hear the sound you picked for a text message notification, you’re associating that sound with something positive. In other words, we’re conditioning ourselves to associate these insidious little devices with a positive reward. I hear R2-D2 beep and boop at me and think, “oh, I’ve got a text message, someone is thinking of me, yay!”

The screen is the most addictive part. Those little red dots that show up on your apps when you have notifications are like a virtual game of whack-a-mole. It bothers me to see those little red dots so I switch from one app to another in an attempt to remove them all. Sometimes the little red fonts don’t always go away and it makes me crazy. I devote chunks of my time to clearing the red dots that pop up right after I’ve closed out that app. Or, I try to figure out why the red dots won’t go away, “it must be something important or there wouldn’t be a red dot there. Where is it and what is it trying to tell me?”

The soft, warm glow of the screen lights up our face as we bask in its comfort and safety of having something to distract ourselves with rather than observing the world around us. The screens show us what our lives could be like; an escape into a realm of beautiful things and hilarious memes.

We compare our lives to others on social media and lament that our lives aren’t as good. We forget that others on social media only show us what they want us to see. “Look at the awesome thing I did” completely oblivious to the fact that it took them hours of hard work to get to that point.

Teenagers may develop unhealthy body image issues comparing their lives to that of influencers on social media. They think, I’m too fat or not pretty enough or I don’t have the clothes that so and so has so I’m not good enough.

We just keep doom-scrolling. Swiping up and up and up never reaching the end. We mindlessly like star, heart, or emote things that lights up our pleasure centers until we find the next one.

Eventually we scroll across something that outrages us (which is why I call it doom-scrolling). We get upset. We repost it. We share it with our friends. Eventually, we go back to doom-scrolling. Letting the outrage lie dormant for a few more swipes of the thumb.

Is it not a strange fate that we should suffer so much fear and doubt for so small a thing?

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings #1)

Smart phones aren’t all bad. They’ve connected the human race in a way never before seen in our history. We can access information from all over the planet from all of human history in a matter of seconds. We can navigate anywhere we want to go, communicate with friends, family, and others with just a few taps of your thumbs. You can talk to someone who doesn’t speak the same language as you through a translator app. You can learn how to make something you’ve never tried before by watching a how-to video. The compendium of human knowledge fits in your pocket and is available at your fingertips any time you like.

The problem is when we only communicate through these devices. We have to remember to put them down and communicate like our ancestors did or we wind up losing the thing that makes us human; our humanity.